Harmonica tab syntax

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Harmonica tablature is hole numbers: which hole to play and which way, blow or draw. Here it is plain text — numbers, breath marks and spaces. No format of our own, nothing invisible — what you see in the field is the whole notation. Copy it into an email, save it as a text file, open it back again.

Below is the language in full, with examples. The sign tables are at the end of the page; that is also where you pick the spelling you are used to, and the site will show tabs in it.

Holes and breath

A number is a hole, and on its own it means blow. A minus in front means draw — read it as "pull towards you".

1. 4 # blow into hole 4
2. -4 # draw on the same hole
3. 0 # a rest: silence for exactly as long as a note would sound

A space separates notes. But when every note carries its own breath mark, the boundaries are visible without it — the site reads that spelling just as well:

1. -2 3 -3 4 # four notes, separated by spaces
2. -2+3-3+4 # the same four: each has a breath mark, no spaces needed
3. -2-3 # two notes in a row, both drawn
4. -23 # this one is a chord: holes 2 and 3 at once, see below

A note the chosen harp does not have is never invented: instead of a circle you get !, and it cannot be played until you change the harp or transpose. An unreadable word is underlined in red and shown as ?( — a typo never passes in silence.

Chords and octaves

Several holes on one breath are written together, without spaces. The breath mark is shared and stands in front.

1. 123 # holes 1, 2 and 3 blown — the backbone of any rhythm
2. -123 # the same three drawn
3. 345 # the same move higher up the harp
4. -23' # a chord with a bend: the mark follows the numbers

An octave is two holes with a gap, the middle ones blocked by the tongue. An underscore goes between the numbers, otherwise it would read as a chord:

1. 1_4 # holes 1 and 4 blown — an octave
2. -2_6 # the same drawn

The same groups can be written with brackets — that is how many other tabs spell them, and the site understands both:

1. (1 2 3) # same as 123
2. -(1 4) # same as -1_4
3. (-1 -2 -3) # a breath mark on every number is fine too

Brackets are not decoration: on a chromatic the numbers run to two digits, and without them the reading is ambiguous.

1. 12 # hole twelve
2. 1_2 # holes 1 and 2 together
3. (1 2) # the same, in brackets

Durations

A bare note is an eighth. That is deliberate: blues is played in eighths, and the most frequent value should be the shortest to write. Everything else is an eighth plus something.

Every dot after a note adds another eighth. You still type them with the space bar: the first space separates the note from the next one, and each space after that turns into a dot — the same keystrokes as before, but what lands in the text is a sign.

1. 4 -5 # two eighths: the space only separates them
2. 4· -5 # a quarter and an eighth
3. 4·· -5 # a dotted quarter and an eighth
4. 4··· -5 # a half note and an eighth

A sign rather than spaces, because tabs travel: people copy them into chats, save them to files, paste them into mail. Trailing spaces get trimmed there and runs of spaces collapse into one — and the melody quietly flattens out. A dot cannot be trimmed or collapsed, and you can see it: count the dots, that is how many extra eighths there are.

One rule for the whole line: a space only separates, the duration always sits on its own note. Neither the end of a line nor a comment after the tabs changes anything.

1. 4· # a quarter — at the end of a line or in the middle
2. 4· # the same quarter before a comment
3. 4 # and this is an eighth: the space before the hash just separates

The dot

A dot makes a note one and a half times longer, as in sheet music. It counts last — after the digit, the duration dots and the sign — and it stands at the very end of the word, behind the duration dots. There and nowhere else: 4·. is understood, 4.· is not, and such a word is underlined. Otherwise two people would read it two ways — "an eighth and a half plus an eighth" or "two eighths plus half again" — and silently picking one for them is worse than saying "did not understand".

1. 4. # one and a half eighths — a dotted eighth
2. 4·. # two eighths by the dot, and the period makes three
3. 4/16. # a dotted sixteenth

The duration sign

Dots can only lengthen, so anything shorter than an eighth is written with a sign — the denominator, the way note values are named. The sign sets the length outright, and dots on such a word are redundant.

1. 4/16 # a sixteenth
2. 4/32 # a thirty-second
3. 4/12 # a triplet eighth — a third of a quarter
4. 4/6 # a triplet quarter
5. 4/4 # a quarter; the same as 4 with one dot
6. 4/1 # a whole note

The sign is handy for long notes too: «4/1» is shorter than eight dots and reads at a glance. Which one to use is up to you — they sound the same.

All the values at once

Note values do not run in a straight line: they double, and dots fill the gaps. Here is the whole row, in eighths, and how to write each one:

1. 4/16 # ½ — a sixteenth
2. 4 # 1 — an eighth
3. 4. # 1½ — a dotted eighth
4. 4· # 2 — a quarter
5. 4·· # 3 — a dotted quarter
6. 4··· # 4 — a half note
7. 4····· # 6 — a dotted half note
8. 4······· # 8 — a whole note
9. 4/1. # 12 — a dotted whole note

Five and seven are missing from the row on purpose: five and seven eighths have no sign of their own in music, they are written as two notes under a tie. You can type such a length and it plays honestly, but on a rhythm staff it is drawn as the nearest shorter note.

Effects

Anything a note does besides its pitch is attached to the note itself. Bends are apostrophes, one per semitone:

1. -3' # draw 3 bent a semitone
2. -3'' # bent a whole tone
3. -3''' # bent a tone and a half
4. 4* # overblow on hole 4
5. -7* # overdraw on hole 7
6. 5# # slide button pressed — on a chromatic

Then the things you hear as a technique rather than as pitch:

1. 1~ # vibrato: the note wavers for its whole length
2. 1w # wah with the hands; 1W and 1wah work too
3. -1w2 # exactly two wahs across the note
4. -4'~ # marks stack: a bend with vibrato

A scoop takes the note at its neighbouring pitch in the same hole and moves to its own; a drop-off does the opposite. The slash shows which side you come from. The neighbour is the bend a semitone below — and where no bend exists, the overbend of the same hole: blow 5 has no bend, but it does have an overblow, and coming in through it is ordinary practice.

