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Show HN: Get the guitar chords from your Spotify playlists

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Re: Show HN: Get the guitar chords from your Spotify playlists

#71

Post by gramie »

CardenB wrote: post #26
omarhaneef wrote: post #13

You would think getting the notes and converting them to chords, and tablature, would be one of those "exactly suited for neural nets" type of problem. If you want the chords to "Here comes the sun," you can find dozens of hits, but try something slightly obscure and they are hard to come by. (People with great ears have no idea what I am talking about.)

Ubisoft has a new version of rocksmith coming out and plans to build most of their library on this technology.

Ah yes, Rocksmith+ that requires a subscription to use, and will not work if you are not connected to the internet (i.e. if your subscription lapses, your purchase is worthless). It's now been delayed until 2022, I wonder if the feedback made them realize that while the board may love the idea of mandatory subscriptions, customers hate it.

Re: Show HN: Get the guitar chords from your Spotify playlists

#72

Post by rodw »

anonymouse008 wrote: post #18
cnity wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked on this problem for some time on a personal project, and I'm pretty convinced you can basically solve this problem without deep learning or AI techniques, and instead use non-negative matrix factorization[0] as a bank of note templates (from their spectrograms). I have a fairly well working proof of concept and the approach is supported by the literature. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-negative_ma…

This is the right approach for song recommendation too — try your approach there and see what happens. If you want help on the business side, reach out.

Can you expand on what you mean by "song recommendations" in this context? Do you mean recommendations like "if you like X you might also like Y"?

Assuming the answer is "yes", I'm not sure if I follow the leap from "non-negative matrix factorization as a bank of note templates (from their spectrograms)" to "song recommendations".

Very loosely speaking my (not wholly uninformed) interpretation of the "note templates" bit is sorta analogous to DFFT analysis with frequency bins centered around the "regular" notes of the chromatic scale - i.e., the cells of the matrix represent signal strength for the frequencies that correspond to conventional western notes (e.g. integer-valued midi note numbers) or (in aggregated form) octave-independent pitch-classes rather than arbitrary frequencies (that might fall between two conventional notes). It's a very useful representation of the component frequencies that appear in conventional music but at the end of the day it's more or less "here are the notes (or pitch classes) active for this given beat".

That is, I can imagine the role this information - essentially the musical score itself, or at least the pitch-specific dimension of that score - could play in a song-recommendation engine, but I'm curious how/why that specific spectrogram-template-based representation is significant.

Are you suggesting that that specific representation could be applied to song recommendations in a way that similar polyphonic-pitch-per-beat information derived from some other algorithm (FFT analysis for a hypothetical example) could not?

Or maybe I've misinterpreted your comment entirely?

Re: Show HN: Get the guitar chords from your Spotify playlists

#73

Post by Spivak »

costcopizza wrote: post #60

Learn them by ear, no tabs, YT vids, or anything else. Much more gratifying, you'll thank me later and become a better player.

Good advice for someone experienced, terrible advice for a beginner.

If you want to kill someone's love for playing and have them hate their favorite songs, make them use their completely untrained ear to listen for chords they don't even know through layers of amp effects, pedals, and editing.

Re: Show HN: Get the guitar chords from your Spotify playlists

#74

Post by rodw »

jamespwilliams wrote: post #10
Y_Y wrote: post #3

Against my better judgement I actually logged in with Spotify, only to find that it just didn't work. I'm not really sure what I was expecting anyway. There used to be a great trade in guitar chords online, but then lots of small sites got taken down and ultimategyitar tried to put a big shitty paywall around years and years of high quality content made by volunteers and often scraped from other sites.

If anyone knows of a free and open-source guitar tab sharing site, I'd be interested. I wrote some tabs recently and ended up just putting them on my personal website. Hopefully people will search via Google and find them.

I don't know of any "open-source" tab sharing sites (i.e., sites specifically dedicated to CC or other permissively-/share-alike-licensed transcriptions) but for what it's worth there are a large number of "free" (as in beer) guitar tab repositories, or at least a large number of places that include freely-available, user-contributed content within a broader freemium or ad-supported service.

