One tool led to another. Fab Tabs solved half my problem — it wrote down what I played. But most of the licks I really wanted were still trapped on records.
Butterfield, McCoy, William Clarke, a killer sax solo, phrases I’d been hearing for years and never quite pinned down. The old way of lifting them was the turntable and the needle: drop it, lift it, drop it again, catch three notes, do it once more. I don’t miss it as much as I pretend to.
For years I figured it couldn’t be done
My whole quest was to find out if it was even possible: a simple program that could take any recording — a song, a video, one of my own takes — find the melody line, and write the harmonica tabs from that recording, bends and overblows included.
The catch is that the best licks are buried in full-band mixes. So it had to start with top-tier lead isolation. One click, and a studio-grade separator pulls the harmonica, sax or trumpet clean out of the mix — the same kind of technology used in film and recording studios. That’s what makes it work on real, full recordings instead of only on clean solo tracks.
Then you check it with your ears
No transcriber is perfect, and I’d rather be straight with you than sell an “always 100% accurate” fairy tale. Every track is different — the quality, how loud the lead sits in the mix, the tone. Even so, Tab-Grabber gets remarkably close. If a note’s wrong, you right-click and fix it: change it, delete it, shift its octave, or type the one you know is right.
What I’ve found is that it’s often not the whole solo I need to crack — it’s a phrase or two, or one note I’d never caught by ear. Sometimes that single note unlocks a whole pile of ideas.
It doesn’t stop at tabs
Save your grab as a text sheet, or as a player with the real audio inside that you can send to a student or a friend. And if you own Fab Tabs, one click sends the whole thing across — the tabs, the key, the position, even the original audio — where you can transpose it, slow it down and really pull it apart.
Same rule: keep it simple
Load, trim, grab. Everything else is optional.
Who it’s for
- Anyone who’s ever asked “what is he playing there?” — now you find out in a couple of minutes.
- Gigging players — lift a horn line off the record, tab it, print it for the show.
- Teachers — turn any recording into a lesson sheet.
- Fab Tabs owners — this is the front door: grab the part, export it, then transpose, practice and share it.
Tab-Grabber runs in your browser — no install, no subscription, a one-time licence. The 5-day free trial includes 3 free instrument isolations, so try it on a song you’ve always wanted. Want both tools? The Fab Tabs + Tab-Grabber bundle saves you money.
