For 10-hole diatonic harmonicas
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Main Features Who It’s For Phone & Tablet Updates Technical
Watch the Demo
Fab Tabs captures and records your live harmonica — writing tabs in real time — all transposable, savable, shareable.
Play back your real harmonica recordings. Slow them down. Watch the tabs and keyboard highlight your notes.
Whether you’re learning a lick or melody, teaching position theory, or sketching out parts for a gig — Fab Tabs does the work.
Already bought Fab Tabs? You always have the latest version at no extra cost.
Go to My Account → Downloads
Open your Fab Tabs order, and click Download Fab Tabs — that link always serves the newest version. Open the file and enter your original licence key to activate.
Current Software Version: V1.24 (check footer in Fab Tabs for your version number)
Main Features
- Simple to use. Who needs complicated? If you can play a phrase, you can use Fab Tabs.
- No music theory needed — It’s built for players who learn by ear, not by theory (like me). Just play — and you’ll pick up lots very practical musical information naturally as you go.
- Real audio — your actual playing — tone, bends and all — not computer-generated harp sounds.
- Live tab detection — play a phrase and your tabs appear on screen.
- Save Real Audio / Tabs — a shareable, playable file — This one’s my favourite. It captures everything in a single file — your tabs and your harp audio — and plays it back exactly as you played, lighting up each note as it goes. Perfect for sharing licks online, for teachers handing a lesson straight to a student, and for building your own library of licks and melodies you can recall in a click.
- Position transposing — see the same lick in 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, or 12th position, and exactly which harp and holes you’d use to play it.
- Playback tempo & loop — hear your actual harmonica, slow it down or loop it.
- Scale degrees (the Number System) — see the musical intervals (1, ♭3, 5, ♭7…) in green below your tabs, so you understand why a lick works — not just where to play it. Includes a built-in plain-English primer on this extremely useful method.
- Live piano keyboard — a visual, playable reference that shows how the harmonica maps to standard notes; great for working tunes out and for teaching.
- Bend Helper: a harmonica-friendly visual tuner to zero in on targeted bends.
- Full harmonica tab notation — blow and draw holes, bends, and overblows/overdraws, clear and colour-coded.
- All 12 keys, pre-calibrated — tuned for how harmonicas actually behave, with optional custom calibration you can save, export, and import.
- Save & print Tabs — export to Word, Pages, or Google Docs. — print for the stage or your students.
- Works with all 10 hole, standard-tuned (Richter) diatonic harmonicas
- Special Tunings: Write and convert tabs on — Natural Minor, Country-tuned, Parrott-tuned (7 draw flattened)
One Program — Many Options
For students
Hear what you played. See the tab, the piano key, even the scale degree. Then hit play and watch your own recording highlight the notes on the keyboard and tabs in real time — so hole numbers stop feeling random and start mapping to a more universal reference. Switch to scale-degree view (Nashville Number System) and convert everything instantly into different positions. Easily Build a library of licks and melodies to be instantly recalled. Everything starts to come together when the harmonica holes, scale degrees, and the keyboard are all speaking the same language.
For instructors
The triple display — tab numbers, scale degrees, and the live keyboard — shows everything at once: which hole, which note, which scale degree, and how those relationships shift from position to position. The harmonica stops being an abstract grid of isolated hole numbers and becomes a musical map. Even better — when your students use Fab Tabs in their own practice, they’ll see firsthand how it all fits together.
For gigging players & pros
Fab Tabs is an advanced tool presented in a simple, easy-to-use package — a road to better musical understanding. It’s not just for creating cheat sheets, but it’s great at that too. Need to tab out a horn line, a melody, an intro for a song? Play it, hear it back, edit it, transpose it to any position. Then save all your parts with the Save Audio / Tabs feature — ready for the next show.
For intermediate players
Working on bends or overblows? Want a better understanding of practical theory as it applies to harmonica? See the notes you played, hear them back, watch the keyboard. Fab Tabs makes the relationships between positions, scale degrees, and holes played visible — not just abstract concepts.
For beginner players
To utilize all of Fab Tab’s capabilities, some more advanced techniques are required — like bending and overblows. But even simple melodies using basic blow and draw notes will work — Fab Tabs detects those just as accurately, so you can build up your skills while seeing your playing in real time.
Technical
- Built for computers — no install. Fab Tabs runs right in your browser — open the file and go.
- Mac, Windows, and Linux. Works on desktop and laptop computers running most modern browsers (Chrome and Firefox highly recommended). Some browsers, including Safari, can be finicky accessing your microphone.
- Playing style. Optimised for lip pursing. Tongue blocking will also work, provided you play clean single notes.
- Tablets & phones (beta). Use the web version at harmonicamute.com/play — no download, same licence key. Tablets get the full app with an on-screen Pause/Resume; phones get a simplified interface. For the best results, use a laptop or desktop.
📱 New — Phone & Tablet Web Version (Beta)
Want to use Fab Tabs on your iPad or phone? Open the web version — no download, just tap the link and play. Your same licence key unlocks it. Tablets get the full app; the phone version is a simplified interface.
Try the Web Version (Beta)
Beta — for the best experience, a laptop or desktop is still the way to go.