Beyond the usual web-based suspects (some of which have been named elsewhere in this thread) there are also a number of other tab sharing "communities", including some relevant subreddits that might be the easiest way to spread the word if you're not comfortable uploading to a more directly for-profit service (not that Reddit isn't for-profit too, but guitar tabs certainly aren't their business model and you'd largely be linking to files stored elsewhere rather than uploading them directly).

But a lot of people seem to do what you did also. I suspect it's not super-effective as a distribution model, but if you dig a little it's not hard to find smaller/specialized tab collections on personal websites or general-purpose file hosting services like Google Drive/Dropbox or even at places like Github.

I don't think Google's `filetype:` operator respects guitar-tab-related extensions like `gpx` or `gp5` or `tab` or whatever but using the `inurl:` operator (or just including the tab-specific file extension) combined with the song title or artist name is a good way to find some of these less-centrally located tabs.

Also there are several massive collections available via torrent and on some of those more gray-hat-ish anonymous/one-off file-sharing services. Arguably these may have a more questionable provenance but I suspect the plurality if not the majority of the guitar tabs you'll find shared anywhere online could be traced back to old-school usenet or the first generation of tab-sharing websites that grew out those communities. Ultimate-Guitar for example self-reports as having "chords and tabs to over 1,100,000 songs", and likes to highlight their "official" (licensed) transcriptions (and to be fair they are nothing to sneeze at), but it's probably no coincidence that they don't seem to report the ratio of "official" to "community-provided" transcriptions.

EDIT: Just out of curiosity I checked the file-count reported at the bottom of UG's search page when filtered by file type, I see:

* 18,688 "official" tabs (AFAIK these are the only actually licensed transcriptions)

* 212,408 "Guitar Pro" (.gpx/.gp5/.gp4/.gp3) files; user-generated and many of which probably weren't originally uploaded to UG

* 1,115,129 plain-text transcriptions (801,597 "chords", 313,532 "tabs") that almost certainly date back to Usenet-era communities

The ~20K of licensed/official transcriptions are impressive (both individually and collectively) but represents less than 2% of the overall song catalog (and much less than 2% by file count).

Re: Show HN: Get the guitar chords from your Spotify playlists

#75

Post by cnity »

rodw wrote: post #72
anonymouse008 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the right approach for song recommendation too — try your approach there and see what happens. If you want help on the business side, reach out.

Can you expand on what you mean by "song recommendations" in this context? Do you mean recommendations like "if you like X you might also like Y"? Assuming the answer is "yes", I'm not sure if I follow the leap from "non-negative matrix factorization as a bank of note templates (from their spectrograms)" to "song recommendations". Very loosely speaking my (not wholly uninformed) interpretation of the "note templates"…

More likely, they mean using non-negative matrix factorization but with a bank of feature vectors instead of note templates. NNMF can be used in a wide variety of domains because it essentially encodes the problem of "this thing is a bit like this thing, a bit like this thing, and a bit like this other thing".

If instead of numbers representing intensity at different frequencies (as in the spectrograms), the numbers in each vector of the template bank represent other features (such as listener overlap with other artists/songs, or genre representation across multiple continuous "color" axes) then you can recommend music to a listener based on the similarity to songs in their library to those in the template bank.

Re: Show HN: Get the guitar chords from your Spotify playlists

#76

Post by Y_Y »

rodw wrote: post #74
jamespwilliams wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anyone knows of a free and open-source guitar tab sharing site, I'd be interested. I wrote some tabs recently and ended up just putting them on my personal website. Hopefully people will search via Google and find them.

I don't know of any "open-source" tab sharing sites (i.e., sites specifically dedicated to CC or other permissively-/share-alike-licensed transcriptions) but for what it's worth there are a large number of "free" (as in beer) guitar tab repositories, or at least a large number of places that include freely-available, user-contributed content within a broader freemium or ad-supported service. Beyond the usual web-base…

I don't know if it's the case any more, but I found that in the past many of the "official" tabs were actually just the highest rated Guitar Pro tab converted to use the web player and dressed up to look fancy. With a little bit of effort you could get the same result just by looking for the highest-rated gp5 and using that locally.

