Show HN: A guitar tab viewer that listens
fatpick.com
fatpick.com
FATpick (https://www.fatpick.com/) is a practice tool for guitar (and bass) that helps you learn to play new songs, improve your skills and stay motivated to keep playing. It's an auto-scrolling tablature viewer, synchronized with backing tracks, that listens as you play along with any guitar, providing immediate feedback on your accuracy and timing.
FATpick will eventually be much more than that - there are a lot of directions to take this in - but even with this more modest scope this M(+)VP release is useful, cohesive and hopefully compelling in and of itself.
A couple of things that might be interesting to HN: (1) So far this has been a bootstrapped, solo effort; but it won't necessarily stay that way. (2) The current Windows and Mac apps are built with Electron; but they won't necessarily stay that way either. I'd be happy to discuss any of that if you are interested.
A direct link to the downloads page is here: https://www.fatpick.com/support/downloads#get-fatpick
You can find a brief (and silent) video of the app in action on either of the pages linked above.
I'd love your feedback on any part of this, but I'd especially appreciate it if you can give the app a try.
Congrats on the launch!
Being able to leverage WebAudio was a major factor in the decision to use Electron.
To be honest at first I was thinking of Electron/WebAudio as a prototyping tool that I would only use for a proof-of-concept, but I've been pleasantly surprised by its performance and capabilities. So far I haven't found a compelling reason to change. When you don't need to worry about cross-browser compatibility the modern HTML5 toolset is really pretty powerful.
Also curious what did you use for painting the tabs. DIY in Canvas? Or vexflow?
Btw there’s a nice talk from Adrian Holovaty on perf challenges with soundslice and its drawing/updating of notation (standard and tabs)
But from a quick scan I think FATpick's tablature view is a little different what VexFlow does. FATpick's view is like a "piano-roll" - the x-axis maps directly to time such that the notes scroll from right to left at a constant rate, with the width of each "bubble" directly corresponding to the duration of that note. VexFlow does "traditional" tablature (and stave) notation, like the sheet music most people are familiar with, in which all notes are more-or-less the same width on the score, independent of duration.
That said, adding conventional (stave) notation to the player view (instead of or in addition to tabs) is on the roadmap, and VexFlow seems like it be very useful for that.
That's also on the roadmap. Right now FATpick renders chords just like any other set of notes in tablature, which is less than ideal once you have much experience with playing chords at all.
Actually the graphics are the easy part, the bulk of the time in the "inner loop" is in the audio analysis. Not to give away any secret sauce but in my experience naively using `AnalyserNode.getFloatFrequencyData` does not provide adequate performance or even accuracy when under "noisy" conditions. FATpick uses a "proprietary" (custom) pitch detection algorithm, but, other than a few domain-specific insights maybe, there's nothing particularly groundbreaking about it -- it's doing the same kind of things you'll find in academic literature on the topic, just judiciously selected and tuned by endless (and ongoing) lab-testing.
Given that it's Electron, is there a reason you don't have a Linux version?
There may be some platform-specific quirks to work out, but you are not the first person to ask for this. If you contact me at rod@<the domain above> or via the form on the website I would be happy to hook you up with a Linux build to try out.
If nothing else I could probably offer a not-officially-supported Linux version if enough people are interested in that.
To clarify: it is totally free to download and use right now and will continue to be for at least several months. Eventually payment will be required, probably in the form of a subscription plan.
Please reconsider this. If this is a local app, then I see no reason for adopting a subscription plan.
I am interested, but right now guitar is a hobby I can afford only a couple of times a week. Paying a subscription would have a different impact on, who like me, is an occasional player.
Otherwise I can stick with Guitar Pro for eternity.
Note: I am not saying that your annual plan would be overpriced or unaffordable.
Just to be clear FATpick is not strictly a local app. It's more like a fat client - a local app that depends on part on services in the cloud.
You really oughta do the math, consider how many subscribers you might be able to attain and how much to charge and whether that makes your ends meet.
You've probably already considered the licensing fees of the sheet music and/or background audio. Just getting into a discussion with the copyright holders is going to be an uphill battle when you're not the first mover in the field.
