There’s no shortage of guitar gear in the world—pedals, amps, plugins, guitars—but there is a shortage of good tools to actually organize and explore it.

That’s the problem I set out to solve with gearlist.studio.

🚀 What is gearlist.studio?

gearlist.studio is a platform built for musicians to:

  • Track pedals, amps, guitars, and plugins
  • Share rigs with others

It’s designed to feel fast, modern, and actually aligned with how musicians think about tone.

🛠️ Tech Stack

Gearlist.studio is built with a modern, performance-focused stack:

Backend

  • .NET 10
  • C#
  • MongoDB

I chose MongoDB for its flexibility—gear data is inherently diverse and evolving (pedals, amps, plugins, presets), and a document database handles that variability really well.

Frontend

  • React.js
  • Custom CSS (no UI framework lock-in)
  • SCSS + PostCSS

The frontend is designed to be fully custom—no heavy component libraries—so the UI can evolve into something unique to the product.

I used SCSS for it’s variables and color functions. PostCSS for autoprefixer.

Tooling & Build

  • esbuild for ultra-fast bundling
  • Lightweight, minimal tooling setup
  • Focus on speed and simplicity over complexity

⚡ Why This Stack?

This setup is intentional:

  • .NET + C# → Strong typing, performance, long-term scalability
  • MongoDB → Flexible schema for evolving gear types
  • React → Fast UI iteration and component-based design
  • esbuild → Extremely fast builds without overengineering
  • Custom CSS → Full control over design system

The goal is to avoid unnecessary complexity while still building something powerful.

🎛️ Features (Current + Planned)

Current Direction

  • Structured gear models (pedals, amps, guitars, plugins)
  • Clean, modular UI foundation
  • Fast, responsive frontend

Planned Features

  • Drag-and-drop signal chain builder
  • Public gear profiles
  • Searchable gear database
  • Saved rigs and user accounts
  • Plugin + digital rig support (Neural DSP, NAM, etc.)
  • Tone sharing and discovery

🎯 Who This Is For

gearlist.studio is built for:

  • Guitarists and bassists
  • Producers and home studio musicians
  • Tone enthusiasts and gear collectors
  • Anyone who obsesses over signal chains

🧠 Developer Perspective

This project is also a deep dive into:

  • Building a clean .NET + React architecture
  • Designing flexible data models with MongoDB
  • Creating a custom design system from scratch
  • Keeping tooling fast and minimal

If you’re a developer interested in the code, check it out here:

👉 https://github.com/zackmorgs/gearlist.studio

🔥 What’s Next?

gearlist.studio is just getting started.

The vision is to turn it into a full ecosystem for musicians:

  • Community-driven gear discovery
  • Advanced rig visualization
  • AI-assisted tone building
  • Mobile-first experiences

Conclusion

I do not intend to deploy this website. It was an experiment for me to use React.js with C#. I wanted to see what developing with this stack felt/looked like. I thoroughly enjoyed the DX.

I personally find it superior to Blazor in some aspects of frontend tooling. The overhead is just smaller.

Hope you enjoy looking over my code. Here is a video that demos the project.

Blog post written by ChatGPT and myself.