Hacker News Reader

Comment by adrianh | Hacker News Reader

Soundslice (http://www.soundslice.com/) -- animated guitar tabs / sheet music.

Demo: http://www.soundslice.com/tabs/5680/bohemian-rhapsody-for-so...

It's cool because:

* The state of the art in guitar tabs is horrible ASCII crap (example: http://tabs.ultimate-guitar.com/e/eagles/hotel_california_ta...). Soundslice is a 1000x improvement.

* It solves a key problem for musicians, which is: when you're learning a new song, you generally listen to a recording of it, and it's a pain to cross-reference the recording with the sheet music/tab.

* It's one of the most advanced HTML5 apps on the web. Almost everything is done in <canvas>, and it has dozens of UI details (http://www.soundslice.com/help/). I did a tech talk about the various JavaScript/HTML5 stuff if you're interested: http://37signals.com/talks/soundslice

* Proudly bootstrapped and made by two people.

View on HN

One of the things I enjoy about traditional tabs, though, is that I can sit down and review them at my own pace. In your demo, I didn't see a way to view the entire tab at once. Also with ASCII tabs, I can repeat a section over and over at the speed I want.

I've played with Rocksmith, which is a video game similar to Soundslice, and it has the same drawbacks for me. It's really, really hard to play a song when you're seeing the tabs for the first time as you're performing it.

Is there a way in Soundslice to do an A-B repeat of a section, or view the entirety of the tab at once?

Totally understand. We're pretty close to launching a "stacked" display that shows the tab in rows, with vertical scrolling instead of horizontal scrolling. I suspect this will address that for you nicely.

To answer your questions: you can repeat/loop stuff by dragging on the timeline (or clicking annotations). You can view the whole tab by using the zoom UI in the lower left corner.

Awesome, thanks for responding! I'll be watching this project to see where it goes, it has a good potential to upset Ultimate Guitar and Songsterr.

Dude, I love you! I started playing guitar again after a 10 year break and I'm learning new songs via youtube mainly nowadays. Just the other day I was thinking about how cool it would be if there was an app available just like yours. That slow-mo thing is a killer feature for sure, I always wanted that.

You may want to check these guys called Cifra Club over youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLZUuCyyQe0 , they pretty much are doing the best of whats possible to do on youtube in terms of animated tabs.

Best of luck for you on this project!

Hey, thanks! I hadn't come across Cifra Club -- much appreciated.

They're the biggest Brazilian tab site: cifraclub.com.br

This is really cool. I could see another application for it - Teachers delivering music lessons to students. As a drum teacher this would be a perfect platform for me to deliver my lessons, assuming you could support drum music (but there's probably a market for this among guitar tutors). I'm imagining a billing system where students pay to subscribe to my lessons and you guys take a slice of the pie.

Thanks. We're definitely interested in making something for music teachers. I teach gypsy-jazz guitar at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago, and I've used Soundslice with my students a teeny bit but so much more is possible.

Could you and I connect via email so that I can get more thoughts? Contact info in my profile.

This is amazing. Awesome work. How much trouble have you ran into licensing / obtaining tabs for popular copyrighted songs? I think a legitimate tab database itself would be incredibly valuable and could power awesome services like this.

I look forward to hearing more about this project, I think this is absolutely great.

Ethically speaking, I don't care if a database has "legit" tabs or not. (I downloaded 1000's of tabs in a zip a lot of years ago, that was definitely helpful as far as learning songs goes.) It's one thing if a it is a song that a band has actually recorded themselves, but an "illegitimate" tab is often the labor of the listeners. You could say that it is plagiarism, but I'd argue that it isn't as long as it doesn't pretend to be something that it is not ("my new cool song!"). It seems comparable to transcribing a video presentation (the video presentation might be copy righted).

Artists don't owe it to give out tabs of their songs, but listeners don't owe it to artists to not lay out what it was that they heard.

We sell tabs as part of our Pitch Perfect program (http://www.soundslice.com/pitch-perfect/), and for that we deal directly with the artist to clear copyrights.

The YouTube (free) part of the site is meant to be a loss leader / tech demo for Pitch Perfect and our technology licensing. We haven't run into any licensing issues. It'll be interesting to see what happens over time, as I don't believe in putting ads on the site, and I'd like to keep a free version and a pay-for version.

Really cool stuff.

