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! :)
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.
Only issue for me is that even in 1/2 speed its moving to fast for my eyes to focus on the numbers. So what I need is to have the lines separated like musical notation so that I can look down and read ahead and see the next line coming, without the numbers moving, so my eyes can focus.
Pretty much everyone that reads music/tabs reads ahead of where they are actually playing its probably something you do subconsciously without realizing it but being unable to do so makes reading tabs much harder.
I was going to comment something very similar. I think perhaps the scrolling should default to "Paged" instead of "Autoscroll".
It's hard to focus on a moving target and "Paged" feels more natural to me since that is how sheet music works. It allows you to look ahead without worrying about the upcoming notes moving.
Since an individual can only play one part at a time, rather than showing two scrolling parts, two pages of the same part should be shown. Initially, page 1 can be shown above page 2. The playhead is the only thing that moves, from the left of the screen to the right. Initially it moves across page 1. When it reaches the right side of the screen, it moves to the start of page 2, below and to the left. At that time, page 1 is replaced with page 3. This way the pages remain still, while allowing the user to progress through the song.
If you zoom out, it's easier to see what's going on (although the numbers run together in the example given). I think a different default zoom for the demo might be helpful.
Ahh yes thanks for the tip, this does make it a lot easier how foolish of me for not trying to zoom! The only issue I have now is that when you zoom out its harder to see the timing but perhaps thats more a problem with tabs then the implementation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is awesome. One bit of feedback: It'd be cool to have some fixed area on the screen where you are showing the current chord (in a big font), while the video is playing. In the Super Mario example:
It's tough for me to follow the tab while it's scrolling rapidly by... so I'd like to see a big A7 / B / etc. on the top right corner of the screen, so I can follow along with my guitar.
Yeah I get a bit of a blur which makes it difficult to follow. Not sure how you'd fix this without making it too jarring. Your idea would definitely help.
PJ here, Soundslice UI designer. Thanks for the feedback! I really like the idea of displaying the current chord somewhere, and in fact, we talked about doing something along these lines. That's something I'd like to include in the future.
As for the rapid scrolling, I usually zoom out on the timeline which causes the playhead to move slower.
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.)
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!
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!
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...
Adrian: as you are one of the only people on YouTube I've ever subscribed to, I felt the need to say that this is fantastic not only for the features of the software itself, but also because you've provided a wealth of tabulature for your own arrangements. And it's intuitive to use and GREAT for practicing. The ability to scope out which part of the track I need to loop for practice is invaluable!
This is really remarkable stuff, and I hope to see more in the future!
Also, if you could please get back tor recording a little ditty here or there for public enjoyment, it'd be much appreciated :)
Hey, thanks for subscribing, and for the kind words! I've transcribed a bunch of my own stuff and plan on doing more in the coming weeks (it's a win/win -- good marketing for Soundslice and people get to learn the arrangements).
And, yes, I need to get back on a regular YouTube posting schedule... :-)
Amazing for what it allows and also for what it illustrates.
In Yesterday [1], shouldn't the song structure appear at the bottom instead of at the top? The layers correspond to decreasing levels of granularity, and I cannot thing of any good reason why they should not be in that order.
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. :-)
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.
Awesome product. I tried to play a little, but the things are moving way too fast even on half the speed (on AutoScroll). I suggest that besides tab numbers that are moving fast, you also make the last one sticky on the edge. PageScroll is OK. I hope you make 5 string version for Banjo soon :) Good luck.
I'm sure someone else has already said it elsewhere in the comments, but I find myself wanting to share the different demos with people and I'm sure it would improve the viral coefficient. Toss some share buttons on there, perhaps?
In any case, I'm going to take this for a spin next time I sit down with my guitar. Nicely done!
How much does the lack of a share button prevent you from "manually" sending the link to friends via Twitter/Facebook by copying and pasting? (I'm asking honestly -- and I'd like to prevent the site from getting gunked up with share links.)
I guess it's sort of a "don't make me think" sort of thing. If I see a share button, I think "oh, I should share this!" or if I think "hey, I should share this" but don't see a share link, there's just a little more friction to actually sharing it (sounds super lazy, but it's true).
So, I might not think of sharing it without seeing a button, and if I do think of sharing something, but requires me to copy, go to Facebook, write a note, paste, go to Twitter and do the same thing, I'll just be like "oh, forget it." (unless I'm really excited... I shared the general link on Facebook, but not any individual song).
I would think of sharing as a feature, rather than clutter. Here's my user story - "As a user, I want to share this tasty jam with my bandmate so we can shred together" (decided to have fun with that one).
