What Bonfire Is

"It's not a tab player. It's the place you go to understand."

The Engine, On Screen

Here is Bonfire v1 — a single page doing a single job: helping you understand a piece of music well enough to play it at your level, today.

Bonfire v1 — the music-learning engine's single-page UI: a fretboard view at top right, an audio waveform with a highlighted region selection, an easy-mode note grid laid over the time line, chord voicing diagrams at the bottom, and a transport with a multi-channel mixer. — Bonfire v1 — fretboard, waveform, easy-mode note grid, and chord voicings, all reading one music model.

Count how many different things are on that one screen, then notice they are all describing the same song:

The fretboard (top right) — the scale and the target notes, laid out the way a guitarist's hands see them.
The waveform (the wide amber band) — the actual audio, with a brighter region selection you can loop.
The note grid (the colored blocks under the waveform) — the easy-mode notes over a time line: what to play, and when.
The chord voicings (the little diagrams) — the progression's chords as playable shapes.
The transport + mixer (bottom) — play/pause, tempo, and a channel strip blending the original, a solo voice, and the chords.

That is the entire thesis in one picture, and we'll spend the rest of the quest earning it: the fretboard, the grid, and the voicing diagrams are not five separate apps glued together. They are five views of one music model. Change the song and every pane re-renders from the same truth. Track 3 is built entirely on that idea.

What Bonfire Is Not

Three sharp negations, so the shape is unambiguous:

Not a tab player. Songsterr and Guitar Pro already render tabs beautifully. Bonfire isn't trying to win that race.
Not a DAW. Logic and Ableton produce music. Bonfire helps you learn it — a different job that, as Track 6 proves, no DAW can host.
Not a transcription tool. "Give me every note of this solo" is a hard, saturated problem Bonfire deliberately links out to rather than rebuilds.

Remove all three and what's left is the actual product: a learning engine. It owns the analysis (what key? what chords?), one music model, easy-mode simplification (play this instead of the impossible original), the theory reference, and an API. The web UI above is simply the first thing that talks to that engine.

Learning Tool, Not Production Tool

Hold onto this distinction — it explains almost every later decision. A production tool's job is to render a finished artifact: a mixed track, an exported tab. A learning tool's job is to change what's in your head and your hands. Bonfire is the second kind. That's why "play a simplified version you can actually manage today" is the headline feature and not a compromise, and why being occasionally wrong — and letting you correct it — is also a feature, not a defect.

Code

One loaded song, as one model (shape sketch)·json

{
  "key": "E minor",
  "tempo_bpm": 132,
  "sections": [
    { "name": "Verse", "start_s": 0.0, "end_s": 18.4 }
  ],
  "chords": [
    { "roman": "i",  "symbol": "Em", "start_s": 0.0, "beats": 4 },
    { "roman": "VI", "symbol": "C",  "start_s": 2.0, "beats": 4 }
  ],
  "notes": [
    { "string": 1, "fret": 7, "start_s": 4.0, "dur_s": 0.5 }
  ]
}

// The fretboard reads `key` + `notes`.
// The note grid reads `notes` over time.
// The voicing diagrams read `chords`.
// One object. Many views. No view edits it.

Exercise

Open any music tool you actually use — Songsterr, a DAW, a YouTube lesson, Spotify. Decide first: is it a production tool or a learning tool? Then list every distinct 'view' it shows of one song, and ask the hard question: are those views one shared model, or separate features bolted together?

Hint

If changing the song updates every view at once, it's probably one model underneath. If you have to re-import or re-load per view, the views are bolted on — which is exactly the fragmentation Bonfire is built to avoid.