Is there any kind of 'music interpreter' software out there?

[phucheneh]

Continuing on my documented recent kick of being a pretend-musician, I am now getting into trying to play stuff for which tabs do not exist. Call it an intermediary step between imitating and creating, I guess.

I can't play things by ear, but I can eventually work out the simpler stuff...it's pretty arduous, though. It seems like for some of the stuff I want to do, the same programming used by tuning software should be able to give me a sequence of notes for a given section of song. Assuming it's clean enough...not looking to get an automatic tab of a guitar part buried in cacophonous din. More just 'this part of the song is a single instrument [and often not a guitar], and I want to know the notes it is playing so I can translate it into something I can do [on guitar].'

I'm searching and only finding complicated solutions. Like ways that involve converting to MIDI.

...fuck MIDI. Long story short on that opinion: figured I could ghetto-rig some input devices to control PC effects software. Can't be that hard, I say. Why can't I just make a footpedal that manipulates something existing, like, say, an axis on a joystick and have a cheapo digital wah pedal? ...cut to hours later and I'm at the music store buying a Crybaby.

Anyway, yeah. Suggestions, music people?

 

[lxskllr]

Maybe try software that lets you slow down music, but lock pitch. It would make learning by ear easier, and give good training for your ear.

 

[Mixolydian]

Maybe try software that lets you slow down music, but lock pitch. It would make learning by ear easier, and give good training for your ear.

Transcribe

I can't play things by ear,

There's your problem.

...fuck MIDI.

You shut your whore mouth!!!

 

[phucheneh]

1) I'll give slowing down a try. But it's still hard. My ear is getting better, but I still only know what sounds 'right,' and it's very hard to know anything beyond 'pitch goes up/down a little/lot.' I was hoping to get the note names, then only have to worry about putting it in the octave I want and working out how I should finger it (...giggity)

2) No, really, fuck MIDI. It's so archaic. It's a goddamned plug-and-play world, you shitty antiquated standard.

 

[phucheneh]

Also, because I feel like it: Behold, my $150 guitar that I now have like 350 into. I don't think it's been wasted.

I like my industrial control panel. I fucked it up, so I went to sand it and paint it. Then I thought, hey, maybe I can just make the chrome look like brushed aluminum or something...then I accidentally sanded through to the copper. I'm debating making the bridge match. Who knows why. Also, ignore the fact that I lose another screw every time I take the pickguard off.

And then I went from an old amp I had laying around to one recommended in another thread. And the Crybaby is my first actual 'real' pedal. But I am kinda proud of the old 'dictaphone' pedal I turned into an amp controller.

 

[lxskllr]

I like the way the metal looks. I tend to prefer "distressed" finishes to highly polished.

 

[Mixolydian]

2) No, really, fuck MIDI. It's so archaic. It's a goddamned plug-and-play world, you shitty antiquated standard.

There's no better system out there that serves the same purpose. That's one area that I don't think can ever really be improved upon.

 

[88keys]

2) No, really, fuck MIDI. It's so archaic. It's a goddamned plug-and-play world, you shitty antiquated standard.

MIDI is still in use and will be for a very long time in some form or another. If you don't want to deal with MIDI, then I suggest you quit music.


I play keys if you couldn't tell and to learn songs I usually find a MIDI file and have it transcribed to sheet music. This is very helpful when learning/writing complicated music. I know there are midi programs that will transcribe midi tracks to guitar tablature too, but they are far from perfect as they usually don't transcribe according to appropriate finger patters. In otherwords, you'll still have to sit down and figure things out for yourself to an extent. But even then MIDI files are just interpretations and are usually not %100 corrrect, but still very close, and close enough for any decent musician/performer.
If there are no good midi files available for a particular song and I need to learn a difficult run, I'll take the audio file into audacity and slow it down to about 70% and work my way up to full speed.
AFAIK, there is no program that will just perfectly lay out the notes (or tab) of any song for you in one click. Some effort will be required on your part regardless. I know it's not always easy to pick things up by ear, but things like that get better with time.

I don't know where you are with your music. But my suggestion is to learn theory and learn to read sheet music. It might seem like a waste of time to a guitar player, but it's not. If you can get good enough at this, picking up new songs becomes incredibly easy. %90 of the time it's just a matter of finding out what key the song is in and everything else will fall in place.

 

[phucheneh]

Ok, so this 'Transcribe' thing is really cool, now that I've sat down and actually put some effort into it. It doesn't neccessarily do what I wanted, but it should help me get a lot better all areas- my 'ear,' playing abilities, and theory in general.

I haven't found any tabs that seem accurate for this song. Or I'm just playing them wrong. But it's fairly basic acoustic guitar stuff...but Steven Wilson has a way of making things way harder to reproduce than they would seem. Don't strum or change chords quite right? Miss that dinky little hammer-on? Then congrats, it sounds like crap.

The chord guesses, as shown above, are not accurate. Which makes sense when you think about it, as playing 'right' with chords means getting the right strum pattern, emphasizing the right strings, ect. Little changes make for technically different notes (just coming to understand that is an accomplishment...). But the ability to zoom in, select a single point or a section of any size, and get that nifty graph showing the dominant notes, is pretty damned neat. If nothing else, you end up finding cool-sounding abstract chords and fingerings that you can use later on for your own purposes.

I'm liking this whole music thing. I don't think I'm gonna give up on it just because I don't fully grasp MIDI concepts. FWIW, my frustration is with MIDI inputs. Those controlling function...not piping notes in and out, which I don't think I have any desire to do.

 

[Oldgamer]

Continuing on my documented recent kick of being a pretend-musician, I am now getting into trying to play stuff for which tabs do not exist. Call it an intermediary step between imitating and creating, I guess.

I can't play things by ear, but I can eventually work out the simpler stuff...it's pretty arduous, though. It seems like for some of the stuff I want to do, the same programming used by tuning software should be able to give me a sequence of notes for a given section of song. Assuming it's clean enough...not looking to get an automatic tab of a guitar part buried in cacophonous din. More just 'this part of the song is a single instrument [and often not a guitar], and I want to know the notes it is playing so I can translate it into something I can do [on guitar].'

I'm searching and only finding complicated solutions. Like ways that involve converting to MIDI.

...fuck MIDI. Long story short on that opinion: figured I could ghetto-rig some input devices to control PC effects software. Can't be that hard, I say. Why can't I just make a footpedal that manipulates something existing, like, say, an axis on a joystick and have a cheapo digital wah pedal? ...cut to hours later and I'm at the music store buying a Crybaby.

Anyway, yeah. Suggestions, music people?

Hmmm.... if you don't find anything like this, this would be an awesome suggestion for a computer programmer to design! =)

 

[phucheneh]

Seems like it, right? Maybe it's just an issue of very limited usefulness...everyone that tried the software would just complain 'it couldn't give me a tab of this power-metal solo!' Heh.

And this program did just allow me to figure out that I'm dumb and was reading a tab wrong. I sounded like shit because I was reading their strum pattern...well, not right. But also they notated something as a hammer-on that wasn't what I normally think of as a hammer-on so much as a one-finger chord change.

But hey! It was slowing down the song and seeing the changes in the frequency graph that got me to do it right. Now I need to try one of the simpler non-guitar things I've wanted...like little piano parts and similar that make up bridges and fills for songs I've been trying.