Making the ultimate-guitar.com web player easier to practice with | Hacker News Reader

Making the ultimate-guitar.com web player easier to practice with

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59 pointsmattigames32 comments

Since this is somewhat related - I've often wanted an open-source "tab player" (and more importantly tab _editor_) for various side project ideas I have kicking around in my head.

Is anyone aware of something like that? Most of the searching I've done hasn't turned up too much in the way of results.

Flat.io has a pretty cool offering, but if I could find something that would be fully under my control, that would be even cooler.

There is TuxGuitar. It can be buggy, but works pretty well most of the time. The one limitation you'll have is I don't think it can play gpx files if that is what you're looking for.

*edit: I don't know about the current status of maintenance on it. I remember development fading away some years ago, but I also see some recent updates so maybe it has been picked up again.

Tux is great for what it is! I didn't specify this in my OP, but I'm looking for something that could be embedded in a web app. Still though, TuxGuitar is a great piece of software, I used it a ton in my early guitar days.

TuxGuitar is also great for making your own tabs. songsterr.com accepts its tab format (or tux exports to a common one, I forget)

Did guitar pro really name their files gpx like the GPS XML format?

I went to go see if I could contribute and modify the tempo to accelerate by less than 1% a repeat. I found the development hard to get into, source control was subversion and documentation was sparse.

This was a few years ago so it may not be accurate.

Check out Soundslice (https://www.soundslice.com/) — I founded it 10 years ago and we're a team of three people. It's a world-class learning and practice tool for music, with a built-in notation/tab editor, all web-based. The learning/practice tool (our player) is embeddable in your own site, though the editor isn't.

It's not 100% what you're asking for, but perhaps you'll find it interesting!

Very cool - this is in the same vertical as my burgeoning side project so it's both encouraging and slightly intimidating to see your work! I've actually used your tool before when trying to break down a solo from a youtube video, it's pretty awesome.

You're also quite a talented guitarist - I really liked your arrangment of the Mario Odyssey theme!

(side note - what a cool thing about HN, to run into the folks behind useful software!)

Does it support drums? Only see guitar pictures.

Yes, Soundslice does indeed support drums. Lots of people use it for that!

Thanks!

I was looking for something similar recently when I wanted to be able to embed sheet music into Obsidian notes.

Have you come across https://alphatab.net/? Seems like a really slick feature rich open source project. It supports Guitar Pro formats, MusicXML, and also its own text based format.

Editing is a whole other kettle of fish and I'd be surprised if there was a polished open source option out there..

That is really cool, but yeah, editing is the hard part. A few years back, I tried my hand at building my own editor with VexFlow as the renderer. As you can imagine it's a really difficult problem and my skills at the time were nowhere near up to the task - although I think I could make a better run at it today.

Still, especially while I'm prototyping, being able to find something pre built would be awesome. I've even thought about trying to do something something WASM with TuxGuitar (no clue whether that would be viable or less work than trying to build it from scratch).

If I get to the point where I feel I need tab editing for my current project, I'll likely wind up integrating Flat.io, which looks like the closest thing to an out of the box solution I've found so far.

I love the idea of being able to embed music notation into Obsidian (or Notion, which I used before Obsidian), it seems so handy.

https://github.com/powertab/powertabeditor

Compatible with the original PowerTab 1.0 files too, so a huge preexisting tab library

musecore is opensource and supports tab playing and editing alongside notation: https://github.com/musescore/MuseScore edit: but I guess reading your comment again you're looking for something web based.

This is very similar to my upcoming senior design project! We're making a learning tool that will allow you to write up tabs, play them back with production audio, and then play along with them. Once the play-along is complete, we'll be implementing a system for evaluating your performance accuracy using some basic numerical analysis principles. It's a big project, but we've got the entire semester ahead of us and a lot of passion behind it. If you're interested, let me know and I'll link you to the repo once we're underway.

Contact me at https://parture.org

Practicing away from the screen is a good idea. My approach has been:

1. Reduce song to discrete riffs

2. Practice each riff slowly, breaking it down bar by bar

3. Begin connecting riffs together at a slow speed

Chunking it into riffs is nice because they tend to be more recognizable than just bars, and they're often repeated. It's also nice when someone asks, "can you play something?" and you can just play a few riffs without needing to set up backing tracks/Guitar Pro/etc.

From here, bringing in a computer starts to have benefits:

4. Start playing entirety of song at slow tempo in Guitar Pro. Raise tempo so long as everything holds together.

I also like printing out tabs and just using paper as much as possible. Being at my computer makes it much easier to tweak things which distracts from technique practice.

Agree completely. For 20 years I played through memorization and could learn a new song pretty quickly. In the last few years I've started using apps (like a Guitar Hero style) and it feels like I'm learning the songs, but I can't hardly play them without the screen. Even though it's funner using the screen, I'm going back to just memorizing.

It's like GPS, even if you know the roads you'll look at the GPS once you make that habit. I think for learning songs memorization is much better once you can do it.

Agree this chunking is the only way I can learn. Apart from needing to be away from the computer - I prefer not having bits of paper floating around. Listening as important too. Maybe its because I start with learning the positions and then learn the timing after.

As someone who is musically inept, I'm contemplating learning an instrument in the near-ish future. I tried to teach myself guitar several years back, but it didn't work (per Mitch Hedberg[0]).

This next time around, I'll likely hire a teacher to make sure I get the basics, and a friend recommended starting with a ukulele before moving to guitar. I'm curious if there's a good app/website that can help newbies learn. Anyone have experience here and any recommendations?

[0] https://www.azquotes.com/quote/899858

Marty Schwartz on Youtube is pretty decent for beginners. Having a visual reference is nice, and he goes at it super slow-paced.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNSaXAe8tyg

Look at https://yousician.com/

Justin Guitar is what finally worked for me.

https://www.justinguitar.com/

I learned with Justin almost 15(?) years ago. The man is a legend and he's still going strong. Lots of great content.

Guitareo is excellent. No affiliation, just a happy customer. Wish I had started with them from the start.

That Mitch Hedberg quote is amazing!

Paul Davids: https://learnpracticeplay.com/

Don't start with a Ukulele unless that's the instrument you want to play. It's fun but a guitar much more versatile. If you want to learn music theory then it's easier to grasp the concepts with a piano / keyboard. I can't play piano very well, but if I want to think about a scale on a guitar then having the piano there is helpful.

Really cool! I've struggled with a similar issue in Guitar Pro and Ultimate guitar. Also that song by Gojira is incredible. I'm currently learning Silvera but Heaviest Matter is my next one. Would love to collaborate on covers if you are open to it :)

Contact is in my profile.

All this with a foot pedal is pretty crafty, well done! I'd never heard of tampermonkey before too. ultimate-guitar has gotten fairly pushy in the last few years about their app and stuff, but the auto scroll (when it works) can be somewhat helpful. foot pedal is so much cooler though!

Somebody needs to hire this guy!

Nice informative write up.

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