Re: Show HN: Get the guitar chords from your Spotify playlists

#77

Post by Y_Y »

rodw wrote: post #64
Y_Y wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazing! Search for finger pattern = {5 4 3 4 1 1}: 16 results found. A+add9add#9 A Augmented Add 9th Add Sharp 9th C#+7add7/A C#/A Augmented 7th Add Major 7th F5addb5addb11addb13/A F/A 5th Add Flat 5th Add Flat 11th Add Flat 13th ...

I can't quite figure out if your response is meant to be sarcastic or not - i.e., if you're "amazed" at the completeness here or maybe mocking the specialized/exotic chords it came up with in this case. I apologize if this is obvious or well known to you, but for anyone not already familiar with it recognize that much like (and not wholly independent of) musical scales, chords are essentially defined by a predictable…

Haha yes, I was being intentionally silly. Thanks for the very nice explanation though, I find that it can be really difficult to explain these things to non-musicians and I like the way you've done it.

(By the way, I also deliberately chose something that should be excruciatingly difficult to actually play on a normal guitar.)

Re: Show HN: Get the guitar chords from your Spotify playlists

#78

Post by GrantSolar »

fenderbluesjr wrote: post #47
saevarom wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually run a guitar chord website, www.guitarparty.com, that provides chords for songs, but also some additional functionality such as PDF books, transposing songs etc for subscribers. But the content is free although you have to tolerate a few Google ads. We're mostly local to Iceland but there are always some users and subscribers from around the world. We once attempted to go the legal route globally and make…

Does your site or any other allow a user to click notes on a fretboard and have the app deduce the chord from the positions? I know a lot of chords the names of which I have forgotten, and don't have the theory chops to work it out myself

I use oolimo (https://www.oolimo.com/guitarchords/analyze) for this as it gives you the notes, intervals, and chord names on the fly with easy inversions

Re: Show HN: Get the guitar chords from your Spotify playlists

#79

Post by cannam »

rodw wrote: post #56
notfed wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an amateur musician I see this as a missing holy grail killer app. I'd love to have it just to pull the chords out of some of my own old recordings that I can't figure out how to repeat. If anyone knows of any apps (even prototypes) that can do this, please provide links.

Automated music transcription - the process of generating a musical score from an audio recording - is a pretty active topic in signal processing (and has been for a couple of decades at least). The monophonic case (one note at a time) is fairly well solved at this point: there are decades old solutions in both the frequency domain (like FFT) and time domain (like auto-correlation and the dozens of refinements of tha…

> The polyphonic case (like chord detection) is trickier

Very true, but for practical purposes chord detection is easier than polyphonic note transcription - it isn't necessary to transcribe all the notes with perfect fidelity to identify a likely chord, and there are many issues around note timing that become simpler when you assume one chord at a time.

> I'm pretty sure Chorify's solution is based on "deep learning" (ANN) techniques

At least at launch, I believe they were using a method more like that of Chordino - in fact using the same chromagram decomposition - but with a more sophisticated language model for chord transitions than Chordino's HMM.

(See this publication from one of Chordify's founders, et al, which I think is relevant, or at least interesting http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.294...)

Re: Show HN: Get the guitar chords from your Spotify playlists

#80

Post by siltpotato »

gerbilly wrote: post #53
dodgrile wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think finding individual notes / the inherent notes within a chord is likely that difficult. The problem with this sort of thing is the nuance that's really involved - a player with a decent ear will be able to tell if the same A note is played on an open string, on the lower, fatter strings, or further up the neck. With chords, you also need to start considering voice leading (where you're specifically picki…

Yeah exactly what I was going to say, you have to consider the chord voicing, the strum pattern, and whether the sequence of chords makes sense for a human to comfortably play. Someone above mentioned: "Here comes the sun", which is a great example. First gotcha, it sort of sounds finger picked, but it's not it's flat picked. Another unusual thing about that song is that it's played w/ a capo on 7th fret. Now I'm sur…

Maybe do away with tabbing and just give out sheet music.
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