I created a simple CLI that turns a YouTube guitar-lesson video into a PDF of the guitar tab.
There are services that transcribe music from Youtube videos into tabs, but they never work well enough for me. Instead I'm taking a simpler approach. It downloads the video, samples frames, uses Claude vision to locate the tab region, crops every frame to that region, de-duplicates the crops by the bar number printed on each line of the score, and stitches the distinct tab lines vertically into a PDF.
I didn't test it on a lot of different Youtube videos yet, so problem will arise for sure.
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I link to a Patreon in my videos that lets you pay a membership to download the full tabs in PDFs.
Here I was thinking AI might soon replace my painstakingly slow tab transcription efforts altogether. But I never thought about someone just ripping it from the video...
Let me know if it works ;-)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2i-Lwoe2Ow
Kudos from one of the Soundslice guys — we've been making web-based tab and sheet music stuff since 2012. :)
That said, it's the fastest way to get a track into some player, define loop points easily, and then write down what I need to along with the player. I can jot down chords, lyrics, tabs of riffs, etc. I've tried tons of solutions over the years like sooperlooper, ableton live, reaper, winamp, youtube. this is by far the easiest, with just the right set of tools. It also doesn't do any of it automatically, so there's not even a temptation to skip practicing my ear.
1: https://www.tabit.net/
ai can't shred
ai will never get chicks
i will use YouTube Guitar Tab Parser to shred and get chicks
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=07N4VVSmYLU&list=RD07N4VVSmYLU...
…exactly the way you described. Pause, screenshot, adjust color/contrast, assemble in a pdf. Super annoying.
Why the heck did this largely go away?
Your's looks nicer :-)
Here's the output of mine for a C chord.
and here it is if I toss in the narrow switch: Here's the source [1], minimally updated to compile with current C compilers and to not depend on any quirks of the runtime of whatever C development system I was using on my Mac back then (Megamax C, I think).I was pretty shaky on chord theory back then so not sure I'd trust it for fancy chords. I have no idea why the heck I made the D tuning flag tune both the 1st and 6th strings down to D. I'm 100% certain every piece of sheet music I had that called for for D tuning only wanted the 6th string tuned down.
[1] https://pastebin.com/HKyKWHip
That sounds like it can get quite costly. Probably there are ways to do it without AI, I would rather manually annotate the tab area with a visual editor.
It has happened quite a few times where I compare tabs in youtube videos with printed scores, and the youtube version turned out to be unique arrangements. It's the same with PDFs on certain sites, especially those that accept user contributed content.
I would rather pay money to get printed scores than to find out later that I have been practicing the wrong thing.
This is interesting and all but seems to use computer vision rather than audio processing?
> the existing tab from the page would be more efficient and precise
But what about songs that aren't made into a YT video?
You need to both work out the chords and also decide on fingerings a human could perform. Seems possible, but more then just audio processing
Here is what I was cribbing from with my own version. Seems they updated it since.
https://github.com/jabbey1/UGDownloader
Here's a working version: https://freetar.sievers.dev
[0] https://github.com/kmille/freetar/pull/90
I only need the clean tab and transposing would be nice.
TerminalTabs anyone?
I don't like having to switch to desktop mode to transpose though. They want you to get the app to do it on mobile which is enough of a reason to make a special program to do exactly what I want.
Also, scraping chord charts is in a different catagory from tabs. I can't even actually read tabs but with a chord chart you can get close enough to noodle around and emulate. Good enough for my needs.
I don't think your software is (or should be) illegal. But it's a form of theft, and incredibly unethical. These people worked very hard on these tabs and don't make much money. You (and kiaansaraiya and neogenix) should be ashamed of yourselves. You don't deserve your guitar if you steal tabs from working musicians.
In some cases, the composer makes the video, and is sharing their own work.
In other cases, the transcribed part is not a composed part, and the composer who is listed (Lennon/McCartney) did not write or perform it (e.g. Ringo's drums).
In yet other cases, the composer was long dead before the recording was made, and the melody being transcribed is meaningfully different than the one they composed. Common in jazz.
"Composer" is a 19th century idea, enshrined in copyright law in the 1920's in order to protect the people who made sheet music for piano players to play in their parlor. Musical expression deserves attribution and protection, but let's not pretend the name on the liner notes is a Beethoven with a long quill creating a work of genius out of their solo effort.
https://www.thatgreatcomposer.com/blog/is-it-legal-to-transc...
https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/96352/dual-question-...
https://www.drumforum.org/threads/what-is-the-legal-basis-fo...
Inevitably the transcriber makes decisions in how to deviate from the reference recording, be it omission of instruments, microchanges in tempo and pitch or articulation. In theory a good transcription is an exact graphical representation of the abstract sonic intent of the artist.
Of course, if you are combining voices, changing chords, it approaches an arrangement which is a more creative endeavor.
Not under US Copyright Law, it isn’t. Transcribing is derivative, not transformative.
BTW, if it was transformative, it’d be fair use and legal, and you’d be contradicting yourself.
the same "working" musicians who didn't write the music they're making tabs for, didn't get any permission from the original artists, and in many cases aren't actually playing/tabbing the parts as originally written.
A "working" musician is someone who doesn't monetize someone else's work, regardless of how super hard it must be to write a PDF.
I'd say someone should take your guitar away but I'd bet money you're not doing anything groundbreaking with it anyway.
But if you do find that they made something valuable that you can’t find elsewhere, then you should compensate them for that. Because yes, it is a lot of work.
But I know, its easier to just pull up a tab.
I can't imagine getting started with any instrument as an adult. Actually, I'm trying to improve my piano playing right now and it's nearly impossible.
If I had spent my first year learning the instrument properly, I wouldn't have wasted the next decade after that fumbling around so much.