Did you think about adding the feature of producing a combined video with the original video plus the overlaid tabs? That'd be nice so that people that transcribe can post back to YouTube.

I guess a lot of people will just search in YouTube and it'd be nice if those searchers could discover the content that the people at Soundslice are creating.

BTW (100% unrelated) - I took one of your YouTube guitar videos and added a couple of parts with BandHub: http://getbandhub.com/song.html?s=524e26a8cc8d46e238000001

Thanks! A few people have suggested that idea -- creating a new YouTube video with the tabs overlaid -- but it's a low priority for us, given everything else we want to do.

Nice work with BandHub!

This reminded me of Miso Media (http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/14/miso-media-raises-another-2...), though at a glance I see that they're pretty different.

I appreciate that your app is web-based, personally. And to have done it all in canvas is crazy impressive-- especially considering the slickness of the interface. Kudos!

love it, im a huge music fan but i've barely started doing web development and making something related to music would've been one of those projects i wanted to try. along with these interactive guitar tabs, i wish there was just some way i could just grab guitar tabs from ANY song i liked...ill keep dreamin.

Yeah, automatic music transcription is the holy grail for Soundslice. Given a song, automatically generate the tab and chords. It'd be amazing!

There's software now that claims to do it (Capo, Riffstation, Chordify), but they all fail miserably on non-trivial music. It's a Very Hard Problem.

Awesome! Love the simplicity of this. My kid was glued to this for about an hour before I had to pry him away. :)

This is really, really excellent. I'll be learning a new song or two today.

Very nice, and good choice of tune :-)

I wish someone made something as well executed as this for the piano. Or maybe I'll just learn the guitar, now.

Notezilla (http://notezilla.io) is working on doing this for piano (and vocal/chamber/orchestral music).

It launched on HN a little over 2 months ago and garnered considerable interest: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6226607

It's excellent! I'm so going to use this site. Is there a way to see the lyrics at the same time ?

I wish you made this sooner!

Holy cow. Excellent work.

>The state of the art in guitar tabs is horrible ASCII crap

Not powertab

<3 U

> The state of the art in guitar tabs is horrible ASCII crap (example: http://tabs.ultimate-guitar.com/e/eagles/hotel_california_ta...). Soundslice is a 1000x improvement.

Oh come on - you guys even mention Guitar Pro on the About page. This is like building a word processor and then comparing it to Notepad.

The vast majority of guitarists still use those ASCII tabs, not Guitar Pro -- but, fair point!

The biggest problem with Guitar Pro is that the playback is synthetic/MIDI. Our philosophy is that learning from a real recording is the best (only?) way to catch subtleties of music like phrasing, timing and feel.

I feel bad for those guitarists...

I've been using Guitar Pro for most the time that I've been playing guitar and bass, and the fact that the playback is Midi has not been much of an issue (and I wasn't sold on Guitar Pro 5 "real sound engine" or whatever it was called). Though I've been playing bass which has less subtleties in my main genre (rock/metal). Even with guitar the heavy lifting for me is to learn what fingers goes where on the fretboard. After that, I can listen to the actual song and polish whatever nuances I feel that I need, without referring to the tab (since I know where the fingers goes on the fretboard at this point).

And of course there's songsterr too don't forget.

You've a great product, but come on, state of the art's not been ascii for a decade. It's just google lurvvves ultimate guitar tab.

Wow this looks nice! I wonder how complicated this would become for songs from Satriani, Malmstein or Steve Vai?

Why did you choose tabs which is rather weak (correct me if I'm wrong) notation?

Thanks! The software scales up to that stuff. There's a bunch of complicated stuff transcribed on Soundslice. Here's an arpeggio exercise in the style of Satriani et al: http://www.soundslice.com/tabs/4976/electric-guitar-solo-cra...

The slow-down feature helps. :)

I chose tabs to start because (1) it's easier to implement than standard notation, (2) most guitarists use tab instead of notation, and (3) classic tab really needs to be brought into the 21st century.

With that said, I'm working on a standard notation version now, and it's going to be amazing. It's a surprisingly tricky technical challenge to render sheet music in the browser -- there are centuries' worth of special cases!

Did you consider/play with Lilypond at all?

Yes, definitely looked into Lilypond. It produces beautiful sheet music, but I can't use it because (1) it's GPL and I intend to license the technology, (2) I'm generating the notation client-side (for responsive design) and (3) I need the ability to highlight certain notes in real time to show the user which notes are being played.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com