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.
I'm curious how it works for videos that contain moving tab (as in, the playhead stays in the center while the tab moves behind it). Seems like that sort of tab wouldn't work with this approach...?
Kudos from one of the Soundslice guys — we've been making web-based tab and sheet music stuff since 2012. :)
Are there technical hurdles around just programmatically generating a tab from any song or audio recording itself?
This is interesting and all but seems to use computer vision rather than audio processing?
Give me a tool that scrapes tabs from Ultimate-Guitar and I'll be a happy camper :)
I don't know how exactly Claude vision works but isn't just using good old computer vision much cheaper?
Yes, for sure. You could probably train a specific vision model for this style of image parsing and run it on device for free. However, this was much easer to make :-)
Almost all those people charge for the PDFs. They know the PDF is more useful, that's why the video is free.
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.
counterargument -- these people are making money off of transcribing other people's parts, with no profits shared with the composers.
That's a bad counterargument. Transcribing is transformative. Copying a video into a PDF is not.
I'm not a lawyer but based on some googling it seems like the overwhelming consensus is that selling transcribed sheet music or tabs if you do not have permission from the copyright holder of the song is illegal.
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...
As an occasional amateur music transcriber I'd say the goal of transcription is not transformation. If I'm transforming, I've failed :)
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.
"you don't deserve your guitar if you steal tabs from working musicians"
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.
i've actually been looking for something like this for so long. all the online transcribers make me pay and i just wanna learn how play songs from a video. this is a great idea!
I had exactly the same issue. I'm learning to play guitar and don't want to pay 8,50 per tab. I simply want to learn something new and discard it. I noticed I'm learning faster if it's printed then on-screen.
learn by ear! It's free and you don't need youtube!
This is very true. Tabs can help in niche cases where the precision really matters, but most tabs are not that good unless written by the original artist (rare).
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.
It wouldn't work for that type of video. As far as I've seen almost all tutorial videos on Youtube have a fixed tab bar though. I'm using it only for learning guitar (i'm a beginner).