
YouTab: Automatically get chords for music - yoodit
https://www.youtab.me/
======
yoodit
Hello,

I've been hard at work on a project that I would like to share with you. It's
called YouTab and its what I believe is a great way to sync lyrics and chords
with music. The smart guys I work with use a nifty algorithm to "listen" to
the music and in a lot of cases it does a really good job in getting the
chords. But since technology has its limits there's an editor application that
lets you fix what is wrong.

I am hoping that this will develop into a useful resource for musicians and
music lovers and I'd love to hear what you think about it and get ideas as to
what you might like to see next.

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

~~~
don_draper
Very nice. You know one feature I would love to see are strumming patterns.
It's nice to see the chords but it's tough for an amateur to identify the
strumming patterns.

~~~
yoodit
I have been thinking a lot on how to implement this feature. Showing it easy
enough, but creating strumming patterns is a bit of a challenge...

This is my favorite feature though.

~~~
jordanwallwork
Don't implement strumming patterns! I've watched my wife trying to learn
guitar pursing her lips saying up-down-up-up-down to herself and it just
sounds robotic. Once you can play the chords smoothly enough strumming just
happens. Even better, everyone seems to strum their own way (i cant sing so i
strum a lot to compensate, whereas i have a friend with a beautiful voice who
barely touches the strings)

~~~
philbarr
That up-down-up-up-down whilst _keeping the hand moving_ sets up different
rythms and is an important skill. Especially if you're trying to learn a
particular song - which will sound totally different if you get that wrong. Of
course, you can get away without learning it like a lot of stuff on the guitar
but you just won't be as good.

------
Jemaclus
This is really nice. There are a number of songs whose chords I can't find,
and this one came up with (at the very least) a starting point for figuring it
out. I like how it tracks the beat and shows the waveform, and I especially
like having the video play in the bottom right so I can watch as I play.

Very cool. The only nitpick is a copy tweak. Throughout the app the app refers
to itself as "us" or "our" ("Working _our_ magic") and then almost immediately
after as "me" ("It takes _me_ about 30 seconds.") You should consider unifying
the pronouns so that either you're always using first person, or you're always
using the royal "we".

Otherwise, this is pretty rad. I can see myself using this to practice some
new songs that come out.

------
Hytosys
Both this and Chordify are really awesome endeavors! However, I find them both
to be erratic in accuracy to the same degree. Many times, a major in a simple
I-IV-V pattern will turn into a minor, or vice versa, or a simple major will
excitedly be read as a major 7th. It must be a huge pain in the ass trying to
pluck out these harmonics and to accommodate for all sorts of wacky
instruments, so I'll let it slide! Both services are tremendous if only for
getting the initial framework for a song and figuring out some of the
incorrect chords yourself.

Does YouTab have a "confidence" rating for each chord? I don't know if it'd be
the best UX to include that number for each chord (and maybe even alternate
chord suggestions), but there are times when I'm simply playing along with the
song incorrectly and it takes me a couple amateur minutes to correct the one
chord that Chordify got wrong.

Great stuff, anyway!

------
abakker
I'm pretty impressed with this - I purposely fed it a song I thought would
kill it ("Fuzz Universe" By Paul Gilbert) - It did an impressive job of
capturing many of the underlying chords, while ignoring the lead lines over
the top. I notice that it is not really great at capturing very fast chord
changes, an has some trouble with varying time signatures, but great first
effort. It would be pretty cool if you could upload your own MP3 to it, and
get a result back - that way you could generate the output off a recording of
yourself to distribute to bandmates.

Edit: Later, that song did kill it, as the changes got faster/harder.

Also, it doesn't seem to have a complete set of possible chords - one song to
check would be "A hard Day's Night" by the Beatles. It has a difficult and
distinct first Chord which might be valuable to test against.

~~~
junhiwo
You and I must be on the same wavelength because the first thing I threw at it
was "Scarified".

~~~
yoodit
PG is my all time favorite guitar player.

~~~
junhiwo
Same here. I'm considering flying to Japan in November just to see Mr. Big
perform at the Budokan.

~~~
abakker
I wish I would be ble to do that. In the mean time I'm enrolled in his
artistworks classes, which are excellent. It's taking quite a bit of re-
learning to do things his way, but I'm willing to admit his way is better than
mine was.

Yeah, he's my favorite guitar player ever also. Not sure anything tops Fuzz
Universe in my mind. But most of his songs are great.

------
jameshart
Been having a lot of success with Capo [1] recently - excellent beat and chord
detection (though it often overcomplicates simple fifths and sus4s assuming
they're much more full voiced than they are); also provides a time/frequency
intensity view that you can use to pick out melody lines which it
automatically translates into tab.

[1]
[http://supermegaultragroovy.com/products/capo/](http://supermegaultragroovy.com/products/capo/)

------
ChrisMac
I'm using Firefox and it kept crashing on me on about half the songs I tried.

~~~
flux_w42
Same for me: Running on Firefox 31.0 (Windows 7) and i can crash it every time
...

