Though as a musician who reads off of sheet music -- is there a way to un-Guitar-Hero-ify the scrolling tabs thing? Maybe my video card is too slow or something, but following the notes is really tiring on my eyes, in addition to dealing with low refresh rate of the visuals.
Edit: d'oh, just noticed the settings to page instead. Would be nice to have more measures before it pages though (again, stone age sheet reader here -- as a musician I probably cache 1-4 measures ahead of what I need to play, when sight reading).
Edit 2: Aha, found the features once I logged in; spoke too soon. :) I think if you make the benefits of creating an account and signing in apparent you'd get even better signup... I guess I'm just missing things all over the place but it definitely would have gotten me to sign up sooner when I realized I could unlock more features.
Thanks! Glad you found the scroll type preferences. For more, check out the tutorial (annotated on Soundslice, naturally): http://www.soundslice.com/yt/8zgsQ9qgA7s/
(Edit) You might also try zooming out a wee bit so that the notes don't go by as quickly. That's helped me a lot as I've used it.
This is great. I would suggest one thing: try to make the scroll speed independent of screen size. I can't read the notes with a fully maximized window.
Edit: found the zoom, but still, I shouldn't have to.
This is awesome on so many levels, being a youtube-taught guitar player, this is right up my alley.
Two suggestions: Definitely make scroll speed a setting (similar to how Rockband 'difficulty' is just them spacing things out further to make it harder) and maybe a slower example? A slower example might be friendlier to new players / more welcoming?
Edit: Also, when I signed up and checked out all the tabs... I ended up getting 'Video not available'. Not sure if that's regional settings kicking in (i.e Canada gets nothing)...
Thanks! I definitely plan to add sheet music as a track type. It's significantly more complicated than tabs, so it didn't make it for launch -- but I'd love to serve all my musician brothers instead of just guitarists. :-)
Copyright: YouTube is the host and already has well-formed copyright/takedown/safe harbor policies.
The transcription/tab output itself can not be copyright - sweat of the brow.
There is the question of whether a useful user resource can be maintained if/when the host video is taken down - can the tab stand alone without the original audio?
I think so - reduced utility, of course, but legally on solid ground and still better than tabs alone.
Sweat of the brow is not currently and never has been a defense to copyright. Otherwise, copyright on books could be evaded by simply copying a book word for word.
The original composer owns the copyright on the arrangement itself. Your imperfect transcription is a separate derivative work but is still subject to the copyright of the original.
So the question remains: how do you plan on dealing with the copyright issues?
But if you can survive the copyright issues, the site itself is impressive.
I'm not the poster/site author, and we're saying the same thing. My claim is that since YouTube ultimately is responding to copyright complaints, SoundSlice is no worse than a tab-sharing site with regard to infringement. I don't see how they can be liable.
I'm not following this thread; Are you suggesting that him sharing tabs isn't subject to copyright? Tabs sharing websites have to pay royalties, and have had to for several years:
You're not saying the same thing at all. You're talking about Youtube performances, and rprasad is talking about tablature. Current tab-sharing sites are very much in a gray area at this point, and the SoundSlice founders have to deal with that somehow.
> The MPA had been pushing for websites offering free tablatures to be shut down. MPA president Lauren Keiser said that their goal is for owners of free tablature services to face fines and even imprisonment.
YouTube is not the service provider when the video is accessed as an integrated part of the OP's website. That YouTube take action against infringement doesn't mean that you're not infringing by embedding copyright content available there on your own site (particularly as it's commercial).
I suspect Capo, http://supermegaultragroovy.com/products/Capo/, operates the way it appears to because they can circumvent many things (that copyright in the music or production of the tracks would restrict) by using the users purchased tracks as the source for the information.
Soundslice looks awesome but if they've not yet consulted with copyright experts then I fear they may be looking at a lawsuit imminently.
