Does anyone here write out their guitar parts in tablature? Computer programs?
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Black Rose
- Posts: 208
- Joined: Sat Mar 24, 2012 8:58 am
Does anyone here write out their guitar parts in tablature? Computer programs?
I use Guitarpro 5 all the time. I come up with lots and lots of riffs over the years so I usually write them up so I don't forget them. At the start it helped to teach me about transcribing too. Nowadays I am astounded by how quickly I know how to write out my stuff. I usually put on a drum track and jam away and that's how I usually come up with my riffs.
Sometimes I develop those riffs into songs and I use Guitarpro to help put that together. I like to put the multi-track feature on so I can work to make the bass and guitar parts really lock with each other so it sounds like a complete piece of music rather than "here's a good riff and it sounds okay over this generic beat". I will work to make unique parts that accent certain aspects of a riff. Guitarpro is a great visual tool.
Its fun to go back to riffs I wrote 6 years ago and either laugh at them or tweak them and make them into a new, improved riff.
Sometimes I develop those riffs into songs and I use Guitarpro to help put that together. I like to put the multi-track feature on so I can work to make the bass and guitar parts really lock with each other so it sounds like a complete piece of music rather than "here's a good riff and it sounds okay over this generic beat". I will work to make unique parts that accent certain aspects of a riff. Guitarpro is a great visual tool.
Its fun to go back to riffs I wrote 6 years ago and either laugh at them or tweak them and make them into a new, improved riff.
Does anyone here write out their guitar parts in tablature? Computer programs?
I'm now doing much the same with a Boss RC-300 Loop Station. Sometimes I start with a drum track but most often start with either a melody line if lyrics are already there or a bass track if the words just haven't come yet. At some point I've realized that my guitar life, (writing, playing, singing, creating), and my work life, (banks of computers surrounding me spitting out more information than one person can possibly absorb), are two distinct worlds. My songwriter life will remain tracks on a looper and old school pen and paper. Computers demand my focus. I lose the freedom to write what pops into my head spur of the moment. I need that pure focus on the new material to bring it to it's best.
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jimmywhirlwind
- Posts: 15
- Joined: Thu Sep 27, 2018 11:33 am
Does anyone here write out their guitar parts in tablature? Computer programs?
Hi All, Im resurrecting this discussion now because I
wasnt a member when it was active. If youre still chasing the OPs dream then
I have some recent experience to add that you might find useful (if rather disappointing)
to know. I too dream of being able to find musical ideas by just playing freely,
getting in the zone, and then extracting specific moments of inspiration later in
a form more useful than just the audio of what I played.
Inmyhands wanted automatic tab from audio because he
often couldnt recapture the original moment of inspired playing. This is certainly
a problem that Ive experienced but not actually the one that drove my recent investigations
- there are other motivations for automatically extracting the musical content
of audio, and there are end results other than tablature, but since this thread
was originally about getting tab automatically, I will describe my attempts to
do just that.
First off, as Im sure you know, none of the major tab
programs (Guitar Pro, Tux Guitar, Power Tab) have this function directly, and
neither do any of the more general notation programs (such as Musescore). Yes,
you can plug your guitar into GP but it is only a Line In for playing along with
the score. However, they can import MIDI and convert it to tab. So maybe if we
could convert guitar audio to MIDI then we can eventually have the result we
want.
Now, I completely agree with inmyhands comment that
music mode and computer mode are too different to allow proper artistic flow. One
is auditory, tactile, and direct; the
other is a pain in the arse of visual processing, logical thinking and
tapping buttons. By necessity, I make music on computers but it is generally
unpleasant and frustrating,though I continually strive to make it more direct
and artistic. Yes, audio -> MIDI -> tab would be an extra layer of work that
takes us away from the guitar but it could be performed after the playing and might
be scripted well enough to be painless. The question is, does it work at all?
MIDI guitar is one of those weird niches that most players
avoid and, historically, rightly so: no one wants a horrible looking MIDI pickup
stuck on their Les Paul. But software-only technology has greatly improved
(especially with developments in machine learning) and programs like Melodyne
extract pitch and rhythm from general polyphonic audio and output it as MIDI.
Melodyne is expensive and not tailored for guitar so I
got hold of MIDI Guitar 2 from JamOrigin and thought my problems were solved.
It is designed and trained specifically for guitar and does a fantastic job
with polyphonic guitar audio. Fantastic meaning that its pitches are mostly
accurate (I would estimate 95% on medium complexity stuff using up to 3 strings
simultaneously), and it captures very fine variations in your dynamics and timing.
And it even takes audio files and not live guitar, which is great
because you can just record your stream of consciousness playing and deal with
it later, at your leisure. In principle, you could even extract MIDI from any
of the isolated guitar tracks (eg EVH) you find on YouTube.
