Tabs

In SongKit, you can add tablatures to guitar-like voices. You add a tab by tapping the icon at the top right with a guitar-like voice. If you’re using a piano voice, you will not see the option.

The current version of SongKit handles what it calls Simple Tabs. These tabs are coded with text like the one you can find on the internet. They only encode pure tab information and are not linked to some score.

When editing Simple Tabs in SongKit, you work by bars. Each bar is divided into a certain amount of horizontal slots. You can input a letter in each slot for each string and the app will understand this a tablature. The number of slots doesn’t affect the effective width of a bar, but how it is divided. So if you put something in the middle of a bar, it will be in the middle of the bar during display, whereas it was in the 10th slot of a 20 slots bar, or in the 15th of a 30 slots bar.

The user interface to edit tab bars is divided in several sections:

• R
  - Remove Column: Tap this button to remove the column where the cursor is;
• I
  - Insert Column: Tap this button to insert a column right after the cursor.
• U
  - Undo/Redo: These undo/redo button only act on the tab being edited and not other modifications you may have made to the song.
• D
  - Delete/Reorder bars: Tap this button to launch a new screen where you can reorder or delete bars.
• C
  - New Copy: Tap this button to insert a copy of the current bar right after it.
• N
  - New Copy: Tap this button to insert an empty bar after the current one.
• F
  - Frets: Use this keyboard to input frets. Use do delete the current selection, and to delete backward.
• S
  - Specials Characters: Use this keyboard to input specific techniques. The convention is the following:
  • h - Hammer-On: 10h12
  • p - Pull-Off: 12p10
  • p - Prebend: 6pb7
  • b - Bend: 6b7
  • r - Release: 6b7r
  • * - Natural Harmonics: 12*
  • t - Tap: 5t
  • tr - Tremolo: 12tr
  • / - Slide up: 2/7
  • \ - Slide down: 7\2
  • () - Grace note: (6)
  • [] - Artificial Harmonics: [15]
  • [] - Tapped Harmonics: <15>
  • s - Legato Slide: 2s5
  • S - Shift Slide: 2S7
  • ~ - Vibrato: 4~~,
  • W - Wide Vibrato: 4WW,
  • = - Duration: 6b7====r
  • x - Muted note: x

You can also add some chords (but no voicings) by tapping the top row of a tab bar. A chord corresponding to the current key will appear. You can move this chord by dragging it, and edit it by tapping. In tabs, chord positioning is independent of the bar length and works on a 48-slots grid. That’s because chords are shared between voices, but voices can have bars with different number of slots.

You can also perform bar-wide operations directly from the regular text edit canvas where you input lyrics and chords: you can delete, copy, or move bar as whole annotations.

You can then configure how the tab likes by editing the “Simple Tab” entry of the “Music” category of the style of the song.