Choosing Yesterday [which is beautifully played] as one of the example tracks was pretty ballsy. FWIW the YouTube video links to Bandcamp where an album of covers are available - Bandcamp are obviously aware of this sort of issue, they can't sell unlicensed covers lawfully. Bandcamp T&C (http://bandcamp.com/faq#mixtape) specifically rule out the use of their service for covers. $0.091 is the current fee per digital play of the track (audio only), sync fees can be more or less; see eg Limelight or HFA or BMI.
Tablature copyright is generally owned by a publishing company, often protecting rights to tab books. Read up on the history of the OnLine Guitar Archive [1] (OLGA), one of the first internet copyright fights I became aware of a couple of years after I got online. Despite the fact that these were user created and shared tabs, often of middling quality, EMI felt they owned copyright and pursued various incarnations of the archive for years. The current crop of ugly, SEO spammed offshore tab and ringtone sites are the result instead of beautiful tools to learn music like Soundslice. Unless the creator has made agreements for publishing rights I'm afraid this great resource is going the way of so many before it while these copyright dinosaurs guard their last remaining treasure.
Any plans to add lyrics to the annotations? It would be cool to be able to follow other contributors as well because some people are great at tabbing things out and others are terrible. Some sort of star rating on the quality of the tab (similar to UltimateGuitar) would be nice as well.
Also, small usability suggestion - I signed up and went looking for a way to start making annotations, but couldn't find it. It took me a while to realize I had to verify my email address before I could use the full capabilities of the site. It may be worth calling that out earlier on (or even skipping the email verification if you can).
Thanks! There's nothing stopping people from adding lyrics as "basic track" annotations, aside from the awkward question of "do I annotate each word separately, or phrases?"
The site doesn't require email verification to start using it... What was it you couldn't find -- the "Add track" plus button?
Yeah - I couldn't find the "Add track" button. I guess I didn't initially get the concept that you had to search for a video before you could annotate it, but now it makes perfect sense...
Thank you! Yes, a few of the videos have chords marked on tab tracks (e.g., "Chord fingering" on http://www.soundslice.com/yt/Y6ti5f-LHp4/) but I'm planning to add a first-class chord track type.
To exit looping mode, just press Pause? Or were you just trying to clear a selection? (If the latter, just click anywhere in the timeline canvas.)
I have searched high and low for a fix to that two-fingered left scrolling in Chrome, and there doesn't appear to be a way to fix it. :-( If anybody knows, please tell me!
2-finger scroll: I'm pretty sure this happens when there are no unscrolled bars under the cursor - so how about an old-school JS hack (remember those?):
1) put the annotation inside a container (and make that position:relative); annotation position:absolute, right:0px;
2) autoscroll the container
3) add some JS to infinitely increase the width of the container on a left-ish mouse move. (I think this will still work even if the container is, itself, in a cropping container.
I suspect the result will be that 2-finger left swipe will be like quicksand - no apparent movement. Kind of sucks, but less than losing your page.
An alternative would be to make history back/forward suck less: keep the display state in local storage and render a page just as it was the last time a person saw it (in terms of time display, modes, and selections).
Probably that's a useful thing to do anyway and has Least Surprise in its side.
Calling preventDefault on the mousewheel event stops swipe navigation in Chrome. You may want to restrict this to when the tab pane's scroll position is 0.
Great! The ability to repeat the selected Chords is really nice. I would suggest adding real musical notation in another timeline (to help people that are learning it).
BTW, I'm getting a console error in some few videos: Cannot read property 'player' of undefined
After retry the error seems to have gone away; I guess that it was a problem with YouTube not responding petitions but I'm not sure; I am using extension-less Chrome in Windows 7.
Same here. Long gone are the days of me queuing up the song I want to attempt to jam to, then having to find the tabs somewhere (I just play once in a while for fun, I can't read chords), and struggle through it...
This seems like an intuitive and logical approach to learning both how to play particular songs, as well as improving tempo comprehension. Well done, I'm quite impressed with my Soundslice experience thus far!
