How to add Gary Coover tablature in MuseScore

[Steve Schulteis]

I finally sat down and figured out a way to add concertina tabs (as Gary Coover uses in his wonderful books) in MuseScore. Maybe this is old hat for the rest of you, but I haven't seen it described before, so I went ahead and made a quick howto video. If anyone knows of a better/easier way to do the same thing, I'm all ears!

 

The TL;DR version is "Add lines from the Palette; edit them in the Inspector".

 

 

 

Lockdown_Waltz.mscz

Edited April 18, 2020 by schult
Update attached file

[Don Taylor]

Impressive!

 

AFAICT Gary only indicates held notes that are a different duration to the note lengths indicated on the staff.  So, no held note lines for the melody notes whichever side they are played on, and no held note lines for any LHS notes that are the same duration as the melody note in the staff. 

 

If I have got this right then this would save you putting in a lot of the held note lines that you have in your score.

 

However, what I really want is an automatic way to convert Gary's tablature into staff notatation so that I can play his pieces back in Musescore!

[Steve Schulteis]

Thanks, Don!

 

I believe you are correct about Gary's use of held notes. I mention it briefly in the video, but the held note lines are disabled for many of the notes you see, and they won't show up in a printout or exported pdf. They still show in MuseScore though. I suppose you could probably just add staff text for those notes instead, but it seemed like more trouble for me to get the formatting and positioning to match everything else. By using a line element as the starting point for everything it was pretty straightforward to make it all match. My approach still involves enough manual positioning that I have to think I'm missing something, but for now it at least achieves the desired result.

 

I'm afraid I don't have an automatic way to convert from tab to standard notation. A motivated individual could probably write a MuseScore plugin to do that, but of course you'd still have to enter the tab notation by hand, which is admittedly a little awkward the way I'm doing it.

 

I updated the original post to attach the completed MuseScore file, so if anyone wants to they can poke around and see what I did. An extra trick that I didn't show in the video is adding hidden rests to a second voice to allow tabs for harmony that has a different rhythm from the melody.

[Vince Herman]

Great work!  I did not know you could create customized palates.

 

I have been playing with Musescore for some time, only recently attempting to use it for Concetina.

I wrote a plugin to go from notes to tabs.  Since I am using a 30 button Anglo that is what I wrote it for.

So this is the score as I entered it.

And this is what my plugin does.

Not perfect. The lines for the draw are only underscores above the button number rather than continuous lines like they should be.  The developers at Musescore have not exposed the line object to the plugin API but they think they will soon.  In the mean time, this is a good approximation.  It lets me start practicing.

I have more I want to do with this plugin.  When multiple buttons are a match for a particular note, I want it to ask present the possibilities and ask which one to use.

Edited April 15, 2020 by Vince Herman

[Vince Herman]

4 hours ago, Don Taylor said:

However, what I really want is an automatic way to convert Gary's tablature into staff notatation so that I can play his pieces back in Musescore!

Ha!  I frequently enter the melody for a song I am studying just to hear it played in Musescore as I try to learn it!

[Don Taylor]

1 hour ago, schult said:

I suppose you could probably just add staff text for those notes instead, but it seemed like more trouble for me to get the formatting and positioning to match everything else. By using a line element as the starting point for everything it was pretty straightforward to make it all match.

Ah, I now see why you have to do this, but it makes for a lot of extra messing in the Inspector.

 

Re. My comment about converting Gary's tabs to notation.  I should have put in a smiley face as what I really want is that I could take a photo of a page of Gary's tablature,  show it to Musescore which would then do all of the work for me. 

[Steve Schulteis]

2 hours ago, Vince Herman said:

I wrote a plugin to go from notes to tabs.

Not perfect. The lines for the draw are only underscores above the button number rather than continuous lines like they should be.  The developers at Musescore have not exposed the line object to the plugin API but they think they will soon.  In the mean time, this is a good approximation.  It lets me start practicing.

 

That's pretty cool, Vince. I think you got a really nice result, especially considering that you couldn't use lines in your plugin. Would you be willing to share your plugin? Or is it already available and I missed it?

 

2 hours ago, Vince Herman said:

I have more I want to do with this plugin.  When multiple buttons are a match for a particular note, I want it to ask present the possibilities and ask which one to use.

 

I wasn't sure about this at first (as opposed to just hand-editing after the fact), but I think I've convinced myself that there are at least a couple cases where it would be handy. Taking it a step further, a "concertina solver" of sorts would be really cool - punch in the notes and maybe some "hinting" notation and get the computer to plot a button sequence that avoids things like using the same finger for two different buttons in a row or reversing bellows direction in the middle of a phrase. Now that I'm thinking about it, that sounds like a basic pathfinding problem, so it shouldn't be too hard to knock out something simple. Then there's the interesting complication that a given button can be pressed by multiple different fingers and using a finger to press one button may make it too awkward to use another finger to press other buttons. Capturing that accurately would be a bit tricky, but I think it's doable. It sounds like a fun project, if I didn't already have too many irons in the fire!

[Vince Herman]

I will absolutely share what I have done so far.

But be warned, I am new to the coding of the plugin.  I am sure that I am missing much in terms of style and knowledge.

