HOW TO GET GUITAR TABS FOR RARE AND OBSCURE SONGS

WHY RARE SONGS NEVER GET TABBED

Tab sites are crowd-sourced, and crowds transcribe popular songs. The economics never reach the long tail. If a song doesn't have enough fans willing to spend hours tabbing it for free, it stays blank forever. That leaves whole categories permanently uncovered:

• B-sides and deep cuts from artists whose hits are tabbed but whose album tracks aren't.
• Indie and self-released music on Bandcamp, SoundCloud, and small channels.
• Regional and non-English songs: bossa nova and samba, K-pop, Greek, Tagalog worship, and countless others the big sites under-serve.
• Gear demos and instrumentals: that lick from a pedal demo or a boutique-guitar walkthrough you can't stop replaying.
• Fingerstyle and solo arrangements that only exist as one person's performance.
• Out-of-print and old recordings that predate the tab sites entirely.

THE OLD WAY: PAY, WAIT, MAYBE GET DECLINED

The established answer for rare songs is a request marketplace. Communities like r/RareTabs funnel to sites such as PaidTabs, where you submit a song, pay per score, and wait for a human transcriber to pick it up, days at best. And there's a catch you see on nearly every listing: "If you cannot find the score, it might be because of a copyright issue." Your request can simply be declined.

That model exists because, until recently, a human ear was the only thing that could turn a recording into a tab. That's no longer true.

THE WORKFLOW, END TO END

STEP 1: GET AN AUDIO FILE

You don't need a tab to start, you need audio: an mp3 you own or can export. Rare music often lives on Bandcamp, SoundCloud, and small channels rather than the big libraries. Wherever you have it, if the guitar is audible in the mix, that's enough.

STEP 2: UPLOAD THE AUDIO

Upload the audio file into audio2guitar (mp3 on the free plan; wav, flac, m4a, and more on Pro). The 6-stage pipeline (source separation, polyphonic pitch tracking, onset detection, chord recognition, beat tracking, section labeling) returns guitar tab, chords (170+ types), synced lyrics, the detected key, and tempo in about 3 to 6 minutes, even for a song that may never have been written down before. The benchmarks are on the stats page.

STEP 3: VERIFY AND REFINE

Play the tab against the recording. Loop the parts you can't hear clearly and slow them down. Rare recordings vary wildly in production quality, so a lo-fi or densely layered track may need a few manual touch-ups. Click a fret number to correct it. You're refining real notes, not guessing from silence.

STEP 4: EXPORT AND KEEP IT

Export to MIDI or PDF, or download the separated stems (exports are a Pro feature). The rare song that existed nowhere is now permanently in your own library, and you can share it with the handful of other people hunting for it.

WHAT WORKS BEST

The cleaner the guitar in the mix, the better the result. The strongest cases are exactly the rare material people hunt for: solo fingerstyle arrangements, acoustic covers, instrumentals, and gear demos, where the guitar is front and center. Full-band recordings work too. If two guitars overlap and you want to focus on one, there's a manual two-pass stem workaround covered in the two-pass stem tutorial.

HONEST LIMITS

There are limits. A muddy bootleg, a wall-of-noise mix, or a part buried under heavy production needs more editing than a clean recording. Very dense or very low-fidelity audio is where you'll spend the most time verifying. Even in the hard cases, you start from a real transcription of the actual recording, in minutes, without paying per song or waiting on someone else's queue.

FAQ