zserge/tab

🎼 A tiny CLI tool to render tabs for music instruments (🎹🎷🎺🎸🪕🪈 and many others!)

tab - Put Music in Your Hands!

Tab is a tiny command-line utility to render tablatures for numerous music instruments.

Features

• Supports almost every tablature notation!
  • Guitar tabs for the following instruments:
    • Guitar
    • Ukulele
    • Cigar Box Guitar
    • Diddley Bow (1-string and 2-string in different tunings)
  • Harmonica tabs
    • Diatonic harmonica
    • Chromatic harmonica
  • Klavarscribo
    • 48-key Piano
    • 25-key Toy Piano
  • Piano tabs
  • Kalimba tabs
  • Flutes
    • Recorder
    • Irish Tin Whistle
    • Native American Flute (4, 5 and 6 hole)
  • Ocarinas
    • Pendant Ocarina
  • Trumpets
    • Trumpet in Bb
  • Saxophones
    • Alto Sax in Eb
  • Jianpu
    • Chinese Numeric Notation for any other instrument
• Great for self-taught musicians and amateurs, also kid-friendly.
• Allows to transpose music for the most convenient way of playing tabs.
• Uses visually appealing colored unicode output, when possible.
• Very tiny, written in C with no external dependencies, should work on every machine!

MIDI support is planned, and please contribute if your favourite instrument is not on the list!

Usage

It's easy to build and install tab from sources:

$ git clone https://github.com/zserge/tab
$ cd tab
$ make
$ ./tab -i uke -x 5 examples/ode_to_joy.abc

    A│-------------0---│---0---------------│-------------------│-------------│-
    E│-2---2-----------│-----------2---0---│-----------0---2---│---2-0---0---│-
    C│-----------------│-------------------│---2---2-----------│-------------│-
    g│---------0-------│-------0-----------│-------------------│-------------│-
    w: Freu-de, schö-ner Göt-ter-funk-en, Toch-ter aus E-ly-si-um,
    ...

Input format

Tab work well with ABC notation but you may use a simplified text notation, too.

Tab operate over a range of 4 octaves from C3 to B6. This seems to be sufficient for most instruments that use tablature music notation.

Notes are written as letters ("CDEFGAB" for octave 4 and "cdefgab" for octave 5). Notes in octave 3 are followed by , and notes in octave 6 are followed by '. Technically, octaves can be lowered and raised even further, but most instrument won't be able to display such tabs correctly.

Like in ABC notation, notes may be prefixed by ^ to make them sharp and _ to make them flat. You may alternatively write # after the note to make it sharp.

White space is preserved, and | is rendered as a bar separator. The rest of the ABC notation is ignored.

Lines that do not contain a musical notation are rendered verbatim as plain text.

Example

Here are C notes in 4 octaves:
C, C c c'
And here is a E minor scale:
E F# G A | B c d e

Rendered for a Tin Whistle you may see something like this:

    Here are C notes in 4 octaves:
    x   x   ○   ○
    x   x   ●   ●
    x   x   ●   ●
    x   x   ○   ○
    x   x   ○   ○
    x   x   ○   ○
    x   x       +
    And here is a E minor scale:
    ●   ●   ●   ●   │   ●   ○   ○   ●
    ●   ●   ●   ●   │   ○   ●   ●   ●
    ●   ●   ●   ○   │   ○   ●   ●   ●
    ●   ●   ○   ○   │   ○   ○   ●   ●
    ●   ○   ○   ○   │   ○   ○   ●   ●
    ○   ○   ○   ○   │   ○   ○   ●   ○
                    │               +

In Numeric notation it would look like:

    Here are C notes in 4 octaves:
          .  :
    1  1  1  1
    *
    And here is a E minor scale:
                       .  .  .
    3  ♯4  5  6  |  7  1  2  3

And for Cigar Box Guitar it would become:

    Here are C notes in 4 octaves:
    g│-x-------5---17-
    D│-x--------------
    G│-x---5----------
    And here is a E minor scale:
    g│---------0---2---│---4---5---7---9-
    D│-2---4-----------│-----------------
    G│-----------------│-----------------

Contributing

Contributions to Tab are welcome! Whether you want to report a bug, request a feature, or submit a pull request, please feel free to get involved.

Tab is open-source software licensed under the MIT License.