But, capturing everything
is a not always a good thing. String noises are also converted to MIDI which show
up as (often but not always) very short
notes that are (often but not always) out of the guitars pitch range. All the
imprecisions and variations in your timing are preserved - it does not quantise
timing at all, so a piece you intended to be all 16th notes may have
some notes that are closer to 8th or 32nd, especially
when multiple strings ring for different lengths or if you lift your finger
early. And if you are a bit late on the beat, then that is captured too. If you
import this into GP now it will contain notes that arent notes and notes that
arent the correct length or on the correct beat.
However, you can attempt to address both issues in your
DAW on the MIDI piano roll - filter the playing noises and quantise notes to the
intended basic rhythm. Yes, more hassle and time but if the end result is good then
it may still be worth a script or something (I realise I sound like Homer
Simpson saying its still good, its still good!). Unfortunately, the process
is prone to error its hard to distinguish between short real notes and playing
noises, and variations in note length
mean that quantisation doesnt always give you what you intended when you
import to GP.
But honestly, the final kicker is that GP must decide how
to map pitches to frets and fingering, and it is usually not where I actually
played it. Now, this last problem is not even really a technical one, its in
the nature of the guitar itself vs instruments that only have one place to play
a note. I found some research papers that are trying to guess the most probable
fingerings based (again) on machine learning but there is nothing commercial
yet. And even then, if you used nonstandard voicings I suspect it will
struggle. And I kick myself now because this should have been obvious from the
start.
Verdict - for simple stuff it can work OK. For anything rhythmically
complex, chordal and with open strings and messy playing, the result is probably
not worthwhile. Maybe someone else will have more success than me, and I havent
given up hope completely, but my focus has changed to things with more
immediate payoff.
But I am happy to say that I did get an unexpected benefit
from investigating this. As I said at the start, tab isnt the only output of audio
analysis and it wasnt actually my original target. MIDI guitar is really
intended to stay as MIDI and to trigger virtual instruments directly. That was
my orginal one-man-band motivation for getting it: to be able to quickly enter
all the non-guitar instrument parts in my songs as MIDI using the instrument I am
most comfortable with, and to do so preserving performance information.
I was then going to do arrangements and refinements of
all parts and instruments on the MIDI piano roll in my DAW, but the process of first
filtering and quantising the MIDI guitar on the piano roll made me realise how
appallingly unintuitive it is for guitarists: I would look at this blizzard of
dots and not be able to make head nor tail of it. What the hell am I looking
at? I thought that if I could see it as tab then I could easily tell what was
noise and what was note. And looking for tab software I paid attention to Guitar
Pro at long last (I had never looked at
it before because thought it was Guitar Hero ) and I saw how it could help me
solve different problems in the one-man songwriting process. More of that soon
unless the concensus is that these topics are boring as hell.
Final point, and bringing it back to the original thread
theme. The OP said they will stick with pen and paper and staying in music mode.
I can definitely understand that and felt exactly the same way when I first
started trying to enter parts into GP. And yet, after practice I have actually
got fluent enough at note entry now to rival pen and paper. I am still playing
guitar in my head while I do it and once
the music is in the machine, the possibilities for editing and arrangement, and
eventual recording, are great. I think it is still worth learning even though the
tabbing process will (probably) never be as effortless as simply playing and
letting the computer do the rest.
Has anyone had more success than me with this issue? Do
tell!
wasnt a member when it was active. If youre still chasing the OPs dream then
I have some recent experience to add that you might find useful (if rather disappointing)
to know. I too dream of being able to find musical ideas by just playing freely,
getting in the zone, and then extracting specific moments of inspiration later in
a form more useful than just the audio of what I played.
Inmyhands wanted automatic tab from audio because he
often couldnt recapture the original moment of inspired playing. This is certainly
a problem that Ive experienced but not actually the one that drove my recent investigations
- there are other motivations for automatically extracting the musical content
of audio, and there are end results other than tablature, but since this thread
was originally about getting tab automatically, I will describe my attempts to
do just that.
First off, as Im sure you know, none of the major tab
programs (Guitar Pro, Tux Guitar, Power Tab) have this function directly, and
neither do any of the more general notation programs (such as Musescore). Yes,
you can plug your guitar into GP but it is only a Line In for playing along with
the score. However, they can import MIDI and convert it to tab. So maybe if we
could convert guitar audio to MIDI then we can eventually have the result we
want.
