Automatic generation of guitar tablature

The program considers all possible fingerings on all possible frets on all possible strings of every single note. It uses a smart algorithm to crack the combinatorial problem and displays the result.

The tablature is displayed underneath the standard version of the music. I'm really in two minds about this. I've been using tablature for flamenco music since about 1974, using a system of rhythm marks that makes the tab complete in itself. I started along the lines of implementing my notation (and putting lots of explanation in the help file so that you'd be able to understand what it was supposed to convey). Then I bought several guitar magazines. They all had tab and they all wrote it out as a second line underneath the 5-line version. In the end I decided that perhaps I should go with the flow, so that's the way that Muse does it.

I'd wanted to write a program to crack the fingering problem for many years, but the combinatorial problem was so hideous. It is absolutely inadequate to consider the piece one note or one chord at a time. Many pieces have a few places where there is a difficult stretch or something awkward. That awkward bit has to be made as easy as possible, and if that means playing the previous six bars in a position that would otherwise be unnatural in order to arrive at the awkward bit with the hand in the right place, then that's what has to happen. I finished up with an algorithm that really does consider every possible combination.

If a piece has 100 notes and if each note has 20 possible fingerings then there are about 10000000000000000000000..(imagine 130 zeros) combinations to consider. The algorithm I eventually came up with really does consider them all. The trick is to eliminate almost all of them in large batches (ask a mathematician what "large" can mean) as life is too short to consider them one at a time.

I can't guarantee that it will produce "the ideal fingering" in fact guitarists will often have different opinions as to what is ideal. An experienced guitarist with large strong hands will use many more barlocks that a beginner with small weak hands. My daughter is learning the guitar and she made that very clear to me!

You can tweak the output. If you don't like a particular fingering you can tell muse to move any tab note to the next higher or next lower string. Then ask Muse to re-optimise. Tablature that is entered manually (by this means or directly typing it as tab) is "locked" and during the optimisation Muse will not alter locked notes, so it will fit the rest around it. (And if you want to see how it struggles, just lock in some really silly ones and tell it to work out the rest!) Of course you can manually lock or unlock any note or passage.
The way that Muse works is that it scores every fingering and every transition from a fingering of one note/chord to a fingering of the next note/chord according to a set of "weights". The weights are all customisable, so that you can tell it that avoiding barlocks is more or less expensive. You can tell it that your hands are bigger or smaller - in fact there are 24 different weights in total. Muse will remember your settings so that once you have (say) your hand size set, you won't need to keep telling it.

Of course you can always edit the tablature to your taste.

I'm still tuning the tab generation, so feel free to mail me if you find interesting cases. I do NOT guarantee to fix every (or even any) problem - in fact I don't even guarantee to reply, but I'll do my best!