All the best to your project, I might give it a try later.
Actually there is a generated username that you can change from your user profile page that also works, but you should be able to log in using your email address (and password).
Obviously there are some "social" features that are planned. Messaging might be one of them, but it's certainly not at the top of the list.
When the time comes it might make sense to allow users (account holders) to disable that feature, maybe as part of a family plan, but for now I don't want to encourage minors to sign up. In fact it violates the ToS. Not that I have any particular issues with it nor that I expect any problems with inappropriate content, but for liability reasons regardless.
You can use free software like TuxGuitar to easily convert other formats to GuitarPro, but for now that's something you would need to do manually before importing into FATpick.
If you find a way to support their format, you might gain access to a huge repository of tabs. Maybe this might put your tool on Ubisoft's radar, so I suggest to thread lightly, but it would be awesome.
But you don't need anything nearly as complicated as Rocksmith files or CustomsForge to import songs into FATpick. FATpick already accepts Guitar Pro files, so there are thousands, maybe 10s of thousands of scores you can download from ultimate-guitar and other sites to import into FATpick.
Also, while obviously not as convenient, free software like TuxGuitar can convert other formats (MuseScore, MusicXML, etc.) into GuitarPro, so you can import pretty much any machine-readable score into FATpick (modulo proprietary formats like Rocksmith/CustomsForge, but you need to jump thru hoops to "extract" data in that format in the first place).
This is interesting. I suggest you add that somewhere in the home page.
I don't always reference "Guitar Pro" by name. Do you think that specific phrase would catch your eye or be more significant for you?
I.e. is "import Guitar Pro tabs" substantially more meaningful to you than, say, "import custom tabs"?
Full disclosure: right now FATpick will import gp3, gp4 and gp5 files. The "import song" button both enforces and mentions this, as does the user manual IIRC, but it's not something that's called out in any way.
If you have a gpx file (produced by Guitar Pro 6 or 7) then you'll need to convert it to gp5 to import into FATpick, at least for now. If you're using the GuitarPro app itself you can just save it that way. If you don't have the GuitarPro app TuxGuitar is free and handles this well (it works for editing GuitarPro files too).
Obviously it would be better to support .gpx directly, and for that matter things like MusicXML, too. But the GuitarPro format has to be more or less reverse-engineered, and gpx is unlike gp3, gp4 and gp5. Most files in the wild seem to be gp5 (or after that, gp3) anyway so that's where its at right now.
It seems like one could probably use some headless form of TuxGuitar on the back-end to convert gpx to gp5, but other than a cursory scan to see if that's a feature they already provide (it isn't) I haven't dug into it much more deeply than that.
Since this is a semi-established space that you're just putting a few variations on, concur with other posters suggesting you need to reduce friction. There shouldn't need to be a login process to start playing pre-built tabs, and if users can't already see tabs others have uploaded you need that function soonest.
Will check back later, cool idea in general.
In case you're wondering, the tab I tried to upload: https://tabs.ultimate-guitar.com/tab/the_lumineers/ho_hey_gu...
I just tested the Lumineers song you uploaded (meaning that I played your exact import, not that I imported the gp4 file from scratch) and it seems to be working ok for me.
I think that if you try again it will probably work. I think the problem you encountered was that the file wasn't properly (fully) downloaded when the app tried to open it. Specifically that sounds like an example of a file-download race condition we're working on (I mentioned it elsewhere in this discussion if you are curious).
Usually when this happens if you just hit the back button in the header to go back to the track-selection screen, wait a few seconds and then hit the play (or forward) button it will work the second time around.
I realize what a crappy UX it is when that happens but it is almost always a temporary glitch. If you go back to the track selection screen, give it a second to finish flushing to disk it should work. (Moreover once the file is loaded to your local cache you shouldn't see the problem again.)
If you are still having problems you could try flushing your local cache (go to the Settings, toggle "Advanced Options" to on then clicking the "Clear Cache" button that now appears at the bottom) and try again.
If you are still having problems even after that please reach out via the contact form in the app, or online at https://www.fatpick.com/contact-us, or contact me directly as rod@<that-domain> and we'll work it out.