Now, I completely agree with inmyhands comment that
music mode and computer mode are too different to allow proper artistic flow. One
is auditory, tactile, and direct; the
other is a pain in the arse of visual processing, logical thinking and
tapping buttons. By necessity, I make music on computers but it is generally
unpleasant and frustrating,though I continually strive to make it more direct
and artistic. Yes, audio -> MIDI -> tab would be an extra layer of work that
takes us away from the guitar but it could be performed after the playing and might
be scripted well enough to be painless. The question is, does it work at all?
MIDI guitar is one of those weird niches that most players
avoid and, historically, rightly so: no one wants a horrible looking MIDI pickup
stuck on their Les Paul. But software-only technology has greatly improved
(especially with developments in machine learning) and programs like Melodyne
extract pitch and rhythm from general polyphonic audio and output it as MIDI.
Melodyne is expensive and not tailored for guitar so I
got hold of MIDI Guitar 2 from JamOrigin and thought my problems were solved.
It is designed and trained specifically for guitar and does a fantastic job
with polyphonic guitar audio. Fantastic meaning that its pitches are mostly
accurate (I would estimate 95% on medium complexity stuff using up to 3 strings
simultaneously), and it captures very fine variations in your dynamics and timing.
And it even takes audio files and not live guitar, which is great
because you can just record your stream of consciousness playing and deal with
it later, at your leisure. In principle, you could even extract MIDI from any
of the isolated guitar tracks (eg EVH) you find on YouTube.
But, capturing everything
is a not always a good thing. String noises are also converted to MIDI which show
up as (often but not always) very short
notes that are (often but not always) out of the guitars pitch range. All the
imprecisions and variations in your timing are preserved - it does not quantise
timing at all, so a piece you intended to be all 16th notes may have
some notes that are closer to 8th or 32nd, especially
when multiple strings ring for different lengths or if you lift your finger
early. And if you are a bit late on the beat, then that is captured too. If you
import this into GP now it will contain notes that arent notes and notes that
arent the correct length or on the correct beat.
However, you can attempt to address both issues in your
DAW on the MIDI piano roll - filter the playing noises and quantise notes to the
intended basic rhythm. Yes, more hassle and time but if the end result is good then
it may still be worth a script or something (I realise I sound like Homer
Simpson saying its still good, its still good!). Unfortunately, the process
is prone to error its hard to distinguish between short real notes and playing
noises, and variations in note length
mean that quantisation doesnt always give you what you intended when you
import to GP.
But honestly, the final kicker is that GP must decide how
to map pitches to frets and fingering, and it is usually not where I actually
played it. Now, this last problem is not even really a technical one, its in
the nature of the guitar itself vs instruments that only have one place to play
a note. I found some research papers that are trying to guess the most probable
fingerings based (again) on machine learning but there is nothing commercial
yet. And even then, if you used nonstandard voicings I suspect it will
struggle. And I kick myself now because this should have been obvious from the
start.
Verdict - for simple stuff it can work OK. For anything rhythmically
complex, chordal and with open strings and messy playing, the result is probably
not worthwhile. Maybe someone else will have more success than me, and I havent
given up hope completely, but my focus has changed to things with more
immediate payoff.
But I am happy to say that I did get an unexpected benefit
from investigating this. As I said at the start, tab isnt the only output of audio
analysis and it wasnt actually my original target. MIDI guitar is really
intended to stay as MIDI and to trigger virtual instruments directly. That was
my orginal one-man-band motivation for getting it: to be able to quickly enter
all the non-guitar instrument parts in my songs as MIDI using the instrument I am
most comfortable with, and to do so preserving performance information.
I was then going to do arrangements and refinements of
all parts and instruments on the MIDI piano roll in my DAW, but the process of first
filtering and quantising the MIDI guitar on the piano roll made me realise how
appallingly unintuitive it is for guitarists: I would look at this blizzard of
dots and not be able to make head nor tail of it. What the hell am I looking
at? I thought that if I could see it as tab then I could easily tell what was
noise and what was note. And looking for tab software I paid attention to Guitar
Pro at long last (I had never looked at
it before because thought it was Guitar Hero ) and I saw how it could help me
solve different problems in the one-man songwriting process. More of that soon
unless the concensus is that these topics are boring as hell.
Final point, and bringing it back to the original thread
theme. The OP said they will stick with pen and paper and staying in music mode.
I can definitely understand that and felt exactly the same way when I first
started trying to enter parts into GP. And yet, after practice I have actually
got fluent enough at note entry now to rival pen and paper. I am still playing
guitar in my head while I do it and once
the music is in the machine, the possibilities for editing and arrangement, and
eventual recording, are great. I think it is still worth learning even though the
tabbing process will (probably) never be as effortless as simply playing and
letting the computer do the rest.
Has anyone had more success than me with this issue? Do
tell!