Writing TAB for YouTube

[robot_pelican_chin]

Evening all!

Been a little while since my last post. Like a lot of you I've been looking for ways to fill the void in the last year, so I've been uploading bass covers of new songs to YouTube, and had a lot of people asking if I have tabs for the bass lines.

Has anyone had experience in creating and posting tabs on their YouTube channel? I looked into trying to make the tab a part of the video but it seemed to require a level of editing way beyond my simple video editing 'skills' 😂. I can also see that some people create PDF's of tabs and upload them to Google drive and share the link but I've no idea what program they're using.

Many thanks in advance!

KJ

[Stingray5]

I use Guitar Pro (v7.5) to do tabs, chord sheets and more. It's a pretty comprehensive program(me) and can export files as PDF's. You can download a trial to see what you think. I also have Power Tab which is free and may well do what you need though, personally, I'm more used to Guitar Pro.

I'm sure others here may have other ideas/suggestions.

A real cheap way to do just basic text tabs is to use a text editor (e.g., EditPad, Notepad, etc). Once you're done, save it and right click on the file name in Windows explorer. In the menu, look for something like "convert to pdf with...". (This comes up for me with Foxit pdf reader).

Hope this helps.  

[Nail Soup]

2 hours ago, Stingray5 said:

A real cheap way to do just basic text tabs is to use a text editor (e.g., EditPad, Notepad, etc)

I've found  that writing tab (or even writing lyrics with chrods above) only really if you use a monospaced font. So 4 I's are the same width as 4 W's.

I think that comes as default in notepad.

See below comparison of Courier and Arial:

 

 

[Stingray5]

2 hours ago, Nail Soup said:

I've found  that writing tab (or even writing lyrics with chrods above) only really if you use a monospaced font. So 4 I's are the same width as 4 W's.

I think that comes as default in notepad.

See below comparison of Courier and Arial:

 

 

Quite right. I neglected to mention about using monospaced fonts. 

[robot_pelican_chin]

Thank you both for your help! I'll try those out, the notepad option sounds like a good idea as it doesn't require much editing.

I wonder if Musescore is worth looking into also, as it's free.

[SpondonBassed]

On 02/03/2021 at 16:59, robot_pelican_chin said:

Been a little while since my last post. Like a lot of you I've been looking for ways to fill the void in the last year, so I've been uploading bass covers of new songs to YouTube, and had a lot of people asking if I have tabs for the bass lines.

May we have the link please?

[MrCrane]

2 hours ago, robot_pelican_chin said:

Thank you both for your help! I'll try those out, the notepad option sounds like a good idea as it doesn't require much editing.

I wonder if Musescore is worth looking into also, as it's free.

Musescore is pretty good albeit with a pretty steep learning curve

[SpondonBassed]

I like the scrolling TAB that some YT users have on their clips.

I don't know if it's an add-on for YT users or whether it's a feature from standard video editing software.  It's helped me to improve my sight reading (albeit TAB only) especially when there is a moving cursor on the beat.

Of course, YT's advertising tends to inhabit the lower half of the screen so it might be an idea to put it along the top of the screen for those who stream only.  That way you'd avoid the frustration of a banner obscuring the TAB content at a crucial point.