The lesson workflow
- Record the part. Play it once, cleanly, into your phone's voice memo app. A slightly slower take is fine, as it gets easier to hear.
- Make the tab. Drop the file into BeatMap. It finds the tempo and key, hears the notes, and picks frets.
- Check it on your guitar. It takes a minute. Look for notes lost from chords, and for a position different from the one you teach.
- Hand it out. Download the PDF. Mark fingerings, bends and slides by hand, since BeatMap doesn't write them.
- Set the practice. Students with their own account can play the tab at 25% to 150% speed, and loop the hard bars.
Good uses, and bad ones
Works well
- Single-note riffs and melodies you play yourself.
- Clean fingerpicking parts, as a first draft to correct.
- A quick tab for a song a student brings in, when you have a clean recording.
- Practice loops. See speed-up routines.
Look elsewhere
- Full band recordings: too many notes come out wrong to save you time.
- Printed sheet music for a class. Songscription leans more toward notation.
- Editing and rearranging. A manual editor like FretNotes or Guitar Pro is built for that.
- Tabs marked with technique. You'd add that by hand.
Why your own recording works best
The cleaner the input, the better the tab. In our synthetic tests, BeatMap found 63 of 64 notes on a clean solo guitar, but only 24 of 64 in a full band mix. It also wrote extra notes on both, so expect to delete a few. A teacher recording one part in a quiet room is close to the best possible case.
Your students' privacy
The audio stays on the device that made the tab, and isn't uploaded. Only the finished tab is saved to the account, and it can be deleted anytime.
Writing your own material? Here's how to record a riff so it comes out clean. Want the details on conversion? See MP3 to guitar tab.