On the tab interface: - Seeing a blob of 6 numbers come isn't intuitive enough. The strings REALLY need to be colored. You should be able to get away with using the same colors as Rocksmith, as there's generic sets of strings using those (https://www.guitarcenter.com/DR-Strings/Hi-Def-NEON-Multi-Co...) - or at least make them configurable. It's hard for me to tell which string is which in fatpick.
- Bar lines for the beat/measure changes would be helpful.
- Chords saying their name above them would be a huge help - "G" is much easier to parse quickly than "355433"!
Practice mode: - Just adjusting playback speed isn't enough. To be actually useful, fatpick needs something like Rocksmith's Riff Repeater, where you can select a section, loop it at a selected speed, and have it increase 1% each time you get the notes right. In fact, here's where you can outshine Rocksmith, since Rocksmith only lets you select entire sections, whereas you could make it so you could really drill in on notes
Audio: - Being able to play the audio file instead of just guitar pro-style midi would be a huge bonus. Don't make it required, so you can still just import a quick GP file to play, but for curated tracks or imported Rocksmith psarcs (see my comment elsewhere about psarcjs), the real audio would be great. - Even better... multitrack audio! Just play the song .mp3 if that's all there is, but there's plenty of multitrack ogg's sourced from rock band / guitar hero floating out there. For these songs you could play with your chosen instrument removed - IE, pick a song with a multitrack ogg, pick the bass part, the audio engine wouldn't play the bass part but would play the rest.
- Some kind of effects on the guitar would be nice. Using an AxefxIII and Loopback I can mix in real guitar sounds with the game, but most of your demographic won't have that ability, so being able to pick an AC/DC song and have basic distortion effects will be a must.
Anyways, after playing with fatpick for 20 minutes I'm going to go back to Rocksmith. Will check on this in a month though and see how far along it is - there's a lot of potential here!
I've also realized that its not a good idea psychologically. You basically remove the "did I play it correctly and did it sound good?" part from your brain, and rely on a external system to provide that feedback for you. This would be no issue if these tools could gauge that better, going beyond "does the input have the correct frequencies at the correct times?". It does not recognize fret buzz, it does not recognize you slightly panicing but still hitting the correct notes.
So in goPlayAlong I just select the parts I wanna work on (you can not just select bars, but also single notes), make sure the pitch is correct (it has halftone + semitone corrections), slow it down to the tempo I want to work on. Then I play it a few times. If I am happy with how it sounds, I press the + key on my keyboard to increase the tempo by 5%.
It also has a trainer mode which increases the speed after a set amount of playthroughs (of the section), by a set amount of speed. So increase 1% every 5repeats for example. I use it when I am more focused on improving speed.
It also has a very tight feedback loop. After it played the last note of the section it straight goes into the first note of the section again. No "You did great", no playing 5 seconds after and before the section like rocksmith does.
Unfortunately it costs something like 40$. After trying the demo and the song syncing I instantly bought it. I was very impressed it was able to accurately sync a live version of a song to the tab, accurately.
The only thing I miss about it is beeing able to edit the tabs.
I've been thinking along the same lines as many of your suggestions, just haven't gotten around to them yet.
The color-coding of strings comment is interesting. It's obviously not hard to do, but it never occurred to me that this would be particularly valuable. (To be fair most of your suggestions are interesting, but this is one that surprised me.)
I guess this is academic from your perspective, but as it happens FATpick does support sync'ing with original audio recordings in addition to the synthesized per-track audio that it generates. But that feature is not exposed right now due to some challenges with the auto-synchronization logic. Maybe I should add the recorded audio to some of the existing tracks just to demonstrate the feature. That's definitely a more compelling experience.
Thanks for keeping FATpick in mind.
Download from here: https://www.fatpick.com/support/downloads
Release notes here: https://www.fatpick.com/blog/release-notes-fatpick-v1-4-2
Thanks for the suggestion.
FWIW, several of your other ideas are also near the top of the development queue but will take a little more time to complete and test.
