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Using the Tab Sync features
Ren Wright avatar
Written by Ren Wright
Updated this week

The Tab Sync player shows you beautiful standard notation and tablature right in your web browser. No plugins or apps necessary. It works in any modern browser, including tablets and most smartphones. Here's how it works...

The Basics

Play and pause a score by clicking the Play button or pressing the spacebar. The notation will light up in real time, as the music plays.

Jump to a particular moment in the audio by clicking on the notation.

Loop sections easily by clicking and dragging across the notation. It snaps to the nearest note, rest or barline for ease of making “perfect” loops.

Slow down the video and audio without changing pitch by using the slider on the lower left. Depending on your browser, we support speeds as slow as 25%.

Customizing Notation

Tab Sync pioneered the concept of “responsive” notation — music that wraps to fit your screen. Unlike in a PDF, Tab Sync’s zooming features are notation-aware. That means, if you make the score bigger or smaller, we’ll intelligently fit just the right amount of music on each stave, re-rendering on the fly. This is possible because our music-engraving engine is tailor-made and runs entirely in your web browser.

Zoom in and out via the Settings menu, and you’ll see the music wraps appropriately.

Transpose the entire score into other keys instantly using our transposition feature. Yes, it even transposes tab, making best guesses for fingerings

Fretted Instruments

There are a few bonus features for fretted instruments, such as guitar, mandolin or electric bass.

The interactive fretboard gives you a graphical representation of where notes should be played on your instrument. During playback, the notes light up in real-time. Otherwise, the fretboard highlights all notes you’ve selected in the notation.

The tablature has rich support for techniques particular to fretted instruments — hammer-ons, pull-offs, slides, vibrato, harmonics, several different types of bends and more. We also render beautiful chord diagrams.

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