Birbla

Discussion summary

TabFont is a tool for rendering guitar tabs as you type, gaining some positive feedback but also criticism over its features and design choices.

What the discussion says

  • Users find it solves common guitar learning problems.
  • Some criticize the UI and design choices, like finger shape icons.
  • Others suggest existing resources or alternative formats for learning.
“This solves like 8 problems with me.”
— djtriptych
“I love tablature because it helped me learn songs.”
— tadfisher

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  • Hacker News
  • shite
    by gjvc
  • Why does the number of chords in the library change as you scroll? It should remain static no?
    by altmanaltman
  • Anyone else here learn to play the guitar in the early-to-mid ‘90s using plain text tabs from OLGA?
    by nativeit
  • OMG. This solves like 8 problems with me. Currently teaching my niece guitar basics and have always wanted this for my guitar videos.
    by djtriptych
  • Dig the Picker which lets you click the chord name and shows its visual. I think in chord symbols and play a ton of shapes but cant remember their names for the life of me. The visual fingering solves this. To atleast be articulate about what i'm tryin to play. All the other stuff seems less useful.
    by ingvay7
  • A version of this font with more chord shapes in it would be useful, like say CMaj7:{digit1-9} would yield different fingerings/voicings for each trailing digit value. You could put together a chord progression that has reasonable voice leading, and could be mostly played as written.
    by kazinator
  • I love tablature because it allowed me to learn the songs that I love and bring joy when I play. I hate tablature because it's like reading English as it's written out in IPA.

    I want finger positions and staff notation so I can learn the theory while actually playing the dang song correctly. I credit tablature and my lazy programmer mind for putting off the theory. Also (channeling Tantacrul here) staff notation is the worst notation, except for all the others.

    by tadfisher
  • Berklee Press has some excellent books with what you're looking for, one in 3 volumes by Will Leavitt. There's another that's more barebones but covers the basics well by Hal Leonard. The former, especially, essentially starts at notation first and then only later introduces tabs when it feels like it. Very challenging if you've been tabs-only, but very rewarding.

    It's an exaggeration, but working through them will make you learn the guitar as an instrument for personal expression rather than just a means for playing other peoples' songs.

    by beezlebroxxxxxx
  • This is one of those things that should obviously exist and I'm mad I didn't think of it!
    by jakefleming
  • Extremely cool. This got me thinking that I would love to have a mermaid-like dsl for creating full tabs and apparently it exists![0]

    [0] https://github.com/0xfe/vextab

    by tuvix
  • Does anyone find the little "finger" shapes confusing? I would rather see circles, so my brain doesn't have to adapt to a new way of reading tabs. Also, the inverted "D" shape is hard to parse because it's not a symmetric shape. Cool idea, other than that! It reminds me of this new QR code font I read about just yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48703200
    by sshanky
  • If shows the direction your fingers would point on the guitar neck but it's not like there's much confusion around this point.
    by ollysb
  • Yeah, as a guitarist this is hideously non-standard. Definition of change for the sake of change.
    by TylerE
  • The name is misleading. The glyphs are showing individual chord shapes. I can't write out a song using this. At best I can use this at the top of a tab to remind myself how the chords are meant to be shaped. But that doesn't appear to work much beyond the basic cowboy chords. For example, I tried 577655 which is an A major barre chord, and it didn't render. I realize a font can only do so much, but I wouldn't pay for this.
    by SaberTail
  • I was excited for a second, because this is one piece of the puzzle (chords), then numerals solve melodies (you can just type something like 0-1 for open string first string, etc), then just need something for ornamentation. Seems like it only matches against a known set of chords, though.
    by dimitrios1
  • yeah this is not what guitar tabs are and I don't think a font should be used to do it or is the best method to do it. It can get really messy with time signature changes and managing all the strings and marks etc just by text and a font
    by altmanaltman
  • Hmm yeah I guess what I really want is a maekdown style mini-language that compiles to tab format.
    by djtriptych