~~~
Sintendo
Do you guys happen to be using Intel graphics?

~~~
flux_w42
Not on my PC where the crash occurred. I'm using Intel graphics on my Ubuntu
laptop, and there it's working perfectly. Disabling AddblockPlus seems to
solve the problem though.

------
neonscribe
I tried it with a song that is very familiar to me, "Antonio's Song" by
Michael Franks, using the top hit in Videos for this Google search. It is in
4/4 time and the beat doesn't vary at all. It has five different actual
chords: Am7, A7, Bm7b5, Dm7 and E7, and the pattern of chord changes is quite
conventional in a verse-chorus structure. The algorithm did a so-so job of
determining the chords. It rarely noticed that they were seventh chords,
instead identifying them as Amin, Bdim, Dmin and E. It appears to rely
strongly on the bass part. In one case there was a C# passing tone in the bass
between an A7 and a Dm7 chord that was identified as a C#aug chord. I didn't
try the editor. I guess this would make it easier than entering all the chords
from scratch, but it struck me that there was still a lot of manual work to
make it accurate and usable.

------
ganeumann
Awesome service. I'll definitely be using it.

A question about your plans: you describe annotating as 'contributing to the
community' but your terms of service say that only you, not the community,
have a license to my copyright on the annotations. You also say that you may
one day charge fees.

There have been cases (notably
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gracenote_licensing_controversy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gracenote_licensing_controversy))
where users have built a database that a company has then claimed as its own
and profited from, to the exclusion of the users. So, the question: are the
user-contributed annotations open source and licensed as such? And, if not,
why would I contribute annotations to a wiki that I may later no longer be
allowed to access?

------
phpnode
I couldn't get this to work, after selecting a song it appears to work for ~30
seconds and replies with "This song cannot be analyzed because it is not set
as public on YouTube." or "This song cannot be analyzed because it is not set
as public on SoundCloud."

~~~
yoodit
What songs? I'll check

~~~
phpnode
`Kiesza - Hideaway`. Other songs do work and the app is pretty impressive, but
I find the UI for lining up lyrics really awkward, it doesn't seem to be
possible to move all of them at once so if the start offset is wrong it's
really painful to use. For an example see `Le Youth - Cool`

~~~
yoodit
To move everything at once drag the the body of the segment (not in between).
That will move everything from that point on.

------
subdane
Nice site! (But I was disappointed when I realized there wasn't actually
tablature).

~~~
jtheory
see soundslice.com

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mcnape
Hey, great job on the website! I have one small criticism (in addition to
others already listed here). I put in a song that was in the key of B. The
most-used chords of this key are B, E, F#, and G#m - as I'm sure you're well
aware. However, the songs chords were detected as B, E, F# and Abm. While
technically correct, as Abm and G#m are the same chord, the convention is to
list Abm as G#m in this case. I believe this is to avoid mixing sharps and
flats in the written chords forms. Written chords should either all be in
flats or sharps, rarely if ever mixed. Certain keys are listed with sharps,
and others with flats. Here are the most common ones:

C - n/a

D - sharps

Eb - flats

E - sharps

F - flats

F# - sharps

G - sharps

Ab - flats

A - sharps

Bb - flats

B - sharps

~~~
jberryman
You're right. The idea is that each note of the scale should fall on a
successive line or space on the staff, and the "convention" of having keys be
only sharps or flats falls out from that (hm, why? I've never thought about
that). So for diatonic chords we spell them with those same notes of the scale
as well, of course. Some scales even have double flats or sharps!

~~~
baddox
> The idea is that each note of the scale should fall on a successive line or
> space on the staff, and the "convention" of having keys be only sharps or
> flats falls out from that (hm, why? I've never thought about that).

The second part is really the same as the first. You want to be able to spell
each diatonic alphabetically in order without skipping any letters of the
alphabet. The B major scale is

    
    
        B  C# D# E  F# G# A# B
    

If you tried spelling that with flats, you'd get

    
    
        B  Db Eb E  Gb Ab Bb B
    

The skipped C and F, and the double E and B, is just nasty. The same would
happen if you tried spelling the scale with a combination of flats and sharps.

As for diatonic scales that start on an accidental, as far as I know you can
use either the flat or the sharp notation. They are enharmonic equivalents. I
know there are often traditional preferences, simply to choose the spelling
that leaves fewer accidentals in the key signature. For instance, I think that
Db major is more common than the equivalent C# major because the former has 5
flats while the latter has 7 sharps.

~~~
jberryman
> As for diatonic scales that start on an accidental, as far as I know you can
> use either the flat or the sharp notation. They are enharmonic equivalents.
> I know there are often traditional preferences, simply to choose the
> spelling that leaves fewer accidentals in the key signature. For instance, I
> think that Db major is more common than the equivalent C# major because the
> former has 5 flats while the latter has 7 sharps.