1. A lot of the features are oriented around having some identity. There would need to be a lot of special cases in the code to support account-free use.
2. Ultimately the app will be something you have to pay for, so the account is valuable as a lead but also maybe as a proxy for whether or not someone is interested enough to pay for the product eventually.
3. By the time you encounter this you've already downloaded and installed (or at least unpacked) the application. I'm not sure there are a lot of people that go through all that trouble only to balk at registering an email/name/password account. (If nothing else I would think at that point you're already committed due to the effect of the "investment" you've already made on basic human psychology.) And if they do balk at entering an email address, are they the kind of people that are likely to enter a credit-card when the time comes?
For what its worth, most of my competitors make you enter a credit card (and promise to charge you if you don't cancel) before letting you try the product.
That said, I guess it _could_ work with some type of gradual account creation flow (like asking for your name when you've earned a spot on the leaderboard). I'm just not convinced that the return that would provide justifies the effort to make it happen (not to mention the complexity that this would permanently add to ongoing development and testing).
I could easily be wrong about this, but that's been my intuition and rationale around this topic so far.
Do you really think that _that_ many "normal" users that are serious paid-subscription prospects will be lost at that step. I can probably measure that to find out, but its also plausible (and maybe harder to measure) that is a useful way to filter out users that will never pay for the service before they become a support or capacity burden.
Also, just a minor bug I found - if you have a song already loaded then it will play on top of the test tones in the Latency Calibration menu.
Edit:
Some other thoughts. It would be great to show the tuning somewhere while the track is being played. I keep forgetting to tune my guitar until after I've selected the track to play.
2) By "not detected" do you mean "doesn't appear in the list of audio input devices" or "doesn't seem to hear me playing"?
There is an input monitor (input volume meter) on the player and in the audio settings view. If there is a signal getting thru then that meter should be moving.
If FATpick is hearing your mic but not detecting any notes then the troubleshooting guide at https://www.fatpick.com/support/troubleshooting has some tips that might help.
If the mic is seen as an input device but the audio signal isn't getting thru then you could check that both the system (sound control panel) and FATpick (settings > audio) have the input volume turned up high enough.
If there mic is not seen as an input device at all I don't have any troubleshooting advice off the top of my head (short of using a different input device).
If you can't solve the problem feel free to contact me as rod@<the-domain-name> or using the contract form on the website. I'd be happy to help you troubleshoot the issue.
It is likely you'll need to "install" the app (drag it to your Applications folder as prompted in the DMG), not just run the app directly.
I think same updates that fixed the notarization issue may fix this problem also (since we had to add an explicit entitlement for the audio input). If it doesn't please reach me via the contact form at https://www.fatpick.com/contact-us or email me directly at rod@<that-domain>.
I think the latest version (v1.4.2) now available at https://www.fatpick.com/support/downloads fixes this.
I think same updates that fixed the notarization issue may fix this problem also (since we had to add an explicit entitlement for the audio input). If it doesn't please reach me via the contact form at https://www.fatpick.com/contact-us or email me directly at rod@<that-domain>. I'd really like to get to the bottom of this issue for both of our sake.
BTW: That minor latency calibration bug you mentioned is also "fixed", in that the button is disabled when you are on the play screen. This was already the behavior in the general case but that special red button you see when the latency has never been calibrated wasn't getting disabled by the same logic. It is now.
Personally I see that as a feature, but I guess if you wanted to be very prescriptive about fingering for educational/training reasons I can see the value in treating them differently.
There is some subtle difference in the tone (which is why you can hear the difference, obviously) so this is _possible_ but not trivial. I've actually been experimenting with "string detection" recently so that I can warn users when they are off by one string (a common beginner mistake).
The string detection is a good idea imho
https://www.soundslice.com/community/ is a good place to start. You can follow people to get updates on their posts (licks, transcriptions), it has a fully baked notation/tab editor, it imports GuitarPro/MusicXML/PowerTab/TuxGuitar files, and it's just really damn good. (Disclaimer: I am the developer.)
If you want you can test out how well it does as-is right now. Within the app go to "Settings" then "Audio Analysis Settings" then click the "Test Settings" button. That will show you the same pitch and note-onset detection as used during game-play.
