Playing guitar tablatures in Rust

https://agourlay.github.io/ruxguitar-tablature-player/

by lukastyrychtr • 2 years ago

193 86 2 years ago

agourlay.github.io

metaketa2• 2 years ago

Owner of https://parture.org here; we should work together. Nice work!

kej2• 2 years ago

This looks like a cool project, but I notice the date at the bottom is from 2020. Presumably it's still alive if you're posting about it, but how alive is it? (If you're comfortable sharing)

metaketa2• 2 years ago

The website has indeed not been redeployed since then, but the Rust stack currently has the following and is still under development every day:

- decentralized server node for hosting scores

- sheet music rendering in browser using WASM with Rust port of VexFlow

- multiplayer live score editing using custom Rust CRDT impl

- search through node's data based on facets like duration, instruments, difficulty, tuning, etc (Meilisearch)

- MIDI playing through soundfonts and RustySynth

- parsing/importing of Guitar Pro files using Rust-port of pyguitarpro

- AI assistant for editing scores using LiveKit, ElevenLabs etc

- support for creating different sheet music editor sites using the WASM core for the frontend

And more to come.

javier1234543213• 2 years ago

Super cool, great job. Looks like a really fun project. This really highlights why sheet notation is so much better at describing music than tablature. The advantage of tabs is that they tell you which version of the same note to play (You can play the same note in up to 6 places in the guitar). However, sheet notation tells you precisely the duration of each note, and can often include the intended articulation. Writing music is fascinating, here is an excellent breakdown of different systems which have been developed, and how they came to be: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq3bUFgEcb4

kjkjadksj3• 2 years ago

The biggest advantage of guitar tabs is you don't need to be able to read music. You just need to know how to count. The timing is a non issue as most people will try and learn the song with a tab and a recording of the song.

javier1234543213• 2 years ago

Which is funny if you presume it is true that tabs precede standard notation (and therefore recording techniques).

Tabs make quite a bit of sense in a post recorded music culture. However, the information density you can get in standard sheet notation is far greater. There's tradeoffs.

zbidi• 2 years ago

some tab viewers do have the rhythm shown as well, just connected to a tab number. Though it might get confusing a bit but more than sheet music imo.

hoytech• 2 years ago

While I agree that sheet notation is superior, it actually is fairly common to indicate duration and articulation in tablature, especially classical. See many of the tabs on classtab.org: https://www.classtab.org/tabbing.htm#key

Surprisingly (to me), tablature is apparently older than sheet music. Tabs are also pretty nice when you're dealing with non-standard tunings.

Lastly, even with standard notation, guitar music is often "unnecessarily" annotated with numbers for left hand fingering, roman numerals for barres, "pima" for the right hand, diamonds for harmonics, etc.

bluGill• 2 years ago

There are often several strings that could be usedeto play the same note. However getting the right one is important as they are not substitutable. Thus standard notation isn't enough.

bigstrat2003• 2 years ago

I think that neither notation is wholly superior, and your comment perfectly illustrates why. Sheet music notation tells you the tempo of the notes but gives no guidance on which way you should play them. Tabs tell you exactly how to finger the notes but don't (usually) tell you anything about tempo. Both notations are leaving out crucial info, and so neither is really superior to the other. It's a matter of which defect you are more willing to live with.

javier1234543213• 2 years ago

Agreed, the video goes into depth in those tradeoffs.

dbalatero• 2 years ago

Sheet music often gives fingering suggestions which make it clear which string to play it on. With fingerings though, there's no correct answer, and often you want to bias towards the best sound (to your taste) vs. the easiest finger execution.

nickserv2• 2 years ago

Sheet music often has fingering suggestions when adapted for a particular instrument. I say "suggestions" because on some instruments, like the guitar, there are multiple fingerings possible for the same note.

Which leads to something you didn't mention, that sheet music can be used with any instrument, whereas tablature is limited to not only a single instrument, but the specific combination of an instrument and a tuning.

In practice this means you won't be able to play a 6 string lute piece on modern guitar in standard tuning if all you have is the lute tablature.

jasode• 2 years ago

However, sheet notation tells you precisely the duration of each note,

True but the reason that guitar tabs missing the duration of the notes is not much of a handicap compared to traditional sheet music notation is that the guitar players learning popular music already get the notes' durations from listening to the actual recordings.

