Hi team, tabledit has been on the radar for a while, mainly for the ability to transpose easily and quickly. My friends play Will the circle be unbroken mainly in A, and I’m keen to be able to get soloing in that key. Might pick it up next fortnight. Anyone done any transposing with it? The documentation says its easy, but I have my doubts haha!
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Hi Luke
To the best of my knowledge TablEdit is NOT a transposition tool i.e you can’t take a TAB in G and convert that TAB to D at the click of a button. To make such a change would require editing the TAB to the new chord structure. But this can be done fairly easily with cut and paste.
You can however take a TAB written in G and apply a capo at the 2nd and 7th frets respectively and place it in the key of A as you would on a banjo. I hope this helps.
Technically speaking, TablEdit can transpose your score. The option is under Score > Transpose. For the purpose of transposing from G to A, though, I’m not sure it’s entirely helpful since tabs of songs done with a capo are usually written as if the capo resets the fret numbers to zero. I guess if it’s easier for you to read the actual fret numbers than to shift everything up the fret board, it may be helpful.
Also, sometimes TablEdit tries to get fancy with its transposing. For example, when going from G to A, if the 3rd string on the banjo is fretted at the 2nd fret in G, rather than place that at the 4th fret in A, TablEdit may decide to move it to an open 2nd string. Same note, but very different picking pattern. Now, there’s an option in the Transpose settings called “Optimize fingerings” that appears to fix that problem, but not having a lot of experience with this feature, I can’t say how well it works.
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Thanks @Mark_Rocka I wasn’t aware of that feature. I guess I need to explore this more.
Have you used this much ? What pitfalls if any ?
Not much. What little I have used it produced less than the desired result. I haven’t found a way to tell TablEdit to just increase everything by X frets. It tries to do too much and the score ends up being different from the original.
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Thanks guys, I think you can fiddle a little with the transpose in the demo mode, but as Mark has said, I thought it might get a bit messy. I’ll have to do some more research on playing with a capo. In general I feel there is SO much to learn banjoing it can get difficult to stay focused on one thing!
This is why @BanjoBen structured teaching method is so effective. If you work through the lessons Ben keeps you on a structured learning track, he introduces his students to the capo and explains how and when to use it. Further along the learning track he teaches students how to play some solos in multiple keys without the capo.
If you skip around the lessons things can seem a bit overwhelming.
Yes there is a lot to learning the banjo, I have been studying banjo for over 10 years and I learn new stuff every day.
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Yes I see that, I took a two measure G lick and pushed it up two clicks and it was unrecognisable.
Maybe things would work out better on a basic melody.
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