Music Notation to TAB

[53old_Jazz]

I'm looking for a software that can convert standard music notation to guitar TAB. Ideally a pdf of a song (solo) could be imported, processed and converted into guitar TAB. Anyone have any thoughts?

[joe2758]

look into musescore and/or guitar pro 8

[AllanAllen]

You have a few choices.

The easy way

• Buy Mel Bay Book 1, 10 minutes a day and learn to read.

The hard way

• Get MuseScore or some notation program, learn how to copy what's on your page into Musescore, this will be much harder if you can't read, and blindly trust the tab it generates.

The lazy way

• Or just toss it into ChatGPT and see what it spits out.

[BreckerFan]

I don't think this would work, because there are multiple ways to fret the same thing on guitar, and they are not all equally good for playing a passage of music. I doubt that there is any software that can automatically generate the ideal fingerings for any given piece of standard notation, in part because to some degree the ideal depends on the player's technique. But even beyond just getting the best fingering, software like this may give you stuff thats just downright unplayable.

[Mick-7]

I'm looking for a software that can convert standard music notation to guitar TAB. Ideally a pdf of a song (solo) could be imported, processed and converted into guitar TAB. Anyone have any thoughts?

Guitar Pro can do the opposite, convert tab to music notation, but you'll have to manually enter the tablature. And as BreckerFan suggested, you'll want to specify the phrasing.

[AllanAllen]

That's why I said software was the hard way.

[rpjazzguitar]

I’ve never done this, but I’m under the impression that it’s possible to get OCR software that will turn a PDF of standard notation into an XML file which can be read by Musescore. And then Musescore will provide tab. The resulting tab may not be optimal.

[Mick-7]

I haven't used Musescore but Guitar Pro will import the following file types: Midi, MusicXML, ASCII, TablEdit, and PowerTab. It will export: Midi, MusicXML, ASCII, PDF, SVG, PNG, and many audio formats.

[kris]

I'm looking for a software that can convert standard music notation to guitar TAB. Ideally a pdf of a song (solo) could be imported, processed and converted into guitar TAB. Anyone have any thoughts?

There is no such software to convert standard music notation to guitar tab without mistakes.
Even if you have good software for editing notes, saving the notes to tab is not corect.
The reason is the specificity of the instrument which is the guitar.
Simply - on the guitar you can play the same note in different places on the guitar neck- on differen strings.

[53old_Jazz]

I agree with you. I'm working on Black Orphius by Ed Bickert. AI will someday make this (notation to TAB) possible. Maybe the computer could spit out solutions where notes aren't more than 4 frets apart. In the meantime, I'm just rewriting in TAB manually. Cheers.

[Jimmy blue note]

When a good player is playing the same tune live, he/she will often make choices on the spot whether to play a phrase, line and/or chord in one of multiple locations on the neck.
Notation is a system that graphically indicates sonic location, not necessarily fretboard location. Sometimes there are prefered choices but it's not a clear indication of where it's played.

TAB IS a system that gives only one place that music can be played. If it has no programmed default as to WHERE that C arpeggio is played, you could very well run into a situation where the TAB version is not the choice of the author, the player or even by the convenience of the reader.

And YES I understand the idea of KISS and it's not what the OP is asking for, but the truth is, how does an AI that converts notation to TAB know what was really going on in the mind of the person who wrote the piece?
These are real considerations that a reader of notation needs to be aware of. TAB makes reading a no brainer, but sometimes there's a place for having a brain when reading a piece of music.
Good luck!

[53old_Jazz]

Thanks. I'll check it out.

[AllanAllen]

I agree with you. I'm working on Black Orphius by Ed Bickert. AI will someday make this (notation to TAB) possible. Maybe the computer could spit out solutions where notes aren't more than 4 frets apart. In the meantime, I'm just rewriting in TAB manually. Cheers.

Why not skip the tab and just go from notation to the guitar? It's hard, but removing a crutch is always hard.

[geese_com]

Soundslice can do that: Scan sheet music with Soundslice

[53old_Jazz]

I'll check it out. Thanks.

[AllanAllen]

I'll check it out. Thanks.

Please report back!

[jazzloverfat]

Notation is a system that graphically indicates sonic location, not necessarily fretboard location. Sometimes there are prefered choices but it's not a clear indication of where it's played.

TAB IS a system that gives only one place that music can be played. If it has no programmed default as to WHERE that C arpeggio is played, you could very well run into a situation where the TAB version is not the choice of the author, the player or even by the convenience of the reader.

These are real considerations that a reader of notation needs to be aware of. TAB makes reading a no brainer, but sometimes there's a place for having a brain when reading a piece of music.

SO MUCH THIS!

I dont know much theory but I can read music and I know the neck and this gives me the freedom to make something sound different or just experiment with different sounds (voicings?) for the same song.


To op, rather than looking for a Rube Goldberg machine just learn to read, it's not that difficult really!