Show HN: YouTube Guitar Tab Parser

So I'm a bass guitarist, and I've made some of these exact videos.

I link to a Patreon in my videos that lets you pay a membership to download the full tabs in PDFs.

Here I was thinking AI might soon replace my painstakingly slow tab transcription efforts altogether. But I never thought about someone just ripping it from the video...

Let me know if it works ;-)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2i-Lwoe2Ow

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. :)

I’ve been working on a tool to help me discover chord inversions and find fingerings I can comfortably play. https://music.shademaps.com/

I don't know how exactly Claude vision works but isn't just using good old computer vision much cheaper?

I learned this one:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=07N4VVSmYLU&list=RD07N4VVSmYLU...

…exactly the way you described. Pause, screenshot, adjust color/contrast, assemble in a pdf. Super annoying.

It would be nice to have a link to an example YT video to see what exactly the AI is trying to locate on the screen.

I was excited to use it, as I really wanted something like this, then I realized it needs AI/Claude (?)

That sounds like it can get quite costly. Probably there are ways to do it without AI, I would rather manually annotate the tab area with a visual editor.

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?

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.

Thank you!

Give me a tool that scrapes tabs from Ultimate-Guitar and I'll be a happy camper :)

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!