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Main Authors: Kaliakatsos-Papakostas, Maximos, Bastas, Gregoris, Makris, Dimos, Herremans, Dorien, Katsouros, Vassilis, Maragos, Petros
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10619
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author Kaliakatsos-Papakostas, Maximos
Bastas, Gregoris
Makris, Dimos
Herremans, Dorien
Katsouros, Vassilis
Maragos, Petros
author_facet Kaliakatsos-Papakostas, Maximos
Bastas, Gregoris
Makris, Dimos
Herremans, Dorien
Katsouros, Vassilis
Maragos, Petros
contents Guitar tablature transcription consists in deducing the string and the fret number on which each note should be played to reproduce the actual musical part. This assignment should lead to playable string-fret combinations throughout the entire track and, in general, preserve parsimonious motion between successive combinations. Throughout the history of guitar playing, specific chord fingerings have been developed across different musical styles that facilitate common idiomatic voicing combinations and motion between them. This paper presents a method for assigning guitar tablature notation to a given MIDI-based musical part (possibly consisting of multiple polyphonic tracks), i.e. no information about guitar-idiomatic expressional characteristics is involved (e.g. bending etc.) The current strategy is based on machine learning and requires a basic assumption about how much fingers can stretch on a fretboard; only standard 6-string guitar tuning is examined. The proposed method also examines the transcription of music pieces that was not meant to be played or could not possibly be played by a guitar (e.g. potentially a symphonic orchestra part), employing a rudimentary method for augmenting musical information and training/testing the system with artificial data. The results present interesting aspects about what the system can achieve when trained on the initial and augmented dataset, showing that the training with augmented data improves the performance even in simple, e.g. monophonic, cases. Results also indicate weaknesses and lead to useful conclusions about possible improvements.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_10619
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Machine Learning Approach for MIDI to Guitar Tablature Conversion
Kaliakatsos-Papakostas, Maximos
Bastas, Gregoris
Makris, Dimos
Herremans, Dorien
Katsouros, Vassilis
Maragos, Petros
Sound
Artificial Intelligence
Guitar tablature transcription consists in deducing the string and the fret number on which each note should be played to reproduce the actual musical part. This assignment should lead to playable string-fret combinations throughout the entire track and, in general, preserve parsimonious motion between successive combinations. Throughout the history of guitar playing, specific chord fingerings have been developed across different musical styles that facilitate common idiomatic voicing combinations and motion between them. This paper presents a method for assigning guitar tablature notation to a given MIDI-based musical part (possibly consisting of multiple polyphonic tracks), i.e. no information about guitar-idiomatic expressional characteristics is involved (e.g. bending etc.) The current strategy is based on machine learning and requires a basic assumption about how much fingers can stretch on a fretboard; only standard 6-string guitar tuning is examined. The proposed method also examines the transcription of music pieces that was not meant to be played or could not possibly be played by a guitar (e.g. potentially a symphonic orchestra part), employing a rudimentary method for augmenting musical information and training/testing the system with artificial data. The results present interesting aspects about what the system can achieve when trained on the initial and augmented dataset, showing that the training with augmented data improves the performance even in simple, e.g. monophonic, cases. Results also indicate weaknesses and lead to useful conclusions about possible improvements.
title A Machine Learning Approach for MIDI to Guitar Tablature Conversion
topic Sound
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10619