TabFont – guitar tabs rendered as you type | Hacker News Reader

TabFont – guitar tabs rendered as you type

philatype.com

The name is misleading. The glyphs are showing individual chord shapes. I can't write out a song using this. At best I can use this at the top of a tab to remind myself how the chords are meant to be shaped. But that doesn't appear to work much beyond the basic cowboy chords. For example, I tried 577655 which is an A major barre chord, and it didn't render. I realize a font can only do so much, but I wouldn't pay for this.

Hmm yeah I guess what I really want is a maekdown style mini-language that compiles to tab format.

"VexTab is a language that allows you to easily create, edit, and share standard notation and guitar tablature. Unlike ASCII tab, which is designed for readability, VexTab is designed for writeability."

https://vexflow.com/vextab/tutorial.html

AlphaTex?

https://alphatab.net/docs/alphatex/introduction

Not quite MD, but fairly easy to learn.

There's no such thing as "Tab format". Tabs are just ascii text.

I had people who had been writing Tabs on paper for a very long time. I would wager that ascii is just a representation

lol markdown and html are also both ascii/unicode and by themselves disprove your point.

Um, how exactly does that even tangentially relate to my point?

all textual representations of data are "formats" and one being easier to edit is a totally valid use case. like 'x57675' instead of a full tab. or # title instead of <h1>title</h1>

Isn't that what LilyPond does, more or less?

Not really. The lilypond format is extremely...complicated and obscure (and that's my polite take on it). Even simple stuff is quite complex. Very very far from Markdown's virtually WYSIWYG.

Yes, but music notation is not simple text. Markdown was made for simple text. If you try to represent more complex text, it turns into Asciidoc or Rst.

yeah this is not what guitar tabs are and I don't think a font should be used to do it or is the best method to do it. It can get really messy with time signature changes and managing all the strings and marks etc just by text and a font

I was excited for a second, because this is one piece of the puzzle (chords), then numerals solve melodies (you can just type something like 0-1 for open string first string, etc), then just need something for ornamentation. Seems like it only matches against a known set of chords, though.

Does anyone find the little "finger" shapes confusing? I would rather see circles, so my brain doesn't have to adapt to a new way of reading tabs. Also, the inverted "D" shape is hard to parse because it's not a symmetric shape. Cool idea, other than that! It reminds me of this new QR code font I read about just yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48703200

Yeah, as a guitarist this is hideously non-standard. Definition of change for the sake of change.

If shows the direction your fingers would point on the guitar neck but it's not like there's much confusion around this point.

Extremely cool. This got me thinking that I would love to have a mermaid-like dsl for creating full tabs and apparently it exists![0]

[0] https://github.com/0xfe/vextab

This is one of those things that should obviously exist and I'm mad I didn't think of it!

I love tablature because it allowed me to learn the songs that I love and bring joy when I play. I hate tablature because it's like reading English as it's written out in IPA.

I want finger positions and staff notation so I can learn the theory while actually playing the dang song correctly. I credit tablature and my lazy programmer mind for putting off the theory. Also (channeling Tantacrul here) staff notation is the worst notation, except for all the others.

Berklee Press has some excellent books with what you're looking for, one in 3 volumes by Will Leavitt. There's another that's more barebones but covers the basics well by Hal Leonard. The former, especially, essentially starts at notation first and then only later introduces tabs when it feels like it. Very challenging if you've been tabs-only, but very rewarding.

It's an exaggeration, but working through them will make you learn the guitar as an instrument for personal expression rather than just a means for playing other peoples' songs.

Is this the one from Leavitt? A Modern Method for Guitar [1]

If so I will order it. Thank you for the suggestion.

1: https://berkleepress.com/guitar/a-modern-method-for-guitar-b...

A version of this font with more chord shapes in it would be useful, like say CMaj7:{digit1-9} would yield different fingerings/voicings for each trailing digit value. You could put together a chord progression that has reasonable voice leading, and could be mostly played as written.

Dig the Picker which lets you click the chord name and shows its visual. I think in chord symbols and play a ton of shapes but cant remember their names for the life of me. The visual fingering solves this. To atleast be articulate about what i'm tryin to play. All the other stuff seems less useful.

OMG. This solves like 8 problems with me. Currently teaching my niece guitar basics and have always wanted this for my guitar videos.

Anyone else here learn to play the guitar in the early-to-mid ‘90s using plain text tabs from OLGA?

Why does the number of chords in the library change as you scroll? It should remain static no?

shite

So awesome. Sad it isn't getting the attention it deserves

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