Yup, that's true, though the choice of enharmonic keys will depend on context:
e.g. the V7/V in a sharp key will be spelled in another sharp key even if more
awkward, with double-sharps etc. Also, to get pedantic there are no
"accidentals in the key signature" by definition.

~~~
baddox
> Also, to get pedantic there are no "accidentals in the key signature" by
> definition.

Yeah, I tried to figure out a better term for that, but I'm not aware of one.
Of course, I meant notes that are accidentals in C major, i.e. the black keys
on a piano.

------
dyeje
Very cool! I love the way it just analyzes the audio. It'll be very useful
when trying to figure out how to play obscure songs that don't have tabs
available on the web.

------
anigbrowl
Works very nicely even with difficult program material (I listen to a lot of
weird electronic stuff), but wit would be nice if it had export-to-MIDI or
suchlike.

------
imacomputer2
I love the concept, but every version of the song I looked for gave me this
message "This song cannot be analyzed because it is not set as public..."

------
woutervdb
Great site, awesome project, good stuff. However, I found some kind of a
"bug": [http://i.imgur.com/elpJSS8.png](http://i.imgur.com/elpJSS8.png) At
this point, you can't see what "kind" of F the first F is. They clearly are
different, however I'm not a musician so I wouldn't know what it should be.

------
beefman
Why does it think this video

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTNzykQba3s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTNzykQba3s)

has anything to do with Glenn Gould?

[https://www.youtab.me/music/loK8Eby47RZ/glenn-
gould/goldberg...](https://www.youtab.me/music/loK8Eby47RZ/glenn-
gould/goldberg-variations-bwv-988-variation-26-a-2-clav)

~~~
yoodit
It tries to figure out the artist by itself and as with all automatic things
like this it missed sometimes.

~~~
beefman
You have an editor to fix the chords. Is there a way to fix the metadata?

Can it understand the difference between a composer and a performer?

~~~
yoodit
There will be in the future.

------
tjr
Wow, at a glance, this appears to be the best auto-chord-transcribers I've
used. I'm getting much more usable data out of this than others that I've
tried.

Do you intend for it to be able to hear altered chords?... #5, b5, etc? It
didn't seem to be catching that on a song I submitted, but it got the root and
third correct, which is still helpful.

~~~
yoodit
The detection is very sensitive to the harmonic definition of a song more than
anything else. On some songs it will do a great job and on other miserably
fail. That's why it's also an editor, nothing beats the human ear.

------
ebbv
This is really cool. The thing that's obviously missing to me is chord charts
to go along with the chord names. Despite the fact that people can look up the
chord elsewhere, the tool would be much more useful to novice players (who are
probably the majority of likely users) to simply provide those charts.

~~~
yoodit
agreed and that is coming up soon.

------
DanielBMarkham
One idea for a feature: you might want to include the ability to move the
chords up or down a few half-tones. Some folks will use various tricks to move
their instrument up or down a few notches in order to make the chords easier
to play. The tool needs to be able to adjust for that.

------
pcorey
This is very very cool. How exactly are you getting the audio from youtube?
I'm assuming you somehow pull the audio from youtube in your backend (how?),
analyze it, use that analysis to build your display and then sync that with
the playing youtube video?

------
hoelle
Wow. Great work! Dropping lyrics in and then adjusting the timings was easy
and fun.

I wasn't aware at first that 'contributing' to a song would be public. This is
cool and intuitive, although I'd prefer to contribute anonymously.

------
medell
Clap, clap, clap. This is incredible and much needed after frustratingly
navigating through the constant up sell of the poorly designed tab sites out
there. You know who I'm talking about. I would pay for this.

------
circa
I just signed up and have only looked at it for about 20 seconds. Seriously
impressed with the chords it has found so far. Great job! Can't wait to check
out more later.

------
saurabh_math
Awesome project,personally I feel there should more options for discovering
music, like languages etc. That will also help you in user engagement.

------
troymcginnis
That's really awesome! Obviously not bullet proof and it doesn't hit
everything 100% of the time but the concept is awesome.

Great work.

------
sdotty
I love it! Good stuff! The cursor beating in time with the music is a nice
touch.

------
SnacksOnAPlane
This is amazing! I've been wanting something like this for so long.

------
dave_chenell
This is awesome. The first song I tried worked perfectly. Well done!

------
chrionsr
WOW! Great for me that likes to produce spare time! Thanks guys!

------
freerobby
This is fantastic.

------
mglauco
Nice work!

------
tech-no-logical

       sorry this video has been removed from youtube
       sorry this video has been removed from youtube
       sorry this video has been removed from youtube
       sorry this video has been removed from youtube
    

ad nauseum. nice project, but doomed to fail because of this.

why the downvotes ? even their TOS sort of acknowledges it will not work :

 _YouTab respects your copyrights and the copyrights of others and therefore
requires that you only annotate tablature of your own music or of music that
you are licensed to annotate (such as public domain music)._

~~~
dethstar
Here's the reason for your downvotes:

Instead of "you're doing it wrong", suggest alternatives. When someone is
learning, help them learn more.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

~~~
tech-no-logical
fair enough.

but the criticism stands : it's hardly useful for me as every 2 out of 3 songs
will not work. probably because I'm in europe, but still. and I can't suggest
alternatives, there aren't any with copyright laws being what they are.