This is the same reason that printing out the lyrics for songs don't require notations of durations for each syllable of every word. People singing karaoke or whatever already get the durations by hearing the recordings. (Indeed, lyrics sheets are also missing the pitch of each syllable.)

On the other hand, traditional notation was invented before recordings so musicians often had no idea what the music sounded like unless they correctly decoded the notes durations on the page.

ramblerman• 2 years ago

That's a great point I'd never considered as a guitarist myself who uses both tabs and sheet music.

I think it also explains why in my last 2 years of playing flamenco I never found tabs, the rhythm is almost as hard to play by ear as the notes.

bossyTeacher3• 2 years ago

Yes, I already said this but you really hammered the point home with the additional analogy of karaoke lyrics. I feel people playing non-popular forms of music live in this ivory tower where they forget other forms of music exist. I wonder why it happens

GardenLetter27• 2 years ago

A lot of tabs will put the note length on the "beat" of the tab too.

You can see this in Tuxguitar IIRC.

KolenCh5• 2 years ago

Assuming you’re talking about standard guitar with standard tuning system, no, there’s no notes that you can play in 6 different strings.

(But if you’re not talking about standard guitar, then don’t stop at 6, you can have more than that.)

eyelidlessness4• 2 years ago

Nit: if you count harmonics, you only need 14 frets to play high E on every string in standard tuning.

tzs• 2 years ago

I suppose a lot depends on what we mean by standard. For example the number of frets varies. Classical guitars are usually 19, acoustics are typically up to 20, and electrics 21 or 22 but sometimes 24.

Those with 24 frets can play E4 on all six strings, but 24 frets is pretty uncommon so I can see an argument for calling those non-standard.

But how about a 22 fret electric with a whammy bar? Those are very common. The highest note on the 6th string without using the whammy bar would be D4. Can you pull on the whammy bar enough to raise that to E4?

ReleaseCandidat• 2 years ago

However, sheet notation tells you precisely the duration of each note

That's why "real" notation is displayed above the tabs or sometimes some other way is used to indicate duration, mostly space between two notes. That's also why it's hard to write an actual usable guitar tab GUI, it needs to display sheet notation too, with all of it's intricacies.

bossyTeacher3• 2 years ago

You are missing the point of tabs. Sheet music people always do. I will explain it below:

- Tabs are meant for music you have the recordings of (so additional details can be obtained by listening to the song)

- Tabs are meant to be an easy way to play a song for people that might not be interested or have the resources to invest the time to learn sheet music

exDM69• 2 years ago

Guitar Pro tabs have time durations on every note (as described in the article), and can also be displayed in standard musical notation. It also has a whole host of articulation symbols, including the standard musical articulations (mezzoforte etc) as well as a bunch of guitar specific special articulations (e.g. artificial harmonics).

Printed guitar tab books also have durations and articulation symbols.

I agree that old fashioned ASCII art guitar tabs without durations aren't great.

destructuror44• 2 years ago

Since TuxGuitar appears to be unmaintained

The development of TuxGuitar has recently resumed

https://github.com/helge17/tuxguitar

agourlay7• 2 years ago

Thanks for the heads-up, I was not aware of this.

agourlay7• 2 years ago

Hey author here :)

Happy to answer any questions.

amelius5• 2 years ago

Why did you think Rust was the right tool for the job, and why not a language with a GC?

throwadobe4• 2 years ago

Why would one prefer a language with a GC?

Iced is a great library if you are willing to put in the effort to learn it (as it's new and documentation is still mostly limited to examples)

agourlay7• 2 years ago

Rust is the language I am the most proficient at this point, so it was a natural choice for me.

Tuxguitar is written in Java and works perfectly fine TBH, even if Rust has clear advantages for high performance software it does not matter that much in this context.

chungus• 2 years ago

Thanks for the great write-up. I've got an iced application that I wrote 3 years ago, and this has given me the motivation I needed to go update it

yoavm• 2 years ago

Awesome work! It would be super cool if this could somehow run as a WASM module. Was thinking I would then try to include it in Freetar [0], for example so it can be used to play the tablatures on a page like this: https://freetar.de/tab/joni-mitchell/a-case-of-you-chords-95...

[0] https://github.com/kmille/freetar/

agourlay7• 2 years ago

Thanks, I did not know about Freetar!

