Write Tab, Add Audio, and Share It From Your Phone. Simple.

Tell me if any of this sounds familiar:

Example A: Perhaps you heard, a few months ago Kirk Hammett lost his phone and over 250 musical ideas that he had recorded in it.  250 ideas!  That’s a lot of Metallica songs sitting in an iPhone.  Now, Kirk Hammett could certainly come up with another 250 ideas – probably by this weekend.  But they won’t be the same ideas.

Example B: When I was first taking jazz guitar lessons, I was given an assignment:  create a series of ii-V-I licks.  I could use whatever scale I wanted to write 10 licks that sounded good over a jazzy ii-V-I turnaround. So I experimented, found a few licks I liked, and then wrote them out over hand drawn tab lines, leaving my unfortunate guitar teacher to interpret the results.

Example C: You’re sitting across from a fellow band member, painstakingly going through the bridge again.  Getting the groove on the verse was easy.  The chorus is a simple three chord progression, also easy.  But the bridge is more difficult.  You recorded an audio file before practice and sent it to everyone to review.  But it’s a complicated riff so there’s really no choice but to go through the fingerings note by note.

What would help all this? A simple way to write and share tab.

There’s a new app coming out called Tabd (www.tabdapp.com).  It promises an easy way to write tablature, attach audio files, and share with friends, all from your phone.  Any tab you add is included in your library. The first edition of the app is coming in September for iOS.

Right now, the popular options for creating nice looking tab are: the Guitar Pro app, but it costs a bit of money.  Or the Ultimate-Guitar.com Tabs Pro software, but I don’t like that they won’t tell you the price up front.

What I like about Tabd is that:

• It’s free, with an upgrade option to remove ads and increase features.
• It’s simple and easy to use.
• It makes it quick to share ideas between people.

The whole idea seems to be to decrease the effort and cost of writing tab so that you can spread your ideas faster.

You can check out their video below.  You can also go to tabdapp.com and sign up to receive updates when the app launches in September.