Tab Gener8or (feat. Basic Pitch)

If you’ve ever tried to figure out a guitar part from a recording, you know the pain. Rewinding. Slowing it down. Guessing which fret that note was played on. Guitar tablature—tabs—emerged as the go-to solution for generations of online musicians. And over time, entire ecosystems of tab-sharing emerged, from early forums to Rocksmith, Ubisoft’s interactive guitar game that spawned a community of players who made and shared custom tabs for thousands of songs.

But what if there was another way to not have to learn a song by ear?

Like many other AI modalities, audio modeling has undergone a quiet revolution in the past few years. Even if Siri still stumbles through your grocery list, ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode is now so good, it almost triggered legal action from Scarlett Johansson when it debuted a little too much like Her.

Yet voice models are just one corner of the broader audio-AI universe. Google’s DolphinGemma is working toward communicating with dolphins. Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute—yes, the place that gave us the .mp3—is advancing Industrial Sound Analysis for predictive maintenance. And in the music world, tools like Suno’s v4 or Riffusion’s Fuzz-1.0 can generate entire songs from a text prompt.

But today, let’s zoom in on something more humble—and more personal: tabs. I built Tab Gener8or, a simple tool to convert raw guitar recordings into playable tablature using Spotify’s Basic Pitch, an open-source audio-to-MIDI model.

Figure 1: The Tab Gener8or pipeline. Audio → MIDI → Tab.

Why Tabs Still Matter

Guitarists don’t think in sheet music. We think in shapes, strings, frets. Tabs let you learn visually and tactically—your fingers read the map. For years, players relied on hand-transcribed tabs found on forums, YouTube, and sites like Ultimate Guitar. Rocksmith took it further, letting players plug in and follow dynamic tabs in real-time, unlocking a fan-made tab scene that rivaled official charts in quality and breadth.

But the vast majority of songs—especially demos, obscure tracks, or new riffs—never make it to tab. Transcribing them is still manual labor. That’s where AI can help.

How Tab Gener8or Works

Tab Gener8or is a minimal prototype that listens to a solo instrument recording and outputs guitar tablature. It works like this:

1. Upload your audio — ideally a clean recording of a single guitar (or any monophonic instrument).
2. Transcription via Basic Pitch — Spotify’s open-source model turns audio into expressive MIDI, detecting pitch, timing, and bends.
3. MIDI → Tab Mapping — Notes are algorithmically placed on the fretboard in readable tab format.
4. Preview the result — Play back the MIDI or copy the tab into your DAW/tab editor of choice.

Try the Tab Gener8or Demo

About Basic Pitch

Basic Pitch is one of those rare open-source tools that feels more like a cheat code than a model. Originally released by Spotify’s Audio Intelligence Lab, it was designed to transcribe single-instrument performances into MIDI data.

Some standout traits:

• Fast & Lightweight – Runs up to 10× faster than real-time with low memory usage (~20MB).
• Surprisingly Robust – Works across a range of instruments: guitar, piano, voice, violin, etc.
• Captures Nuance – Detects pitch bends, slides, and vibrato for expressive MIDI generation.

Its output isn’t always perfect—polyphonic input can still confuse it—but for clean solo recordings, it's shockingly good.

Limitations

Tab Gener8or works best with isolated guitar parts—multi-instrument tracks, heavy distortion, or overlapping notes will confuse the model. Timing and rhythm quantization are still rudimentary, and fretboard position mapping isn’t always optimal.

With future versions, we could integrate:

• Source separation for polyphonic audio
• Rhythmic quantization for more readable tabs
• Real-time transcription for live performance feedback
• Community tab-sharing features, à la Rocksmith

Final Chord

Despite the crazy advances in audio modelling that have made Tab Gener8or possible, there is still something magical about live music. The experience of making music with other people is, and always will be, inimitable.

Further Reading

1. Basic Pitch. Spotify Audio Intelligence Lab. GitHub
2. How AI Brought John Lennon Back to Life for the Last Beatles Song. New Scientist. Read article
3. Demixing the Rolling Stones. Abbey Road Studios. Explore