I'd be happy to talk more -- you can reach me as rod@ the domain I linked to -- but to be candid monochromatic pitch detection of the human voice is not a hard problem. I'm not sure FATpick is as special at this as you seem to think, but I'm not quite sure what you have in mind. And I certainly don't want to talk you out of thinking that :) I'd love to hear more about it.
Pitch detection can be tricky and system dependent but when it's not working at all (or missing most of the notes you are playing) the root cause is usually one of a few common problems. The troubleshooting guide at https://www.fatpick.com/support/troubleshooting may help.
If you want to experiment some you can enable the advanced settings (under General) which will add the Audio Analysis options to the main settings menu. There are a lot of knobs you can turn on that screen to adjust how the audio analysis works, and you can test the pitch detection from that screen.
There are actually a bunch of additional options, including alternative pitch detection algorithms that are included but not exposed on that screen. If you reach out to me (rod@<that domain> or using the contact form on the web) I'd be happy to try to help get it to work for you.
One thing that was frustrating when learning guitar was figuring out which finger goes where. Even though the tabs show where you need to press, they don't really tell you which finger should go where.
Is this something you would be able to help with?
FATpick has an algorithm to programmatically determine where to place your fretting hand and fingers (when the information isn't available in the score) but to be honest I wasn't confident enough in that logic to enable it by default quite yet.
None of the bands in your "small sample of songs" were really what I wanted to play, so I didn't bother downloading this. It seemed like it would probably be a lot of work to download, install, get past the security errors on macOS Mojave, presumably create a login, and then find out what songs you have.
However, maybe the library of songs isn't what your main target audience cares about.
GuitarPro is a pretty common format for machine-readable sheet music. Most "tab editor" programs can open and save to the GuitarPro file format. TuxGuitar is one example of a tab editor that is both good and free and does this well.
But you don't need to do that either. There are tens of thousands of GuitarPro format files readily available on the Internet. Ultimate-Guitar is one major source but there are lots of others.
EDIT: Name a band or a song and I'll import one for you. (Just don't go out of your way to "stump" me with an obscure choice).
I never could get it to do anything. I got as far as pressing "play" and then seeing a page with a little bar on the left, two quotes in the middle and the word "practice" on the right. Press that and it says "paused". Oh, I was playing? Didn't seem like it.
This is typically a momentary issue. If you want to give it another try you can go back to the track or song selection page and try again. That generally clears the problem up.
(The problem is that data file wasn't fully flushed to disk when the player tried to open it. If you give it a second and try again it generally works.)
If the file happens to be very large or the network connection is slow you might see this more often. Also if you are a little more leisurely about going from the track-selection page to the player this is less likely to happen.
Worst case scenario is that the data file was somehow corrupted when being written to the cache. That will clear itself out eventually, or you could clear the cache from the settings panel, or try another song if you are just playing around.
I know this seems like a problem that should be easy to fix, but it's been a little bit of a whack-a-mole problem to address all the edge cases. I'm sorry you ran into this, but fortunately it's almost always a temporary glitch.
To be honest the most interesting differentiators are not really visible in this MVP release, but there are some, even now.
At a practical level:
* FATpick lets you import and play any song you can get your hands on (as well as those shared by other users). You can import any GuitarPro-format scores directly (or at least any .gp3/4/5 files) and if you're motivated enough you can easily convert anything else to the GuitarPro format using free software like TuxGuitar.
* FATpick is also totally free right now. There are no time limits or features hidden behind a paywall. To be clear it won't always be free, but it will remain free for at least several months (as we refine the product) and we'll work out a special offer for early-adopters as we get closer to defining the actual subscription model.
At a philosophical level:
* Most of the competitors in this space - possibly all of the "big" ones - focus on trying to "teach" guitar and so invest heavily in instructional videos and in content selected for pedagogical reasons.