Looks great. Definitely needs a copy/paste functionality. I tried to tab "blitzkrieg bop" (for the obvious reasons), and without copy/paste it's not so fun.
Also, I'm constantly clicking to add multiple notes in one section, but clicking just moves the time in the editor, until magically i convince it that i want to add another note in the tab... I have no idea what I'm doing wrong.
PJ here, Soundslice designer. I'm pretty sure your issue is that to add a note, you have to hover over the particular string you want to add the note to while you have a selection. You can also press 'A' to add a note to the next available string. Does that help?
This is a great point. There's a (low) threshold on how many annotations need to be in a song before it shows up in "Latest by others" -- maybe a good quick fix would be to raise that.
How about letting users mark their annotations as complete/in progress or letting them estimate, e.g. 50% complete, 80% complete, 100% complete; something I could filter against.
This is really cool, when I was starting with web development you made Django. Now I'm learning guitar and you start Soundslide, thanks a lot Adrian, good luck!
Awesome! I coded this exact same concept about 4 years ago (livetabber.com... your name is better). I was really hoping somebody would do it for real.
Do you plan on adding functionality to help people create SoundSlices? I'll just list the features I put in the concept maybe you will find some useful.
* Ability to slow down the track to let the musician hear the notes more easily while transcribing.
* Import existing ASCII tabs and input a BPM to create a base annotation that the user can then tweak. -2-4-7- gets imported differently than -247-. Does this by stretching the tab to fit the time of the song. This was very useful.
* Attempted to do pitch detection and bpm detection... didn't work so well maybe tech has changed.
* Show guitar fingerings.
* Allow the user to "highlight" a portion of the song so that it will loop only that portion. This is useful for both annotating and learning. E.g. highlight the solo and slow it down to "hear" the notes better while annotating while looping it, or slowing it down to practice it repeatedly.
* Use arbitrary formats as input (spotify, pandora, mp3 file, etc.)
As a guitar player, I'm at the --- played it in my college dorm room, learned all the Nirvana songs --- level.
That being said, your "demos" on the home page are incredibly awesomely impressive. And..... way way way beyond where I will ever find the time to get to.
And when I clicked the "Play with an example" link I literally LOL'd!!!
I may have no idea who your target audience is, but from this example.... it's not me :/
If you wanted to inspire someone like me to run upstairs, grab my guitar, and come back to your site to try it out really quick - and probably get hooked, I would consider making one of your demos pretty dumb-simple, if you know what I mean. Something fun or well known, not copyrighted of course, but something I could accomplish right now with my guitar.
But maybe I'm not your customer, I don't know.
If I am, maybe consider 2 buttons: Beginner Example and Advanced Example.
I'm at a similar guitar-level as you, but I'm delighted by the site. The hardest thing about ascii-tabs for me is to understand the timing. This fills that missing link.
The site is beautiful, and I'll use it, and even try to add a couple of tabs. This needs to live on people! :)
A killer feature would be auto-generation of the tab from the audio. Then you'd instantly have tons of content.
Does anyone know if this is remotely possible? I messed around briefly with this a while back, and I remember it being very difficult to get a note (much less a chord) from a noisy signal.
Monophonic pitch estimation isn't too hard these days (see e.g. the YIN frequency estimator). Polyphonic pitch detection of even a single instrument is a hard problem. Real music, with multiple instruments, becomes a very challenging unsolved AI problem with current technology.
Translating pitch to a playable guitar tab would even more difficult than the pitch detection. Unlike the piano, the same note can be played in multiple places on the guitar neck. Auto-generating guitar tablature would require not only pitch detection, but some kind of logic that would pick the most appropriate string/fret depending on the surrounding notes/chords.
In the example Django Reinhardt song, there's a bit where he plays the same pitch a few times fretted, then a few times on the neighboring open string.
I can imagine software that would analyze fret noise, vibrato, timbre, hand positions, etc. to get a decent shot at reproducing a performance -- basically, what a real player listens for when transcribing -- but right, this is a really hard problem.
