How it works
Your ears are still the final judge.
TabScribe produces a solid first draft of what was played, then tells you where it’s unsure. It is not magic, and it will sometimes be wrong. Here is exactly what it does and where it struggles.
The pipeline
- 1
Fetch
The clip is downloaded (or read from your upload) and its soundtrack is extracted with ffmpeg.
- 2
Hear
A pitch tracker finds every note onset, its pitch and how long it rings. This is the backbone of everything that follows.
- 3
Finger
Each pitch can usually be played in two to four places on the neck. TabScribe picks the path a real hand would take — small stretches, few position jumps.
- 4
Count
Tempo and beats are estimated from the audio, and notes are snapped to a rhythm grid so the tab reads like music rather than a list of timestamps.
- 5
Check
When the fretting hand is visible, video frames are used to confirm which string and position were used. Video never adds or removes notes.
- 6
Write
The result is written as notation plus tab, MIDI, plain-text tab and other formats you can open elsewhere.
Audio first, video second
Every note in the tab was heard in the audio. The video is only corroborating evidence: it can raise confidence that a note was played on the 3rd string at the 7th fret rather than the 2nd string at the 12th, but it can’t conjure a note the microphone didn’t catch. Clips with cuts, close-ups of the strumming hand, or no guitar on screen simply fall back to audio-only fingering.
Reading the colors
Confident
Both the pitch and the string/fret choice scored well. Usually right.
Unsure
The pitch or the fingering is shaky. Worth a listen before you learn it.
A guess
Low confidence on both. Often a ghost note, a chord tone, or bleed from another instrument.
Video-confirmed
The fretting hand on screen matched this string and position.
A note’s confidence is the geometric mean of its pitch and fingering confidence, so a note is only as trustworthy as its weakest part. The bar chips under the score show which bars the video backed up.
Where it falls short
- Full-band mixes, backing tracks and heavy distortion blur pitches together. Clean solo guitar works far better.
- Dense strummed chords are hard: individual chord tones may be missing or doubled.
- Rhythm is quantised to a grid. Rubato, swing and free-time playing will look stiffer than they sound.
- Bends, slides, hammer-ons, vibrato and palm mutes are detected but still miss often.
- Tuning and capo are inferred from open-string positions, chord shapes, the lowest pitch played and, when the fretting hand is visible, the video; partial capos are not supported yet. If the tab looks odd, try re-fingering with the right setup.
- Instagram often blocks anonymous downloads. Uploading the saved file always works.
Privacy
Clips you upload or link and the transcriptions made from them are stored privately in your account. Only you can open them, and you can delete any transcription from your library. We use your Google account just to sign you in, and payments are handled by Stripe; we never see your card.