I didn’t sit down one day and decide to build a piece of software. That’s not how this started.
It started because I kept running into the same problem, over and over.
I needed to write out tabs — intros, horn lines, melodies — to print for gigs and for my students. Things I’d worked out at home but wanted on paper for reference. I rarely use tabs myself, but every so often they’re exactly what’s needed. I wanted something that made all of that easier, and a lot faster.
I don’t read music. Never learned, and for most situations I’ve managed fine without it. But that always left a gap: I could play things, yet I couldn’t really see or explain what I was playing — how the notes related to the scale, what the intervals were doing, why a run of notes worked. I wanted a way to look at my own playing and connect it to the bigger picture.
I’m not the most patient guy. I wanted something that would just listen to me play and write the tabs down for me. Not standard musical notation — simple harmonica tabs, with the holes and bends marked clearly, readable at a glance. And ideally, something that would show me the theory underneath without me having to go back to school for it.
So I started building Fab Tabs — for me.
Wait — This Is Actually Useful
The first version was rough. Really rough. But the basic idea worked. I’d play a phrase, and there were the tabs — most of them, at least — right there on the screen. I could hit playback and watch the notes light up in time with the audio. That wasn’t just satisfying; it let me focus on what I was actually playing, which is surprisingly hard to do while you’re busy playing it.
Then the theory side started to surface. I’ve always been a fan of the number system, and seeing the scale degrees roll out next to the tabs, I started to understand why certain licks landed the way they did. Stuff I’d played by ear for years began to make sense. For a non-reader like me, that turned out to be a big deal.
Then I Showed a Couple of Students
Things shifted again. What I’d built for capturing licks and figuring out my own playing turned out to be even more useful as a teaching tool.
The triple display — tab numbers, scale degrees, and a live keyboard — put position theory and the number system into a visual form instead of something abstract. Students could see how the same melody in 2nd position maps to completely different holes in 3rd, and how the scale degrees stay put while the tabs shift around them. The Nashville Number System, which often takes weeks to grasp, was clicking in minutes.
I hadn’t planned for that at all.
It Kept Growing
From there I kept adding the things I personally wanted:
- Transposing between positions — 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th and 12th — the ones you actually reach for.
- Save-to-RTF, so I could open the tabs in Word, mark them up, and print them for the stage.
- All 12 keys supported, with the calibration tuned for how harps really behave — because pitch detection built for piano falls apart on a harmonica, especially on bends.
The Hard Part: Making It Work on a Real Harp
Then I had to deal with the noise and the overtones. Harps throw off rich overtones and harmonic artifacts, and a simple pitch detector mistakes them for octave errors — hearing a note an octave above or below what you actually played. So a lot of the work — honestly, most of the work — went into making it reliable for diatonic harp specifically, not generic pitch-to-MIDI.
But my most important design rule was simplicity. If something gets too deep too quickly, I’m gone. I don’t think that way, and I don’t play that way.
Who It’s For
I built it for me — but at this point, I’d say it’s for:
- Pros and gigging players — tab out a horn line, an intro, a melody. Edit it, transpose it, print it. Done.
- Non-readers like me — see the theory underneath what you already play, no sheet music required. A simple, quick reference.
- Teachers — your students see the holes, the notes, the scale degrees, and how it all connects, all at once.
- Intermediate players working on bends or overblows — watch exactly what you’re playing in real time, and start to understand why things work the way they do.
- Beginners — even basic blow and draw notes work fine. You don’t need to be advanced to get something out of it.
Give It a Try
It runs in most browsers — no install, no app store, no subscription. One-time licence. It works on Mac, Windows, Linux, Android tablets, and iPad (with a Dropbox or iCloud workaround), though it’s at its best on a desktop or laptop.
There’s a 5-day free trial — the whole thing, full features. I’d rather you try it yourself than take my word for it. If it turns out to be the tool you didn’t know you needed — the way it was for me — great. If not, no harm done.
