Reinventing the zeal without starting from scratch

As a self-taught musician who has grown up playing the guitar I got used to tablatures (tabs). There are many ear-transcriptions of popular songs available and this form of musical notation is perfect for fretted string instruments. I started writing down my first song at the age of 15 using the Power Tab Editor. However, its limitations regarding drums and proprietary nature back in the days got me looking out for something else.

Scorewriting with TuxGuitar

I soon switched to TuxGuitar as an alternative to GuitarPro. Creating and editing tabs feels intuitive and as the proprietary formats of GuitarPro are also supported I could learn from communities, such as UltimateGuitar.

Writing down guitar riffs has been handy and fun as TuxGuitar provides means to also note the “effects” to shape the guitar sound, such as harmonics, vibratos, bends, slides, hammer-ons/pull-offs, and palm muted notes, for example. In addition to note duration and dynamics characteristics, I have been able to precisely sketch my song ideas without actually having the time to record any tracks.

Bum tchak

Another important feature is its capability for drum notation using General MIDI key mapping (notes 35 to 81¹). For instance, the following ASCII tab represents a typical drum pattern of “bum tchak bum bum tchak” with additional crash cymbal on the first note, eighth notes on a closed hihat and an open hihat at the end:

C|-57------------------------------|
C|---------------------------------|
C|-----42--42--42--42--42--42--46--|
C|---------38--------------38------|
C|---------------------------------|
C|-35--------------35--35----------|

The first songs I wrote aimed at being a typical rock band arrangement for guitar(s), bass, and drums. I never felt the need to write down vocal melodies as I was rather into the other instruments. For this reason, many songs of mine have evolved from ideas saved in TuxGuitar’s binary .tg files while I was happening to compose and arrange with it.

Other instruments

I also experimented to include scores of other instruments: A piano playing chords or melodies, a synthesizer playing a drone note to create a specific atmosphere, or even woodwinds and brass for some variety and excitement. Since I haven’t seen the need to dive into MIDI and synthesizers, and since Ardour hasn’t had MIDI support before version 3², I even used TuxGuitar to drive the instruments using Fluidsynth and its SoundFont³.

However, this is not what TuxGuitar has been intended for and I must admit that it’s rather a stopgap solution I came up with while focussing the guitar, bass and drums sound. And since I decided to go a zero barriers way regarding my music, I also want my musical notation to be as open and accessible as possible.

New territory

Learning programs for musicial notation needs time to master from what is my experience. I choosed to try MuseScore in order to use a more complete scorewriter and MusicXML as an open standard. About two years ago, I already tried to migrate from TuxGuitar to MuseScore (version 3.6.2), but there was no path to convert existing compositions with an acceptable amount of subsequent work to correct notes, add effects, and clean the scores from any misinterpreted special notation.

A matter of interpretation

As of writing this blog article exporting my existing TuxGuitar compositions into MusicXML to proceed my work in MuseScore still isn’t feasable. The screenshot below shows the same melody of the example tab above in the middle of this three track composition. Apparently, the note rather than the exact string to play is read, sustained notes, and effects (vibrato, trill, hammer-on, slide, ghost note, and bending) are completely ignored.

The first track is a strummed acoustic guitar. However, due to the same quirks regarding string information, sustained and palm muted notes, and the direction of strumming, without heavy adjustments this tab is rather useless. And concerning the drum track at the bottom, writing it from scratch may be the better option.

Starting over

Without compatibility between TuxGuitar tabs and MuseScore I have to rewrite my scores from scratch. Though this is a good training to learn MuseScore I am currently unsure if I am willing to spend time to this process of migration as it is just another project to keep me from recording and producing the Dozen lections for educationists album.

Don’t get me wrong, I sure want to share the compositions. However, since time is a limited resource and all of my efforts as this.ven are a spare time occupation I must prioritize. And at the moment playing and recording instruments, editing the tracks, and doing the sound design and mixing is a primary driver.

Since composing and arrangement has already been finished and TuxGuitar still works for me to recall the ideas I collected in addition to the drafts, I guess learning to write tabs with MuseScore can wait for now.