125 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 184 ms ] threadThough as a musician who reads off of sheet music -- is there a way to un-Guitar-Hero-ify the scrolling tabs thing? Maybe my video card is too slow or something, but following the notes is really tiring on my eyes, in addition to dealing with low refresh rate of the visuals.
Edit: d'oh, just noticed the settings to page instead. Would be nice to have more measures before it pages though (again, stone age sheet reader here -- as a musician I probably cache 1-4 measures ahead of what I need to play, when sight reading).
Edit 2: Aha, found the features once I logged in; spoke too soon. :) I think if you make the benefits of creating an account and signing in apparent you'd get even better signup... I guess I'm just missing things all over the place but it definitely would have gotten me to sign up sooner when I realized I could unlock more features.
(Edit) You might also try zooming out a wee bit so that the notes don't go by as quickly. That's helped me a lot as I've used it.
Two suggestions: Definitely make scroll speed a setting (similar to how Rockband 'difficulty' is just them spacing things out further to make it harder) and maybe a slower example? A slower example might be friendlier to new players / more welcoming?
Edit: Also, when I signed up and checked out all the tabs... I ended up getting 'Video not available'. Not sure if that's regional settings kicking in (i.e Canada gets nothing)...
Thanks for the awesome tool.
edit: I am curious about one thing -- how do you plan on handling copyright down the road?
2nd edit: Feature request, if you hover over chords, it'd be cool if it showed the finger placement
The transcription/tab output itself can not be copyright - sweat of the brow.
There is the question of whether a useful user resource can be maintained if/when the host video is taken down - can the tab stand alone without the original audio?
I think so - reduced utility, of course, but legally on solid ground and still better than tabs alone.
The original composer owns the copyright on the arrangement itself. Your imperfect transcription is a separate derivative work but is still subject to the copyright of the original.
So the question remains: how do you plan on dealing with the copyright issues?
But if you can survive the copyright issues, the site itself is impressive.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tablature#Legal_issues
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tablature#Legal_issues
> The MPA had been pushing for websites offering free tablatures to be shut down. MPA president Lauren Keiser said that their goal is for owners of free tablature services to face fines and even imprisonment.
http://www.out-law.com/page-7235, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/08/29/guitar_sites_under_f... give details of take downs, a few years ago, around the provision of guitar tabs. Note that the MPA moved the next year to make specific provision for licensing of guitar tabs, http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2007/04/legal-guitar-tabs....
I suspect Capo, http://supermegaultragroovy.com/products/Capo/, operates the way it appears to because they can circumvent many things (that copyright in the music or production of the tracks would restrict) by using the users purchased tracks as the source for the information.
Soundslice looks awesome but if they've not yet consulted with copyright experts then I fear they may be looking at a lawsuit imminently.
Choosing Yesterday [which is beautifully played] as one of the example tracks was pretty ballsy. FWIW the YouTube video links to Bandcamp where an album of covers are available - Bandcamp are obviously aware of this sort of issue, they can't sell unlicensed covers lawfully. Bandcamp T&C (http://bandcamp.com/faq#mixtape) specifically rule out the use of their service for covers. $0.091 is the current fee per digital play of the track (audio only), sync fees can be more or less; see eg Limelight or HFA or BMI.
http://diymusician.cdbaby.com/2012/03/on-posting-cover-songs... covers the licensing requirements quite well.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-line_Guitar_Archive
but as far as html5 tools for guitar tabs goes, this is certainly a huge step forward.
Any plans to add lyrics to the annotations? It would be cool to be able to follow other contributors as well because some people are great at tabbing things out and others are terrible. Some sort of star rating on the quality of the tab (similar to UltimateGuitar) would be nice as well.
Also, small usability suggestion - I signed up and went looking for a way to start making annotations, but couldn't find it. It took me a while to realize I had to verify my email address before I could use the full capabilities of the site. It may be worth calling that out earlier on (or even skipping the email verification if you can).
