I never set out to be a software designer. I’m a harmonica player — but I kept walking into the same wall.
I needed tabs written out. Intros, horn lines, melodies — things I’d worked out at home and wanted on paper to print for a gig or hand to a student. And I wanted that faster and easier than picking it apart a note at a time.
There was a second thing, too: I don’t read music. Never learned. I’ve done fine without it, but it left a gap. I could play something without really seeing what I was playing — how the notes sat in the scale, why one run worked and another didn’t.
Turns out those were the same wish. I didn’t just want the tabs on paper — I wanted to see the music underneath them. So I built Fab Tabs — harmonica tabbing software that listens, writes the harmonica tabs, and shows the scale degrees in the same breath.
What tabs always left out
Tabs tell you which holes. They never tell you how — the timing, the push and pull, the phrasing that makes a lick sound like the lick. So Fab Tabs plays your own recording back while each tab lights up in time. Your sound, your bends, your phrasing, with the tabs moving along underneath. That’s the part paper can’t do.
One idea led to fifty
What I built to catch my own licks turned out to be a genuinely good teaching tool. The triple display — hole numbers, scale degrees, live keyboard — makes position theory something you can see instead of something you have to imagine. Watch the same melody land on different holes in 2nd and 3rd position while the scale degrees stay put. The Number System, usually weeks of head-scratching, clicks in minutes.
Everything else I wanted came along with it: your real harmonica sound and phrasing captured, tabs transposed between 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th and 12th position, text files I can mark up and print for the stage, and all 12 keys calibrated for how harps actually behave — especially on bends.
One rule: keep it simple
If something gets complicated too fast, I’m out. I don’t think that way and I don’t play that way — so Fab Tabs doesn’t work that way either.
Who it’s for
- Gigging players — tab a horn line or an intro, transpose it, print it.
- Non-readers (like me) and anyone who learns by ear — finally see the theory under what you already play.
- Teachers — holes, notes, scale degrees and how they connect, all at once.
- Beginners and up — even plain blow-and-draw works; you don’t need to be advanced.
Its sister tool
Fab Tabs eventually grew a companion: Tab-Grabber, which lifts a harmonica — or sax, or trumpet — solo straight off a recording and writes the tabs, then drops them into Fab Tabs with a click. If you want both, the Fab Tabs + Tab-Grabber bundle saves you money.
Fab Tabs runs in your browser — nothing to install, no subscription, a one-time licence. There’s a full 5-day free trial, because I’d rather you try it and decide for yourself.