It may be going to far, but you might even want to make sharing a song a call to action ("Did you enjoy this song? Share it with friends!" [followed by big fat Facebook & Twitter buttons])
My first thought was that the perfect place for the word SHARE and a thin horizontal strip of "favicon-sized" buttons was ...the same place you warned me that my IE10 might not work ≡÷þ
It's cool, but it's got some usability issues for "playing along" unless you already know the chords, etc. The 1/2 time was also pretty choppy for me.
Rocksmith [1], which can be described as Guitar Hero for real guitars and basses, does a pretty nice job with the UI, difficulty levels and such. It would be cool to see a more open version of Rocksmith where you could load up tabs/songs on demand.
For reference, I wouldn't pay for Soundslice, but I have already shelled out $100+ on Rocksmith (Game, Bass expansion, songs, cords, guitars, etc) and am willing to shell out more (Ex: A Rush Pack just came out I believe.)
I've been teaching myself the guitar ove the past few months with a similar method. I go on dylanchords.info, open up a tab, play the song on google Play, then play along with my guitar. Dylan's songs have simple chords, so its ideal for beginners. I've been at it for the past 4 or 5 months, and Im already almost at the intermediary level, so this method of practice does work.
My suggestion: the interface for entering the tabs is not ideal. You should invent a srt-like file format for entering chords. For instance a sing thats the same three chords over and over again is tedious to enter through your interface.
Aha! I remember Holovaty using a very cool interface (now part of soundslice) showing up the parts and chords of a song on his talk at Pycon earlier this year. It's good to see that it became this really cool project.
Awesome. I am your target. I often troll YouTube for "[song name] + acoustic cover" then find myself navigating the spammy chord/tab sites for the music. Bringing it together is incredibly helpful for me. Well done!
This is just fantastic. Wish you guys were around while i was trying to learn how to play guitar. Seems like i m going to have to buy a acoustic guitar and give it a second shot. Good job.
Awesome awesome idea, one of the best projects I've seen on HN recently. Congrats, and keep it going, as a guitar player myself I would pay for something like this
From one guitarist to another, this is absolutely amazing. It would be great if numbers would scale down when zooming out—otherwise they overlap one another.
It's a javascript library for displaying tablature and musical notation. It uses its own text format for describing tablature, but it is pretty easy to work with. I noticed that your tab doesn't have any slide/bend information, which vextab does. It may not be as necessary because the audio is well synchronized.
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.
Was just playing around with the YouTube JavaScript API myself, it's really not that complicated. You can do some pretty cool things with it. Looks like you're using the HTML5 YouTube player too, I haven't tried that.
I'm surprised by how rarely people integrate a YouTube player into sites, does anyone have any other good examples?
Great stuff. I just played 20 minutes of guitar in a row. That did not happen to me since years.
Thank you very much for this tool.
The one thing I miss: if I search I don't get any video with already made soundslice tabs. Even a search on 'nirvana' returns no result with soundslice annotation even though there are some.
That's an awesome application you have. The demos are really quite amazing, but I am like dpcan, it would be nice to see a demo of a simpler song (say - Rush - Limelight or something similar).
The guitar playing is amazing though and the application has a nice layout to it and good use of HTML5. Well done.
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.
- Ability to loop sections of a song.
- An easy way to restart the current song from beginning.
- And, because I'm not great... Slower than half-speed playback.
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)...
Great idea but, even on half speed on the Super Mario example, the thing is so jerky that the numbers on the tabs just blend together, I can't read a single one of them.
Same problem here. I wouldnt say that the animation is jerky but just that everything blends into a long motion blur. MacbookPro 2012. Tested in Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.
This looks awesome. As a guitar player, I really hope you guys are successful with this this. Is there a way to browse through all annotated videos, rather that just recent ones?
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?
Wow, that is cool for sure. One comment: set the default scrolling behavior to "paged". I found that real-time movement was too blurry. Otherwise, great job!
might be worth adding way to have the community mark a tab as complete. the couple i checked other than the tutorial ones weren't finished.. made the experience frustrating. i know its early and coverage will only improve, but that might help smooth out that process.
i have been playing guitar for 10+ years, learned most of what i know via tabs (but took some lessons). if this app takes off it would change the way people learn guitar. i think it is awesome, but i might be hard to get people to spend time annotating the songs.
This is incredible. Really interesting concept, fantastic execution. Great level of polish. You should be incredibly proud of this because it's really well done.
I love the Beatles and Yesterday is one of the few songs of theirs I just can't play. This app helped me finally get it.
I think something got changed in the last 30 minutes or so. I had it loaded fine, let it run forever because Mario is hypnotic, then went to look at some of the others and got this.
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.
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.