The person behind the app

I built SongScribe for me.

I am a songwriter. I have been writing songs for as long as I can remember, though I should clarify that "writing songs" is a generous description of what happens when you sit on the floor with a guitar and a notebook at two in the morning, convinced that this particular chord progression is the one that will finally change everything. It never is. You write it down anyway.

The moment that started all of this was not dramatic, but it was clarifying. I was busking outdoors, halfway through a set, and I ran out of mobile data. I could not load the tabs I needed. I just stood there, guitar in hand, with nothing to play. It is a particular kind of humiliation to be defeated not by stage fright or a broken string, but by your cellular provider.

Before SongScribe, my system for managing music was, to put it charitably, a disaster. Lyrics lived in Apple Notes. Chord charts lived in a different part of Apple Notes. Recordings lived in Dropbox on my laptop, inside a folder named "guitar stuff dec24" that I am not proud of. Three systems, none of them connected, none of them designed for music, all of them failing me at the worst possible moments.

I wanted one app that kept everything together. Chords above lyrics where you actually play them. A recorder that keeps your rough takes with the song they belong to. Setlists that work without WiFi. Something you could trust on stage, even when your phone has given up on the internet entirely.

I did not have the skills to build it. I am a songwriter, dammit. Not an engineer. But when AI coding tools became capable enough to hold a real conversation about what I wanted, I started talking to Claude Code, and I kept talking to it for about eight months. The result is SongScribe.

I am one person. I work from my mother's basement, which sounds like the setup for a joke but is simply the truth. The company is called Rasputin Software, which is a satirical nod and a wink to the great Wizard of my homeland. There is no team. There is no venture capital. There is no roadmap designed by committee. There is just a songwriter who wanted better tools and got fortunate with the timing.

I built SongScribe for me. But I hope you like it too.