Automatic Generation of Harmonica Tab in my free ABC Transcription Tools

Theory
1

I have released a free open-source web-based tool that can automatically add hole number + blow/draw harmonica tablature to any tune in ABC notation.

It supports many different harmonica tunings and keys and even allows for custom tunings.

The tool is at:

Specific information about the harmonica tab generation including demo videos are here in the detailed User Guide:

Image below of a example tune with tab for a standard Richter tuned harmonica in the key of G:

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6 Likes
2

Fantastic job—congratulations!

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3

Thank you so much. You must have worked on this for quite some time. It is a very useful and beautiful piece of modern software. Thanks again

4

Oh wow! Ok, heading over to download. I have violin music for Ashokin Farewell by Jay Unger. I can pick and poke thru the printed music I have but it would be nice to hook your system up to facilitate playing on my Easttop Tremelo Low D harmonica.

Cheers

5

Well I went over and tried to use the application, found Ashokin Farwell Midi file, but couldn’t find how to associate it to a 24-hole Easttop Tremelo harmonica key of D. So now I have a complex PDF file with the music score like what I already have, but no association to the holes on my harmonica like your example.

6

Did you try using the Custom harmonica tab editor and then selecting it as the tablature to use when injecting, and then doing the injection?

You can associate every note in the four-octave range with whatever text you want to have displayed for the tablature for that note.

Full details here:

7

Thanks. I probably will have to buy a different harmonica because a tremelo can’t bend the one note in the song that needs bending.

1 Like
8

Okay, I’ve found this quite useful for Irish tunes since I really want to play with sheet music+tabs below not just tabs.

  1. search for the ABC of the tune on https://thesession.org

  2. paste it into the above tool. Usually, you’ll need to transpose it lower several times (the easiest way is to search for existing tabs and see if the first few notes match) - otherwise, you’ll get notes that need overblows or somesuch

  3. I usually export as a PDF and also record the screen of the “player” so I get a “video lesson” of it playing (I like to practice in a place without internet so simple = best)

This is one of those “THIS is what I’ve been searching for” types of things. I previously tried to get Grok to do this but… no. it’s frustrating because it seemed it was “almost” reliable. Perhaps the only wish would be for an offline version you could run locally (I’m always paranoid of things disappearing, like what if in 10 years I want to use this ) - like a paid program or something.

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9

What exactly does the term “ABC” file mean. I dont understand what that is.

10

here is an example:

there you can see “sheet music” and “ABC”, if you click ABC you’ll get some text like this:

X: 1
T: The Kesh
R: jig

M: 6/8
L: 1/8
K: Gmaj
|:G3 GAB|A3 ABd|edd gdd|edB dBA|
GAG GAB|ABA ABd|edd gdd|BAF G3:|
|:B2B d2d|ege dBA|B2B dBG|ABA AGA|
BAB d^cd|ege dBd|gfg aga|bgg g3:|

  • the advantage of this is that it takes up very little space (it’s just a text file), and is commonly used so you can find lots of tunes with it that you can add harmonica tabs to
  • you DON’T need to understand what the stuff in the ABC file means, it’s just for storing sheet music
2 Likes
11

Thanks. I will however be trying to read the script. Mmm. Interesting. So only some sites give this file type option. If we read the file we wouldn’t need the sheat music?

12

Some folks can read ABC directly, but the ABC with the diatonic harmonica tab injected is almost unreadable by humans, the tool turns it in to notation like this:

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1 Like