[HN Gopher] Playing Guitar Tablatures in Rust
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       Playing Guitar Tablatures in Rust
        
       Author : lukastyrychtr
       Score  : 71 points
       Date   : 2024-07-19 16:57 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (agourlay.github.io)
 (TXT) w3m dump (agourlay.github.io)
        
       | metaketa wrote:
       | Owner of https://parture.org here; we should work together. Nice
       | work!
        
         | kej wrote:
         | 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)
        
       | javier123454321 wrote:
       | 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
        
         | kjkjadksj wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | javier123454321 wrote:
           | 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 wrote:
         | 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 wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | bigstrat2003 wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | javier123454321 wrote:
           | Agreed, the video goes into depth in those tradeoffs.
        
           | dbalatero wrote:
           | 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.
        
         | jasode wrote:
         | _> 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.
        
         | GardenLetter27 wrote:
         | A lot of tabs will put the note length on the "beat" of the tab
         | too.
         | 
         | You can see this in Tuxguitar IIRC.
        
       | destructuror44 wrote:
       | > Since TuxGuitar appears to be unmaintained
       | 
       | The development of TuxGuitar has recently resumed
       | 
       | https://github.com/helge17/tuxguitar
        
         | agourlay wrote:
         | Thanks for the heads-up, I was not aware of this.
        
       | agourlay wrote:
       | Hey author here :)
       | 
       | Happy to answer any questions.
        
       | clwg wrote:
       | I clicked hoping to see Smoke on the Water mentioned, and there
       | it was right at the start.
        
       | bazzargh wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | aanet wrote:
       | 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!
        
       | buildsjets wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | kej wrote:
         | 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 wrote:
         | 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)
        
       | nrjames wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | ethagnawl wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | hnuser435 wrote:
       | Watch the sparrow falling Gives new meaning to it all If not
       | today nor yet tomorrow Then some other day
        
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       (page generated 2024-07-19 23:02 UTC)