One tool led to another.
Fab Tabs solved half my problem: it wrote down what I played. But most of the licks I actually wanted were still on records — Butterfield, McCoy, William Clarke, a killer sax solo, phrases buried in tracks I’d been hearing for years.
The old way was the turntable and the needle: drop it, lift it, drop it again, catch three notes, do it once more. I don’t miss it as much as I pretend to.
For a long time I assumed this couldn’t be done
My quest was to see if it was even possible — to create an easy-to-use program that could take any recording — a song, a video, one of my own takes — find the melody line and write the harmonica tabs for me, bends and overblows included.
Since the greatest licks are usually buried in full-band mixes, I’d have to start with state-of-the-art lead isolation.
Full-band track? One click and the built-in studio-grade separator pulls the harmonica, sax or trumpet clean out of the mix. It’s the same kind of technology used in film and recording studios, and it’s the reason this works on full recordings instead of only on clean solo tracks.
Then you check it with your ears
No transcriber is perfect, and I’d rather be honest than try to hype anyone on an “always 100% accurate” system. Every track varies in quality, volume of the lead instruments, tone etc. Even with those variables, Tab-Grabber still manages to get things fairly close to that high bar. If a note is wrong, you simply right-click it and fix it. Change it, delete it, shift its octave, or type the tab you know is right.
The interesting thing I’ve found is that it’s often not the entire solo I need to decipher, it’s just one or two phrases, or a single note that I hadn’t recognized by ear. Sometimes that unlocks a bunch of ideas for me.
And it doesn’t end there
Save the tabs as a text sheet, or as a player with the real audio inside that you can send to a student or a friend. And if you own Fab Tabs, one click sends the whole thing across — the tabs, the key, the position, even the original audio — where you can transpose it, slow it down and better dissect things.
Same design rule: simplicity.
Load, trim, grab. Everything else is optional.
Who it’s for
- Anyone who’s ever asked “what is he playing there?” — now you can find out in a couple of minutes.
- Gigging players — lift a horn line off the record, tab it, print it for the show.
- Teachers — turn any recording into a lesson sheet.
- Fab Tabs owners — this is the front door: grab the part, export it, then transpose it, practice it, share it.
Runs in your browser — no install, no subscription, one-time licence. Mac, Windows, Linux; best on a desktop or laptop.