TBH I have a lot of things to improve before thinking about this kind of interop.

But feel free to create an issue :)

clwg• 2 years ago

I clicked hoping to see Smoke on the Water mentioned, and there it was right at the start.

bazzargh• 2 years ago

30 years ago (oh dear, that's got to be too long?) I wanted to print out a bunch of guitar tab from OLGA (the online guitar archive, probably kicked off the net many times since?), but that ascii format meant that when you shrank it to try to fit more on a page, you just ended up with empty space.

So I wrote this https://ctan.math.utah.edu/pub/ctan/tex-archive/support/psta... (linking to the manual not the code - the manual is itself a program using the code I wrote to do the formatting) - a thing for formatting guitar tab that _ran on our Apple LaserWriter_, because we had pretty much nothing else that could do graphics. I learned postscript to write this, and because I needed to do some diagrams for my PhD, and wrote it in a week... so it's rough. But after the first couple of days I realised, that not only could I get it to format tab typed in the format I could type quickest, but I could get it to parse the ascii tab and reformat it to fit on a page, with nicely drawn lines not minus signs.

It also does stuff like printing verses with chords annotated, chord tables, and suchlike.

I recall going back to this 10 or 15 years later and the output in ghostscript was fugly, but at the time, I got a message from someone who'd used it to publish a book of banjo music in New Zealand - because it was the only thing that handled variable numbers of strings that he'd found!

Of _purely historical_ interest, I wouldn't recommend plumbing the code for any insights, since like I say I was very new to the language, and the stuff I wrote in the manual with my opinions about code are fairly embarrassing. But hey, the past is past.

homarp• 2 years ago

https://www.chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/links/cached/chapter... has the history of OLGA

https://archive.org/details/olgaarchive has a snapshot

aanet• 2 years ago

Fantastic project! I loved it. The blog post is informational, and the video is impressive. I dont know nearly enough Rust to understand fully how it was developed, but as a guitar enthusiast who primarily uses tabs to learn new songs/tracks, I love this project!

Would love to see how this can be extended for general purpose tab player. That would be awesome.

Thanks!

agourlay7• 2 years ago

Thanks for the kind words!

What do you mean exactly by "general purpose tab player"?

buildsjets• 2 years ago

I sure do wish that there was an open source alternative to Rocksmith+ that would allow you to play tabs from Ultimate Guitar in a Rockband like presentation format, with scoring and learning tools like repetition and speed-up intervals.

RS+ is great for quickly memorizing new riffs and songs, but when they discontinued RS2014, they cut over to a yearly subscription service, AND made it incompatible with the tens of thousands of user-notated songs created with the old API. Just a lot of back catalog stuff now.

My 8yo niece is so disappointed she can’t use it learn Taylor Swift songs on the little Strat Mini I gifted her.

kej2• 2 years ago

The previous version still works and has a decent collection of (user made) Taylor Swift songs, though, doesn't it? Why not just use that?

adrianh• 2 years ago

Try Soundslice (https://www.soundslice.com/), which has an speed training feature (https://www.soundslice.com/help/en/player/basic/286/speed-tr...).

It's not gamified like Rocksmith, but it's got an excellent learning and practice interface — for _any_ music you throw at it. You can import tabs you find online in various formats, and we recently added a PDF scanning feature as well. There's also a built-in tab editor.

Also, it works for sheet music (i.e., not just tabs), so you can use it with any instrument or voice that uses common western music notation.

(I help make the site — happy to answer questions)

Ylpertnodi3• 2 years ago

Under 'plans', what does "Number of slices you can create" with a 'tick' instead of a number, mean. *getting back into guitar, am taking a look, thanks.

jmkr• 2 years ago

I have neither used Rocksmith nor my links, but I have found these on my guitar quest (not opensource).

https://tonelib.net/jam-overview.html https://yousician.com/guitar

But I have been interested in something like https://github.com/PolyMeilex/Neothesia for guitar.

nrjames3• 2 years ago

As somebody learning guitar and focused on fingerpicking... One of the things that bugs me about Ultimate Guitar tabs is that there are many places where it would help me better to learn to read the tabs if the relevant chord were displayed over the measures/notes. I'm not sure where you are going with your project, but I thought I'd just mention this since I spend a lot of time deciphering the tabs just to figure out what chord position my hand should be in.

kazinator• 2 years ago

Chord symbol, or chord shape? I'm guessing the latter, because that would tell you: put the left hand fingers in these places, and most of the rest of the tab for that measure would just be which of those notes you pick.

nrjames3• 2 years ago

No, I really just want the chord name: C, F#, G/B, etc.

ethagnawl• 2 years ago

As someone who has been dabbling with both guitar and Rust for a few years, this is very exciting. I'm looking forward to reading this post in full and digging into the app.

