Following on from looking at ABC Notation and EasyABC, as my usual dabbling is with a guitar, I wanted something just as simple this which would allow me to jot down melodies along with chord progressions and lyrics but also in TAB. Given what we have with web technology, it's sad that so much is still put into ASCII and then painfully rendered on forums detailing various riffs and licks. There should be a better way. Surprisingly there is not that much out there.
After a bit of searching I came across VexFlow and VexTab notation originally by 0xfe touting itself as HTML5 music engraving. Poking around a bit and messing around in the playground, it seemed to be just the thing. Great! No need to re-invent the wheel! I particularly liked that VexTab seems to allow entry in score or Tab and if entered in Tab optionally the score could be shown as well. I did find the score entry a little klunky compared to EasyABC, but the Tab entry seemed pretty fine, although getting the score to match exactly what I wanted was a bit harder than I hoped for getting the beaming right.
After a bit of searching I came across VexFlow and VexTab notation originally by 0xfe touting itself as HTML5 music engraving. Poking around a bit and messing around in the playground, it seemed to be just the thing. Great! No need to re-invent the wheel! I particularly liked that VexTab seems to allow entry in score or Tab and if entered in Tab optionally the score could be shown as well. I did find the score entry a little klunky compared to EasyABC, but the Tab entry seemed pretty fine, although getting the score to match exactly what I wanted was a bit harder than I hoped for getting the beaming right.
After trying the online playground, I downloaded the source bundle and played myself from the web-page locally (I wanted to stretch the display over more than 3 bars each line - I finally found an easier way to do this using options in the first line).
Using Silent Night again (not a very rock selection, I know!), it looks something like this in VexTab
And renders like this in the online playground:
Cool! Not quite so neat and succinct as ABC Notation, but it sort of does the job. My real gripe is that I just could not seem to figure out how to get text/lyrics to align no matter how much I followed the tutorials or tried to work this different ways. I'll need to give it more of a look.
Now, ideally if there was some sort of harmony between EasyABC and VexTab we'd really be somewhere.
Using Silent Night again (not a very rock selection, I know!), it looks something like this in VexTab
And renders like this in the online playground:
Cool! Not quite so neat and succinct as ABC Notation, but it sort of does the job. My real gripe is that I just could not seem to figure out how to get text/lyrics to align no matter how much I followed the tutorials or tried to work this different ways. I'll need to give it more of a look.
Now, ideally if there was some sort of harmony between EasyABC and VexTab we'd really be somewhere.
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