The site doesn't require email verification to start using it... What was it you couldn't find -- the "Add track" plus button?
Possible bug report: I couldn't figure out how to exit looping mode, and had to refresh the page.
Not sure if you can fix this: two-fingered left scrolling in the tab area activates my browser's "back" function.
To exit looping mode, just press Pause? Or were you just trying to clear a selection? (If the latter, just click anywhere in the timeline canvas.)
I have searched high and low for a fix to that two-fingered left scrolling in Chrome, and there doesn't appear to be a way to fix it. :-( If anybody knows, please tell me!
1) put the annotation inside a container (and make that position:relative); annotation position:absolute, right:0px; 2) autoscroll the container 3) add some JS to infinitely increase the width of the container on a left-ish mouse move. (I think this will still work even if the container is, itself, in a cropping container.
I suspect the result will be that 2-finger left swipe will be like quicksand - no apparent movement. Kind of sucks, but less than losing your page.
An alternative would be to make history back/forward suck less: keep the display state in local storage and render a page just as it was the last time a person saw it (in terms of time display, modes, and selections).
Probably that's a useful thing to do anyway and has Least Surprise in its side.
BTW, I'm getting a console error in some few videos: Cannot read property 'player' of undefined
Is the console error happening consistently for certain videos, or is it sporadic?
This seems like an intuitive and logical approach to learning both how to play particular songs, as well as improving tempo comprehension. Well done, I'm quite impressed with my Soundslice experience thus far!
But great site overall!
(It looks like the "latest by others" section is almost entirely incomplete ones)
(btw, awesome site)
I doubt anyone else is getting that, but you might get bug reports about it.
Using Chrome Version 23.0.1271.64 m @ Windows 8 btw.
Top work!
Do you plan on adding functionality to help people create SoundSlices? I'll just list the features I put in the concept maybe you will find some useful.
* Ability to slow down the track to let the musician hear the notes more easily while transcribing. * Import existing ASCII tabs and input a BPM to create a base annotation that the user can then tweak. -2-4-7- gets imported differently than -247-. Does this by stretching the tab to fit the time of the song. This was very useful. * Attempted to do pitch detection and bpm detection... didn't work so well maybe tech has changed. * Show guitar fingerings. * Allow the user to "highlight" a portion of the song so that it will loop only that portion. This is useful for both annotating and learning. E.g. highlight the solo and slow it down to "hear" the notes better while annotating while looping it, or slowing it down to practice it repeatedly. * Use arbitrary formats as input (spotify, pandora, mp3 file, etc.)
Please kill GuitarPro and ASCII tabs for me :)
I usually don't see so much innovation in this market, but this is a very big step forward if compared to the printed tabs spread in my house.
Congrats and keep up the good work!
That being said, your "demos" on the home page are incredibly awesomely impressive. And..... way way way beyond where I will ever find the time to get to.
And when I clicked the "Play with an example" link I literally LOL'd!!!
I may have no idea who your target audience is, but from this example.... it's not me :/
If you wanted to inspire someone like me to run upstairs, grab my guitar, and come back to your site to try it out really quick - and probably get hooked, I would consider making one of your demos pretty dumb-simple, if you know what I mean. Something fun or well known, not copyrighted of course, but something I could accomplish right now with my guitar.
But maybe I'm not your customer, I don't know.
If I am, maybe consider 2 buttons: Beginner Example and Advanced Example.
Good luck, this looks awesome.
For me, this was amazing because it distilled how something as hard as the example is played and can be learned.
http://supermegaultragroovy.com/products/Capo/
The site is beautiful, and I'll use it, and even try to add a couple of tabs. This needs to live on people! :)
Does anyone know if this is remotely possible? I messed around briefly with this a while back, and I remember it being very difficult to get a note (much less a chord) from a noisy signal.
I can imagine software that would analyze fret noise, vibrato, timbre, hand positions, etc. to get a decent shot at reproducing a performance -- basically, what a real player listens for when transcribing -- but right, this is a really hard problem.