It's also the second time that iced has caught my attention today. The first was when I ran into an issue installing sniffnet on a new machine and had to revisit the docs. This led me to iced.rs and I eventually wound up playing with the Halo shader edit for a bit. It looks like a nice library and I'm itching to give it a try.

throwadobe4• 2 years ago

The very recently written pocket guide available at https://docs.iced.rs/iced/ is both a great little crash course on the library and a bit of an admonition. The disclaimer should really help either make you salivate to dive in or stay away entirely, depending on what you're looking for.

hnuser435• 2 years ago

Watch the sparrow falling Gives new meaning to it all If not today nor yet tomorrow Then some other day

orliesaurus• 2 years ago

This is awesome, I sorta gave up learning/playing guitar because of the software tax. I can't wait to give this a try!

tempodox• 2 years ago

Sadly, those ASCII charts do nothing for me. I find them even worse than sheet music. At least I know how to read a sheet.

pipeline_peak• 2 years ago

_ in Rust

myhnews• 2 years ago

Window Defender don't allow the download of this file: ruxguitar-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc.zip. Detected trojan : Script/Phonzy.B!ml False positive ?

agourlay7• 2 years ago

TBH I have no Windows machine to test this release binary.

However I can share with you the release script if you want to double check https://github.com/agourlay/ruxguitar/blob/master/.github/wo...

titzer2• 2 years ago

Neat project!

I've been using TuxGuitar for years and I hate the UI so much. The ergonomics around basic functionality like "loop this section" and "speed up / slow down the tempo" are so bad. I feel like it was designed by people who are only interested in writing tabs. The user experience for practice is so crappy. I'm sitting here with a guitar in my lap and I absolutely cannot be bothered to navigate some really poorly-laid out drop down menus just to do basic stuff. I want to have keys on the keyboard do all the basic stuff so it's just a single tap with one hand.

I looked into TuxGuitar's Java source...it's incredibly complicated for what it does. I literally had no idea how I'd alter to make it better or even extract part of it to make my own UI.

If the author reads this: more power to you! And one thing that would be very useful is to make the font REALLY BIG so that players can read it very easily. Squinting at TuxGuitar's default tiny font size sucks so much.

pixelesque• 2 years ago

Sounds like you haven't really looked into TuxGuitar....

You can set custom keyboard shortcuts for most menu items, and setting loop and repeat points is pretty easy in my experience...

agourlay7• 2 years ago

FYI my focus is solely playing tabs and I do like keyboard shortcuts :)

What kind of shortcuts would you be interested in?

titzer2• 2 years ago

Of the top of my head:

- Play / stop

- Increase / decrease speed

- Go to next section / riff / verse / chorus [1]

- Loop this phrase / riff / verse / chorus

- Turn off drums / bass / guitar tracks (i.e. isolate)

- Switch to click track mode[2]

[1] It'd be great if I could annotate part of the tab as a riff, phrase, or other section, give it a name, and then loop, repeat, jump around amongst riffs in a song (or even multiple songs).

[2] I've always wanted the ability to play a section of the tab as clicks (not notes), just to be able to hear and feel the intended rhythm of a section.

miquong• 2 years ago

Tabs seem like they'd be great training material for LLMs and generative music. Does anyone know of projects attempting this?

Update: looks like some papers got into it last year:

Rock Guitar Tablature Generation via Natural Language Processing: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.05295

GTR-CTRL: Instrument and Genre Conditioning for Guitar-Focused Music Generation with Transformers: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.05393

TylerE• 2 years ago

I don’t see how they’d be easier than midi.

bjourne• 2 years ago

You may find this site interesting: https://folkrnn.org/tune/119105 Thing is tabs and other kinds of notation only capture a small part of the composition, often just the melody. So to generate "real" polyphonic music you need other kinds of data.

Playing guitar tablatures in Rust

Related Stories