Thanks for stopping by. The purpose of Tempoetic is to provide two things.
- Great quality music backing tracks of popular songs, designed for use in live performance; and
- Accurate, professional chord charts for musicians of all levels. Optimised for live performance with cues for changes, starts and stops. All critical in a live gig atmosphere
For far too long we have all seen chords for songs published on the internet and used by people in various ways, even at live gigs, where the charts were so wrong that the song could never possibly have sounded right by following the charts. Many times we’ve coached friends and family and corrected shonky charts downloaded from the internet. This is what led to the idea of doing this as a service. There was simply a huge gap in the market that no one was addressing.
Every single chord chart and backing track on Tempoetic is very accurate and either true to the recorded version or (optimised beyond the original recording) to cater to live musicians.
Are we suggesting our tracks are better than the original?
Absolutely not. But here’s the thing; when a song has 16 bars of “a cappella” (no music, just voice), a live performer MUST have some sort of cue to keep them on beat otherwise their performance of the song will almost certainly fall apart. That doesn’t help anyone. So we take some poetic license and ‘enhance’ songs where we think it will help the live performer.
Tempoetic – a 35 year journey
These days, every company has a big challenge in finding a good domain name. There are hundreds of millions of names already registered and some companies make a living out of registering any name they can think of, even stupid ones. Really good domain names are almost impossible to find, which is why there are so many companies with silly names like Fiverr and Calendly. After much deliberation, we came up with a name that we thought was a winner and despondently typed the name into our domain registrar expecting to see the usual message; “this domain name is taken”. Can you believe that nobody in the world had thought to register the domain name of tempoetic.com? Finally, we had a name that perfectly describes what we do.
It’s an excellent domain and company name that’s for sure. But how did we come up with this fictional word that fits so well?
Our name is the merging of three words. Firstly, all songs have a tempo. Secondly, songwriters have a lot in common with poets, so there’s the poet part. And lastly, as explained above we sometimes take “poetic license” with our backing tracks and chord charts in order to provide live performers with essential cues for songs. Put them all together and voila, Tempoetic was born! Cool name, right?
However, Tempoetic is a name we only recently decided to use. We have actually been making these tracks since the mid 1980s when the then new technology of MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) was first released. This allowed music to be digitised, whereby we could plug a musical keyboard into a computer for the first time, and record the notes in digital format, which can then be edited and programmed – as opposed to raw audio format which cannot. We were one of only 5 companies in the world that produced professional MIDI files. Needless to say, the demand was huge and we did very well selling backing tracks all across Australia. Back then we would charge up to $25 for a single MIDI file, because demand was so high but good producers were in such short supply. Back then, there was also no internet or email! So we would save our MIDI files onto a 3.5 inch floppy disc and mail them out to our customers. They would get them the next day by Express Post. None of this instant online download like we have today. You might wonder how people knew about our service? Again, there was no internet, no Google, no Facebook etc so we had to advertise our tracks in traditional print media. Publications like Time Off and The Trading Post is how our customers found us, along with flyers in music shops. Those were the days! This was our very first production company which was called SMS or Sydney Music Service which formed in the late 1980s.
In the early 1990s, we renamed to MIDI Tracks Australia (or MTA) to better embrace the name of the technology. We have kept the “MTA” tag to this day which you will notice we still use for the SKU prefix for our product IDs. We discovered however, that this name restricted our coverage to only Australia, whereas we were producing songs that were massive worldwide hits. So in the early 2000s – and now with the internet boom coming online – we rebranded to Hipjunk.com. This was a cool name, but it didn’t adequately describe what we do. Nevertheless, it was still a great success and exposed our tracks to a wider global audience.
Then a few years later, we decided to change tack and ran some other start up companies and for several years we stopped producing our tracks and selling them online. Although we did manage to secure international distribution for our catalog, which continued through our distributors. Then in the late 2010s the music production bug hit us again and we rebranded to Soundbank. This is why you may notice that branding still on some of our chord charts. While we loved this name, we could not obtain the proper global rights and domain name for it. So we went in search of a new name. One that would be global, we could keep forever and would embrace all that we do. And we found it in Tempoetic!
That’s quite a journey and the name changes have seen us appear and disappear at various times over the years. But the one thing that has remained constant is the quality of our work. We are thrilled to be back in force and making our world class backing tracks and chord charts available to you once again. And this time, they are here to stay! We hope you will share the good news with all your muso mates.
Look around and enjoy your newfound source for accurate professional music. We would love to hear your feedback, requests and suggestions, so please feel free to contact us anytime.
~ The Tempoetic Team