Songshed is a proof-of-concept for a grid-based guitar tab editor.

Guitar tab editors are either inprecise (they won't let you specify exactly when a note should be hit) or cumbersome (they require classical notation knowledge or have a difficult UI to learn). Songshed divides a bar into a grid, letting you place notes as easily as filling in a table. Then, use drag-and-drop interactions to create ties, bends, and annotations, move notes and reorder bars, and more.

You can also create chord charts. The name of the chord will be automatically detected based on your input. You can override that naming, and you can also use a chord picker to choose from a library of chords.

Implemented Features

• Note entry (press "x" for muted note)
• Ties (hammer/pull-off, slur, slide)
• Bends (prebends, holds, release)
• Select notes by dragging
  • Delete selected notes
  • Move selected notes by dragging
  • Copy and paste selected notes
• Add and delete bars
• Drag to move new bars
• Break the bars into new lines
• Text annotations
  • drag to create
  • drag handles to resize
  • delete text to delete annotation, add new annotation rows)
• Time changes
• Change tuning (you can quickly change the tuning of a string, or expand for note + octave)
• Interactive GUI for chord diagrams - edit, reorder, rename
  • Chord name detection with tonaljs
  • Chord picker using chords-db
• Serializing/deserializing tabs (for demo purposes; just uses a global KV store)
• Responsive options
  • Collapse empty (default): Empty columns collapse as the screen gets smaller, until they get to a minimum width. After all empty columns have reached their minimum width, the line breaks.
  • Collapse all: All columns collapse as the screen gets smaller, until they get to a minimum width. The font size of notes will shrink. After all columns have reached their minimum width, the line break.
  • Collapse subdivisions: All columns that aren't on the beat collapse (with the same behavior as the other options).
• Dark and light mode (currently works based off of your system preference)

Planned Features

• Full account and profile system (save, view tabs, share)
• Metadata (title, description, date, etc)
• Triplets/Tuplets
• Rests
• Ghost notes
• Integration with alphaTab for playback, PDF generation, export to Guitar Pro
• Dragging chords to the bar for chord rhythm notation
• Copy chords and bars as images
• Multiple tab views (i.e., multiple guitar/bass parts for the same song)
• Mobile version

Responsiveness

The app is fully responsive, breaking bars across lines and automatically shrinking empty columns to make more space:

If a tie, bend, or annotation expands across a bar, and those bars end up on separate lines, they will gracefully break: