build 419 1 Load→ 2 Trim→ 3 Song key & position→ 4 Grab Tabs

Nine times out of ten the recording is not isolated enough. TAB-GRABBER tracks ONE wind-type instrument — if a band is playing behind it, hit ✂ Isolate instrument first. Amplified, distorted or roomy recordings are always harder than clean ones.

It sends your selection to our top tier separator, pulls the wind instrument (harmonica, sax, trumpet) out of the band, and loads the isolated track straight back in — nothing to download or re-load yourself. Selecting just the solo first makes it faster and cheaper.

A reminder, nothing more. It appears only when something is waiting on you: a freshly isolated track you haven’t saved yet (Save isolated track (for reuse) — keep it and the isolation never costs credits again), or tabs that have gone stale after a settings change (Regrab your tabs). Do the job and the bar leaves. Files you load that are already isolated don’t trigger it.

Yes — automatically, after every grab. It takes a second look through the gaps between notes for quieter ones the first pass walked past, and adds what it finds (they show in parentheses). It respects your Overblows setting, so it never inserts notes you’ve said your player wouldn’t use.

A setting that changes what the scanner hears (the selection, Tuning ref, or Scanning speed) has changed since the last grab — the current tabs are stale. Hit the glowing button to rescan. The button in the bar at the top is the same button, always in reach.

Use the OCTAVES row above the tabs: “Tabs” shifts the written tabs (harmonica recordings often read an octave high — try −1). “Auto octave” in Fine-tune normally handles this on its own.

Those are ghost harmonics. Set Note Check to Normal — it drops them. If they survive, pull Capture down one step. On amplified harp avoid Strong: it can delete real notes.

Set Scanning speed to Careful or Very careful (needs a Regrab) and keep Busy-Adaptive On — fast passages then accept shorter notes instead of swallowing them.

That’s working as intended. The Song key is the fixed anchor — it’s the key of the record you loaded, and it doesn’t move. When you choose a Position, Tab-Grabber works out which harp plays that song in that position and fills in the Harp key for you, then re-maps the tabs. The green banner over the tabs tells you which harp to reach for — e.g. “Play these 3rd-position tabs on an Ab harp.” Set the song key first (or press Guess), then flip between positions to see the same solo written for different harps.

Match it to what you loaded. Harmonica is for a recording that already IS a harmonica — it sits in the harp’s range, so the tabs are placed as-is, and it reads every sound it hears, which is what catches fast runs, bends and fine detail. Horns/Wind is for tabbing anything else — a sax, trumpet, clarinet or voice — onto harp; it lifts the line up into the harp’s playable range and follows one lead line at a time, so the tabs come out cleaner with fewer stray notes. If a harmonica take is coming out with notes that aren’t there, Horns/Wind is worth a try on it, and the other way round if a horn take is losing quick runs.

Turn up Capture (the “fewer ↔ more notes” slider). It sits at More by default; Most lowers the bar further still for the faintest low-register notes — quiet notes are the hardest for the detector to be sure of. Standard goes the other way: fewer, more confident notes. If low notes still don’t appear, they may be falling below the harp’s lowest hole — switch the Instrument Voice to Horns/Wind, which lifts an out-of-range line up into playable range.

That is correct, and it is meant to. Recording pitch is the reference the system reads the recording against to work out which notes were played — it changes the tabs, not the sound. Playback is deliberately left alone: the tab tone always sounds at concert pitch, so it stays a fixed reference you can trust, and the recording always plays exactly as it was recorded. Tab-Grabber measures the recording pitch for you after every grab, so you rarely need to touch it.

After a grab it re-measures every note against the actual audio using harp physics — for example a natural note can never read sharp, so a “sharp 4+” is really a flat 4′ bend. It fixes bends that landed on the wrong note.

They are harmonica-specific: My Cal verifies pitches against real harp tunings, Bend Physics applies harp bend rules. A sax playing slightly sharp is legitimate — these rules would fight it, so the Horns preset turns them off.

After a grab the system measures the whole recording. If it runs 8 cents or more off pitch (older records often do), the Recording pitch is corrected for you and the Grab button turns into Regrab — you will see “Track tuning has been corrected” under the box. Hit Regrab to tab at the corrected pitch. If you would rather keep the original value, click “Use the original pitch”. And if you never want to be asked, click Always keep it once — corrections keep applying automatically, quietly, from then on.

mp3, wav, m4a, ogg, flac — plus mp4, mov and webm video (the audio is pulled out automatically).

Hit “⬇ Save .fabtab” in the play dock, then import that file in Fab Tabs. Colours, bends and held notes carry over.

Isolation credits are attached to your Fab Tabs licence key. Enter the key and the app shows your credit balance; each successful isolation uses credits based on the length you send.

The OCTAVES row has two controls: “Tabs” changes what is written, “Playback tone” changes only the sound. They move together while “linked” is ticked — untick it to set them separately.

That is the separated track that came back from the isolation step — it replaced the full-band version in the app. The original file on your computer is untouched.

Yes. Right-click the tab. You can swap it for a nearby tab, type the exact tab you want, shift that one note an octave, or delete it. Fixes survive setting changes and go into every save; a fresh Regrab starts clean.

A plain number is a blow and a minus sign is a draw (in the default format: 4 blow, -4 draw). Apostrophes mark bends — the more apostrophes, the deeper the bend (-3', -3'', -3''') — and they show in blue. Brackets mark an overblow or overdraw, e.g. (6), in pink. Faint repeats of a tab (-5 -5 -5) mean hold that note, one repeat per half-beat — they are not extra notes to play. Switch that off with Long notes → Single tab in Fine-tune.

Yes — the Tab format control in the sidebar has the same four formats as Fab Tabs: Conventional (6 / -6), Minimal (6+ / 6), Letters (6b / 6d) and +/- Symbols (+6 / -6). It changes the display and the saved files, and the app remembers your choice.

Show Bars Mode lays your tabs into musical bars, spaced on the beat, so you can see the timing at a glance. Click any bar to play from there; drag across bars to loop them; double-click a bar to loop just that one; click anywhere off the bars to end the loop. Immersive View opens the same thing full-width in its own window — big tabs, a sweeping playhead, and a whole-song strip you can click to jump anywhere. The space bar pauses and resumes in both. The clock beside the transport always shows where you are in the song.

No. A purchased copy comes with your licence already inside it, and a key you type is remembered by your browser — once is enough.

Only for isolation: up to 30 MB and 5 minutes of audio per run, and up to 40 isolations a day per licence. Grabbing, playback and saving have no limits — they run entirely on your own computer.

Files go to the server only for isolation. They are processed and deleted within 24 hours, and nothing else ever leaves your computer. You are responsible for having the right to use the recordings you upload.

Only for the Isolate step. Everything else — grabbing tabs, playback, fine-tuning, saving — works offline.

Tab-Grabber and Fab Tabs are separate programs. Tab-Grabber turns recordings into tabs and saves them as text or an audio player; if you also own Fab Tabs, the “Export to Fab Tabs” button carries your tabs across.