1. /-2 # scooped into from below
2. -2\ # drop-off: taken clean, pulled down
3. /-2\ # both: from the bend to the note and back
4. /5 # no bend here — we come in from the overblow
5. /5* # and the other way round: into the overblow from the plain note

Two techniques link neighbouring notes, so they carry two numbers:

1. 2>5 # a slide: gliding from hole 2 to hole 5 on one breath
2. -4>-1 # a slide down
3. 2…5 # the same slide as an ellipsis; three plain dots are read too
4. -3=-4 # a trill: two holes alternating quickly

Repeats and endings

Repeats are written with marks at the edges of a line. The line itself stays single: spell it out three times and you will not know later whether it was a repeat or written that way on purpose.

1. 1 -1 x2 # the line is played twice; X2 and ×2 work too
2. |: 1
3. …
4. 4 :| # a repeat: everything between the marks is played twice
5. 4 :|x3 # the same repeat, but three passes

The opening mark is optional: without it the repeat counts from the start of the tune, or from the end of the previous one — the same way sheet music is read.

An ending is |> at the start of a line. As many endings as there are, that many passes, taken in order; they carry no numbers — a number would have to be kept in step with the count on :|.

1. |: 1
2. 2
3. |> 3
4. |> 4 :| # plays 1 2 3, then 1 2 4

1. |: 1
2. |> 2
3. |> 3
4. |> 4 :| # three passes: one body, three different endings

An ending runs until the next mark — lines under |> without a mark are its continuation, not the body of the repeat. That is how a long ending of two or three lines is written: putting |> on each of them would mean one more pass.

The number on :| repeats the whole construction, endings included: :|x2 means all of it sounds twice.

You don't have to type the vertical bar. The Russian layout has none at all, the German one hides it behind AltGr — and the sign is needed on every other line. Type a colon at the start or the end of a line, an arrow at the start, and the editor adds the bar. We read the bare signs too, so someone else's tabs with : and > open just as well.

Errors and warnings

A typo never passes in silence, and the site does not guess what you meant. A word that fits no rule gets a red wavy underline right in the field, and a dot lights up next to the line number — you can see where to look even if the line runs off the screen.

1. 1x # not how notes are written: a letter is not an effect mark
2. -4/5 # not a note value: 16, 12 and 8 exist, 5 does not
3. (3 1) # inside a chord the numbers go upwards
4. 54 # two notes without a space stuck into one word

In the melody below the field such a word is shown as ?( — its place in the line is kept, so you can see where something dropped out. The site does not try to play it: one unreadable note does not stop the rest.

The second case is gentler: the spelling is right, but the note does not exist on the chosen harp — an overblow where none is available, or a note below hole one. Such a note is shown by name with a !, set in light grey, and stays silent. It is not a writing error: change the harp or transpose, and it appears.

1. C-1 # this harp has no such note — it is named instead
2. /2 # nothing to scoop from: the note sounds, the ornament does not

The second line is about ornaments: a scoop starts from the neighbouring pitch of the same hole, and that pitch is not there on every tuning. On another harp the very same tabs play with the ornament, so the writing is not counted as broken — the word goes dim and the note still sounds.

Hence the everyday rule: if something does not sound, or sounds plainer than written, look at the colour. Red — fix the spelling; grey — it is the harp.

Words and headings

A line after a hash is not played. That is where lyrics, notes to self and section headings go — and all of it survives copying and lands in the PDF. The hash may also stand mid-line: everything before it is played, everything after it is read.

The more hashes, the louder: one is a comment, two a smaller heading, three a larger one. In the field itself they are all dimmed alike, like any word that is not played — that is a place for typing, not for reading. They become headings below, in the melody and on the sheet.

1. ### Ode to Joy
2. ## Verse
3. 5 5 -5 6 # first phrase

The tab language and converting

The same numbers give different notes on different harps: 4 is C on a C harp and A on an A harp. So every piece of tab has a language: the key and tuning it was written for. It sits above the editor field and has nothing to do with what you play on — it says how to read the numbers.

The harp is picked below, in its own block. When language and harp match, everything is simple. When they do not, the site shows the tabs so that your harp produces the same tune.

Found tabs written for a G harp while yours is in C? Set G as the tab language, paste the text, choose C as your harp — and click "Convert to my tab language". The numbers are recalculated, the language becomes yours, and the tune sounds the same, only in another key.

That order matters: the language is picked while the field is empty, and the moment there is anything in it, the language is locked. It is a property of the text, not a setting — switching it silently would re-hear the notes you already typed as different ones, and you would only notice by ear. Converting changes it, recalculating the numbers first. And if you did set the wrong language after typing, cut the text out, pick the language on the empty field, and paste it back.

Tuning works the same way. On a minor harp or a chromatic the same note sits in a different hole — change the tuning and the numbers follow. If the note is missing from the chosen harp altogether, it is shown by name (C-1) and marked !: there is nothing to play it with, and the site says so instead of quietly substituting a neighbour.

People spell tabs in many ways: +4, 4B, (4), 4o, -3bb. The site reads all of them, and shows and copies in the one picked in the tables below. The choice is remembered: paste someone else's tabs and you see them in your own spelling.

Open the tab editor