Show HN: Get the guitar chords from your Spotify playlists

[lucaaa]

Hello, I am the creator of the website. The main goal is not having to search on UltimateGuitar for the chords of the songs you want to play, but instead get a direct link to the song on UG. I made it because I was tired of checking my Spotify playlists for songs of which I didn't remember the title but I wanted to play and then go on UG and type the title in the search field. It's more of a "I'm lazy" tool than an actual tab website.

[omarhaneef]

You would think getting the notes and converting them to chords, and tablature, would be one of those "exactly suited for neural nets" type of problem.

If you want the chords to "Here comes the sun," you can find dozens of hits, but try something slightly obscure and they are hard to come by. (People with great ears have no idea what I am talking about.)

[cnity]

I've worked on this problem for some time on a personal project, and I'm pretty convinced you can basically solve this problem without deep learning or AI techniques, and instead use non-negative matrix factorization[0] as a bank of note templates (from their spectrograms). I have a fairly well working proof of concept and the approach is supported by the literature.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-negative_matrix_factorizat...

_edit_

That said, you'd probably need something more hard-core for extraction from an actual track, so you're probably right.

[dodgrile]

I don't think finding individual notes / the inherent notes within a chord is likely that difficult. The problem with this sort of thing is the nuance that's really involved - a player with a decent ear will be able to tell if the same A note is played on an open string, on the lower, fatter strings, or further up the neck. With chords, you also need to start considering voice leading (where you're specifically picking chord inversions for melody, which on guitar will affect how / where you play a chord) and how the mechanics fit together overall (I probably don't want to play an open C chord followed by something on the 11th fret, for example).

[astrea]

Thus propagating the NN "If all you have is a hammer" trend. I don't quite know the nuance of music theory, but could you not get away with traditional Fourier analysis? You just need to decompose the song into its constituent frequency "bins" right?

[CardenB]

Ubisoft has a new version of rocksmith coming out and plans to build most of their library on this technology.

[Y_Y]

Against my better judgement I actually logged in with Spotify, only to find that it just didn't work. I'm not really sure what I was expecting anyway.

There used to be a great trade in guitar chords online, but then lots of small sites got taken down and ultimategyitar tried to put a big shitty paywall around years and years of high quality content made by volunteers and often scraped from other sites.

[saevarom]

I actually run a guitar chord website, www.guitarparty.com, that provides chords for songs, but also some additional functionality such as PDF books, transposing songs etc for subscribers. But the content is free although you have to tolerate a few Google ads. We're mostly local to Iceland but there are always some users and subscribers from around the world.

We once attempted to go the legal route globally and make a deal with Harry Fox Agency (the agency that took down OLGA), we had a contract ready but it would have been quite expensive and risky for us. That being said, we pay royalties to our local copyright agency based on usage.

[boringg]

Seriously ultimate guitar just effed over so many people who put time and effort into spreading guitar chords.

That and their site is covered in so much ad content.

[scarecrowbob]

I learned to play guitar back in the 90s when the OLGA was still a thing.

UG sucks for precisely the reasons you mention.

I suppose the trade-off is that now all the great folks who were making nice tab content are on YT, but still, if you'r business model is making money off aggregating a bunch of content people created in the early 00s because the love of it, then that's hyper lame.

I still use UG if I am in a hurry and want a quick idea of other folks' take on the structure of a song, but I'm thankful I outgrew the need for other folks' transcriptions.

[vitorbaptistaa]

As an alternative, I use cifraclub.com.br for many years, and enjoy the interface and the overall quality of the chords (not affiliated with them).

It's not in English, but you should be able to figure out where's the search bar and use it without much effort.

[dsizzle]

One of my first tastes of the web was finding tabs on ftp servers!

[jamespwilliams]

If anyone knows of a free and open-source guitar tab sharing site, I'd be interested.

I wrote some tabs recently and ended up just putting them on my personal website. Hopefully people will search via Google and find them.

[jaywalk]

Looking at the JavaScript of the site, it looks like all it does it scrape the search results from ultimate-guitar.com for the songs in your playlist.

[weystrom]

UltimateGuitar is so pushy with their ads and subscriptions, it's a crime.

Neat shortcut though. Thanks for the effort.

[JulianWasTaken]

uBlock + some extra style blocks works pretty well to make it go away IME. The extra style blocks will remove the fake overlays with videos that they add, or the tight padding, etc.

[the_arun]

Is there a way to demo how it works, before I sign in with my Spotify account & share my data?

[xnzakg]

Wish there was some kind of example of what it looks like before I log in with my spotify account.

[dsizzle]

Yeah. The playlist part seems unnecessary too -- why not just have it work on a single song?

[driekwartappel]

In the good old days of Winamp (15 years ago...) I created a plugin that scraped the web and showed the chord in Winamp as you played a song. The code was dead easy to implement as it was just an embedded site within Winamp (HTML & Javascript & Winamp JS SDK). And surprisingly the site is still running! Not sure if the scraping still works though http://pikkipowpow.davidsmit.za.net/Home.aspx

So yes there are definitely a use case for all the new media players to show chords

[zwily]

Tangentially, if you want to get chords from a song (and can't find them already written online), Capo does a pretty great job at it and is very easy to use. Mac/iOS only, but the best I've seen.

https://supermegaultragroovy.com/products/capo/

[japers]

I built something similar for personal use. It's a Mac app that uses AppleScript to poll Spotify for the track that is currently playing. It then looks for chords on Ultimate Guitar through a small NodeJS API that uses Puppeteer to scrape the site. I'll usually just put my guitar playlist on shuffle and have this app open alongside it.

[tinyhouse]

Oh so this is not what I thought it is. I thought it actually figures out the chords for any given song.

[kej]

You want Chordify, then. It uses YouTube instead of Spotify but does a pretty good job of finding chords.

https://chordify.net/

[wsinks]

Yeah agreed.. wishing I hadn’t given them my Spotify credentials.

I feel a lot of egg on my face

[dvsfish]

Hah! I made a similar thing where I have a button in my extension bar on chrome that I click to perform a google search of [song I'm listening to on spotify] + " chords". Waiting for firefox manifest v3 update to add final touches.

[michaeljgerace]

Hi! In terms of your credential flow - did you get a quote extension from Spotify for your use-case? I know that this kind of log in flow is really restricted without requested (at least in my experience working with the API).

[lucaaa]

Hi, I didn't get a quote extension, I never actually looked at the quote limitation because I was only using it myself.

Edit: I checked on the Spotify developer dashboard and it says "App Status: Granted quota extension"

[Malp]

This is great, I was thinking of a similar idea recently- thank you for making this! If you haven't already, I would suggest sharing it on reddit too- I think /r/guitar and some others would love it :)

[costcopizza]

Learn them by ear, no tabs, YT vids, or anything else. Much more gratifying, you'll thank me later and become a better player.

[Spivak]

Good advice for someone experienced, terrible advice for a beginner.

If you want to kill someone's love for playing and have them hate their favorite songs, make them use their completely untrained ear to listen for chords they don't even know through layers of amp effects, pedals, and editing.

[CountDrewku]

This just searches ultimate-guitar.com for you. Why do I need your app for that? I'll just go to the source.

[giantg2]

Anything for bass lines? I wanted to build somestuck. As a project, but I suck.

[standard09]

This is really great product. Keep it up!