I'm Simon Dadia. I've been building websites and digital products for 25 years, and I've been playing Carlebach songs for almost as long.
Here's the problem I kept running into: every Rosh Chodesh, every Yom Tov, every time someone asked me to lead Hallel or play guitar at a kumzitz, I'd go through the same process. Flip through my mental catalog. Text a friend for a chord sheet. Google "Carlebach chords" and land on a site that hadn't been updated since 2012 — or worse, was gone entirely.
The Jewish guitar chord sites that used to exist are mostly dead. The ones that survived never mapped songs to specific sections of davening. Nobody classified which Carlebach songs fit Hodu versus Min HaMeitzar, or which niggunim hit different for Sukkot Hallel compared to Rosh Chodesh.
So I built NiggunMap.
It's a siddur with chords. More than that, it's a community-curated mapping of Carlebach melodies to every section of Hallel, filterable by occasion, with transposable chord charts overlaid directly on the Hebrew text. The community votes on which songs fit best at each section, and anyone can edit the chord positions to match how their shul or their minyan actually sings it.
The app ships with 82 Carlebach songs, each with a full chord chart. The Hallel module covers Tehillim 113 through 118 with named sub-sections. Select an occasion — Rosh Chodesh, Chanukah, Sukkot, Pesach — and NiggunMap auto-switches between Full and Half Hallel, then surfaces the songs the community has tagged for that holiday.
NiggunMap is free. No subscription, no premium tier. If you play guitar at davening, if you lead Hallel, if you're the person in your shul who everyone asks "what should we sing here?" — this is built for you.
The blog you're reading covers the practical side: which songs to sing where, guitar chord guides for Jewish music, deep dives into specific Carlebach melodies, and tips for leading a Carlebach davening. Every article links to the app so you can go from reading about a song to seeing its chords on the Hallel text in one click.
NiggunMap is built by Laziest Marketing. If you have feedback, song suggestions, or chord corrections, I want to hear them.
— Simon