online ABC to tab please?

Subject: online ABC to tab please?
From: GUEST
Date: 08 Apr 17 - 10:25 AM

Does anyone know a online ABC to tab editor? One that's not down and other online ABC editors? Please tell me! Thanks.

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IP *.*.*.189
-Joe Offer-

Subject: RE: online ABC to tab please?
From: Mark Clark
Date: 08 Apr 17 - 05:18 PM

What devices are available to you? Do you own a PC or Mac? How about an iPad or similar?

Are you looking for a Web page that does the processing or can you download free or nearly free applications?

The reason I ask these questions is because ABC to tablature isn't necessarily straightforward. ABC deals with notes more than fingerings and many instruments, stringed instruments especially, have many possible fingerings for the same note. This makes it hard for software to guess where the player would like to locate any given note.

Most music publishing systems that produce tablature take fingerings (string & fret) as their input and optionally produce a staff of music that represents the selected fingerings. ABC can be converted to MusicXML, for example, and many music publishing programs accept MusicXML as an import format. Once you have that, you can build your tablature from the music staff. I'm not sure there is a Web page that lets you do it but many free music publishing programs such as MuseScore will.

      - Mark

Subject: RE: online ABC to tab please?
From: GUEST,Jon
Date: 08 Apr 17 - 06:00 PM

As far as I remember what Mark mentions is likely to be a problem with anything just passing "plain dots" to abcm2ps. I think there was a more advanced way involving user input but for what we tried, the tab generation only sees the note as it's to be set on the score.

(And I'd never have had the programming ability to take things further and lack the ability to say know what I'm doing with say up the neck positions on guitar even if the abc->score capability was there.)

Sort of upshot there is that sort of "automatic conversion" should work for instruments such as a whistle and my type of open single line open string GDAE folk melody playing (and anyone willing to venture into the mysteries of postscript could have a go at their own) but I only imagine it working for "simple purposes".

Subject: RE: online ABC to tab please?
From: Jack Campin
Date: 08 Apr 17 - 06:53 PM

The problem is that when the tab could be most useful is when it's hardest to create it. With an instrument like the guitar, tab tells you which of a few alternate strings to use to get a particular note. Choosing the best alternative depends on the context; you want to minimize hand and finger movement, so you want to tab whole phrases, not individual notes.

Laurie Griffiths (a very knowledgeable guitarist with a background in mathematical physics) put this sort of intelligent tab generation into his ABC processor Muse, but was killed by a thug in a posh car just before he could release it. He said that in the most pathological cases, changing a note at one or other end of a tune could force a change in the tab that would propagate all the way to the other end.

I suspect that the definitive answer to this problem would have to use Dmitri Tymoczko's orbifold models of voice leading; he has a theorem which constructs voices moving by the minimum number of steps, with no crossings, for any specified chord progression. That isn't quite the same as the tab creation problem, but you should be able to use similar constructions to minimize finger position movement rather than to avoid unsingable jumps. The relevant articles:

"The Geometry of Musical Chords", Science, 7 July 2006, pp.72-4 (see Theorem 1 in the supplement you can download from the Science website)

"Generalized Voice-Leading Spaces", Science, 18 April 2008 (which also has a supplement detailing the nitty-gritty)

Tymoczko has a book about all this, The Geometry of Music, which has all sorts of neat ideas about music history but less about algorithms. And lots of demos, as downloadable software or videos.

Subject: RE: online ABC to tab please?
From: GUEST
Date: 09 Apr 17 - 09:58 AM

Well I need no downloads. Just online please

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IP *.*.*.189
-Joe Offer-

Subject: RE: online ABC to tab please?
From: gillymor
Date: 09 Apr 17 - 02:03 PM

mandolintab.net/abcconverter

Subject: RE: online ABC to tab please?
From: GUEST
Date: 14 Apr 17 - 12:17 PM

I know but. I need a ABC to harmonica tab converter please?

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IP *.*.*.189
Looks like the three unnamed guests are all the same person. Jon is a different person - he's a friend of mine.
-Joe Offer-

Subject: RE: online ABC to tab please?
From: The Sandman
Date: 14 Apr 17 - 04:22 PM

imo you should be playing harmonica by ear, have you tried playing bodhran by tab?, why not?, its just as sensible

Subject: RE: online ABC to tab please?
From: Stanron
Date: 14 Apr 17 - 05:06 PM

Four guests. Four different posters? Or just one having a laugh?

Subject: RE: online ABC to tab please?
From: Jack Campin
Date: 14 Apr 17 - 06:46 PM

"GUEST, Jon" is for real. The others are a trolling twat, which is why I reponded that way.

Subject: RE: online ABC to tab please?
From: Stanron
Date: 14 Apr 17 - 07:50 PM

The problem of usable tab from a score is interesting. Sibelius, I used up to version 6, and Musescore version 2.? both translate score into guitar tab in first position wherever possible. You then have to edit the tab that goes above first position to make it playable. Software doing this would need to be able to recognise phrases which would be played in a position above first position. How do you get software to recognise phrases?