It is after bet time and my dear wife is reminding me of that.

PM me your email address and I will send along what I have some time tomorrow.

 

[Don Taylor]

Steve

 

Did you try using lyrics for the notes that actually do not need a line?  Lyrics keep their alignmment with notes. 

 

Don.

 

[Steve Schulteis]

7 minutes ago, Don Taylor said:

Did you try using lyrics for the notes that actually do not need a line?  Lyrics keep their alignmment with notes. 

 

Lyrics work great, with one glaring exception: I can't figure out an easy way to control whether they appear above or below lines, so I can't put the pull/draw line above the button numbers above the staff, and I can't put held notes below non-held notes below the staff. I could turn off automatic positioning, but then I'm back to messing around in the Inspector. Any tips?

[Don Taylor]

7 hours ago, schult said:

Any tips?

 

Have you tried this:

 

1.  Enter a line of tabs as lyrics, does not matter where they land vertically right now.

 

2. 'Lasso' the lyric/tabs that you just entered.   You do this by holding shift and the left mouse button down and then drawing a box around the lyric/tabs that you want to re-position.  It is a bit tricky at first to get this right, I find it best to start at the bottom left corner of the lasso box.  When you release the mouse button then you should have all of the lyric/tabs selected (and just those lyric/tabs).

 

3. Adjust the Vertical offset in the Inspector.  This will let you move  the selected lyric/tabs as a group to where you want them.

 

Would this do the job?

 

Don.

 

 

Edited April 16, 2020 by Don Taylor

[Steve Schulteis]

Oh, interesting. I was trying to move the pull/draw line to get it to appear above the lyrics, which only shoves the lyrics further up. But, if I move the lyrics instead, I can move them below the line!

[Anglo-Irishman]

On 4/16/2020 at 1:33 AM, Vince Herman said:

The lines for the draw are only underscores above the button number rather than continuous lines like they should be.

Vince,

Who says that the lines should be continuous?

My old Anglo tutor, which uses the same button numbering scheme, designates each pull note separately (with a "circumflex" or "Inverted V", as used for upstrokes in violin bowing annotation). Spanning several notes with a continuous line would. for me, hint at "tied" notes - but since you tabs are merely annotation to a standard score, information on note duration and articulation is taken from the score.

In short: I wouldn't worry about this issue!

Cheers,

John

[Vince Herman]

I think that the long line over a series of pull notes make it easier to see the run.

But lines are not supported in the plugin API yet, and I have more interest in making a sheet of music I can practice from than making a perfectly pretty score.

Oh, and I have more than a little interest in playing around with the code to make it do what I want.  ?

I am still playing around with the placement of the tabs. 

Next up I want to have a little bit of user input on notes that match to multiple buttons.

 

[Roger Hare]

The OP describes adding Coover-style concertina tabs in MuseScore.

 

Simple question: If I wanted to, how do I do this in ABC?

Edited April 18, 2020 by lachenal74693

[Steve Schulteis]

12 hours ago, lachenal74693 said:

The OP describes adding Coover-style concertina tabs in MuseScore.

 

Simple question: If I wanted to, how do I do this in ABC?

 

I'd also love to hear if somebody has a good solution using ABC. I played with this a couple years ago, and it ended in frustration. My memory is a little fuzzy, but I think I had issues with horizontal alignment. I recall being pretty dead set on having continuous lines for sequential pull notes though, and if you can live without that, it's probably doable.

 

I can't find any of my ABC files from those experiments, but I think I used annotations, with underscores for the pull/draw lines:

http://abcnotation.com/wiki/abc:standard:v2.1#annotations

http://abcnotation.com/wiki/abc:standard:v2.1#symbol_lines

[Roger Hare]

3 hours ago, schult said:

I'd also love to hear if somebody has a good solution using ABC...

...I think I used annotations, with underscores for the pull/draw lines:

http://abcnotation.com/wiki/abc:standard:v2.1#annotations

http://abcnotation.com/wiki/abc:standard:v2.1#symbol_lines

I suspect it's not possible, at least not in a practical/practicable sense. I've looked at it on and off

over the last couple of years, (in the form of 'thought experiments)'. In a sense, it's hypothetical for

me as I use a different tabulation system in any case, but I'm 'interested' in this sort of problem in

a general way and I'd be interested to see an ABC-based solution.

 

17 hours ago, Vince Herman said:

...Next up I want to have a little bit of user input on notes that match to multiple buttons...

I think this is always going to be a 'problem', whatever tabbing system is in use, (and for whatever

instrument). A while ago (a year?), someone posted a very clever Python script on melodeon.net

which inserted the different options for same-note-on-multiple-buttons into an ABC script, It did this

by inserting the (melodeon) tabs into different lines of w: fields below the staff. I did some fiddling

about at the time and remapped the melodeon tabs to ABT concertina tabs, but it produced a score

which was (IMO) too messy to read. Also I prefer to have the tabs inserted as text annotations, which

is what is done by the program I'm currently developing (slowly!).

 

 

Edited April 18, 2020 by lachenal74693

[Recombinatrix]

Thank you very much; this was extremely helpful.