* FATpick takes a different approach. We assume you've heard of JustinGuitar and focus instead on being the best platform for viewing tabs and learning to play songs, to the extent that even someone that is brand new to guitar can be playing songs they know in just a few minutes -- maybe slowly or poorly or relatively simple ones -- but literally going from "Where do I put my fingers?" and "Is this where the guitar strap should go?" to "Cool, now I can play Seven Nation Army along with the recording as if I'm in the band" in a just a few minutes. More experienced players are able to sight-read new stuff, even on the first play thru, making it easy to learn new songs. And all with objective feedback on your performance and the ability to track your progress over time. We aren't trying to teach you guitar -- you should be looking at multiple sources for that anyway -- but we are trying to be an indispensable tool on your belt, helping make your practice sessions more fun, more engaging and more effective.
But again I think the most interesting and unique stuff is still on the roadmap. A big part of what I'm trying to do now is field-test the technology. This version was more or less scoped specifically to be useful and compelling enough to support that but the really good stuff is still in the pipeline.
Dynamics exercises. Capture amplitude changes, so users can practice crescendos when using acoustic guitars.
Solve the reverse problem, but for singing. Given a song, extract it's melody and replay as a karaoke with scores.
Guitar Pro compatibility is more important than you think. You'll probably have to differentiate yourself from Yousician.
Cheers.
You can set the latency manually but first you must got to "Settings" (gear icon) then "General" then toggle "Show advanced options" to on. This will expose a bunch of new configuration options, both in the settings and in a few other places in the app.
Once you have enabled advanced options you'll see a "link" at the bottom of the Latency Calibration screen that says "Manual configuration...". That will let you manually configure the input and output latency.
It's unfortunate that this wasn't easy for you to find but I'm glad you said something. I wasn't sure whether anyone would know what to do with this, so you've at least validated that it's worthwhile to have that option.
Would love to try it!
Are you seeing that problem when opening the DMG or the app itself? Does it help to use the right-click-and-choose-open approach?
For what it is worth you can download (a zipped version of) the .app file directly from https://www.fatpick.com/releases/FATpick-1.3.5-mac.zip, if that would work around the problem.
It is not yet notarized, but only because of my own ignorance of the implications of that. (In my defense the notarization thing is a relatively new policy.)
xcrun altool --notarize-app --primary-bundle-id "com.your.bundleid" --username "username" --password "password" --file "/path/to/installbundle"
Wait for apple to approve it.
Then staple it.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/notarizin...
In the meantime you can make an explicit exception by "right-clicking" on the application icon and selecting "Open" from the context menu that pops up.
The version currently available at https://www.fatpick.com/downloads/FATpick-mac-latest.dmg is fully notarized by Apple and should not have this problem.
Release notes here: https://www.fatpick.com/blog/release-notes-fatpick-v1-4-2
Please let me know if you encounter any problems with this new build. You can reach me via the contact form at https://www.fatpick.com/contact-us or you can email me directly at rod@<that-domain>.
You should be able to right-click on the application icon and choose "open" from the context menu that pops up to make this problem go away. (Assuming you trust the developer, of course.) This message is just a more strongly worded (and less convenient) version of the dialog that has always come up when opening side-loaded apps for the first time, at least in my experience.
It looks like Apple's newly introduced "notarization" process will avoid this step, even for apps distributed outside of the official App Store, but that process will take a little bit of time. In the meantime you'll need to take the right-click-and-choose-open action.
The version now available at https://www.fatpick.com/downloads/FATpick-mac-latest.dmg is fully notarized by Apple and should not have this problem.
Release notes here: https://www.fatpick.com/blog/release-notes-fatpick-v1-4-2
Most string-instrument-based tracks are playable in FATpick so if you have a GuitarPro file (or want to use TuxGuitar to convert another format to guitar pro, ideally gp5) you can import and play it right now.
To be fair we haven't really tuned anything for Uke so the pitch detction might need a little TLC but it should work reasonably well as-is. Even banjo would theoretically work but to be honest I'm not sure if the short-string on the banjo is handled properly, nor how that's represented in GuitarPro files.
Let me know if you run into problems (rod at fatpick or via the in-app or on-web contact form). Obviously we'd like to support ukulele, we just haven't been able to prioritize that yet.