Show HN: A guitar tab viewer that listens

I'm guessing that a few of us would be interested if you could build one. This sounds great.

Actually that probably deserves a less flippant answer, so let me offer one.

To be honest the most interesting differentiators are not really visible in this MVP release, but there are some, even now.

At a practical level:

* FATpick lets you import and play any song you can get your hands on (as well as those shared by other users). You can import any GuitarPro-format scores directly (or at least any .gp3/4/5 files) and if you're motivated enough you can easily convert anything else to the GuitarPro format using free software like TuxGuitar.

* FATpick is also totally free right now. There are no time limits or features hidden behind a paywall. To be clear it won't always be free, but it will remain free for at least several months (as we refine the product) and we'll work out a special offer for early-adopters as we get closer to defining the actual subscription model.

At a philosophical level:

* Most of the competitors in this space - possibly all of the "big" ones - focus on trying to "teach" guitar and so invest heavily in instructional videos and in content selected for pedagogical reasons.

* FATpick takes a different approach. We assume you've heard of JustinGuitar and focus instead on being the best platform for viewing tabs and learning to play songs, to the extent that even someone that is brand new to guitar can be playing songs they know in just a few minutes -- maybe slowly or poorly or relatively simple ones -- but literally going from "Where do I put my fingers?" and "Is this where the guitar strap should go?" to "Cool, now I can play Seven Nation Army along with the recording as if I'm in the band" in a just a few minutes. More experienced players are able to sight-read new stuff, even on the first play thru, making it easy to learn new songs. And all with objective feedback on your performance and the ability to track your progress over time. We aren't trying to teach you guitar -- you should be looking at multiple sources for that anyway -- but we are trying to be an indispensable tool on your belt, helping make your practice sessions more fun, more engaging and more effective.

But again I think the most interesting and unique stuff is still on the roadmap. A big part of what I'm trying to do now is field-test the technology. This version was more or less scoped specifically to be useful and compelling enough to support that but the really good stuff is still in the pipeline.

That's fair.

Full disclosure: right now FATpick will import gp3, gp4 and gp5 files. The "import song" button both enforces and mentions this, as does the user manual IIRC, but it's not something that's called out in any way.

If you have a gpx file (produced by Guitar Pro 6 or 7) then you'll need to convert it to gp5 to import into FATpick, at least for now. If you're using the GuitarPro app itself you can just save it that way. If you don't have the GuitarPro app TuxGuitar is free and handles this well (it works for editing GuitarPro files too).

Obviously it would be better to support .gpx directly, and for that matter things like MusicXML, too. But the GuitarPro format has to be more or less reverse-engineered, and gpx is unlike gp3, gp4 and gp5. Most files in the wild seem to be gp5 (or after that, gp3) anyway so that's where its at right now.

It seems like one could probably use some headless form of TuxGuitar on the back-end to convert gpx to gp5, but other than a cursory scan to see if that's a feature they already provide (it isn't) I haven't dug into it much more deeply than that.

I tried using this and it's a damn mess. You need to sit down with someone unfamiliar with it and take a note of all the roadblocks on the way towards getting it to do something.

I never could get it to do anything. I got as far as pressing "play" and then seeing a page with a little bar on the left, two quotes in the middle and the word "practice" on the right. Press that and it says "paused". Oh, I was playing? Didn't seem like it.

Thanks for the feedback. That sounds like a bug. If you see the two quotes and didn't see the tabs you definitely weren't playing anything. Specifically it sounds like we failed to load the song data, so you don't really see anything at all.

This is typically a momentary issue. If you want to give it another try you can go back to the track or song selection page and try again. That generally clears the problem up.

(The problem is that data file wasn't fully flushed to disk when the player tried to open it. If you give it a second and try again it generally works.)

If the file happens to be very large or the network connection is slow you might see this more often. Also if you are a little more leisurely about going from the track-selection page to the player this is less likely to happen.

Worst case scenario is that the data file was somehow corrupted when being written to the cache. That will clear itself out eventually, or you could clear the cache from the settings panel, or try another song if you are just playing around.

I know this seems like a problem that should be easy to fix, but it's been a little bit of a whack-a-mole problem to address all the edge cases. I'm sorry you ran into this, but fortunately it's almost always a temporary glitch.