The Steel Guitar Forum

Hey gang! New steel guitarist here. Coming from the gypsy jazz world, transcription is a big thing. There's this neat website called soundslice that lets you sync tablature to youtube videos and I talked the creator into including some steel guitar tunings (starting with E13, A6 and C6)

Check out some transcriptions I did recently:

Boot Heel Drag performed by Chris Scruggs
https://www.soundslice.com/slices/LZwcc/

Teardrop performed by Doug Beaumier
https://www.soundslice.com/slices/sJycc/

Not sure how useful this is in a general sense since I'm finding that tunings are a very personal thing, but hopefully using the vanilla tunings would be useful to anyone.

Very useful links. Keep on posting these tabs, if it's possible, please. This would make this Forum even more educative, than it already is. . . BTW, listening to "Alcatraz Islanders" is a real pleasure

Victor, that's very amazing and helpful, how exactly is the syncing done, and how is accurate tab notation created? Think pedals and levers could work with this?

I've been contemplating learning how to sync audio to tab in something like Adobe Premier, having the steel notes being played change color on the tab page in sync with the audio/video, but can only see that as a likely time investment that I can't handle, and a tedious, inefficient way to achieve what I want for education purposes.

Drop me a line or phone, let's talk! Thanks.

All best,
John McClung
Pedal Steel Lessons, Casuals, Sessions
Olympia, WA 98512
Email & PayPal fees – steelguitarlessons@earthlink.net
Easy PayPal link: paypal.me/JohnMcClung
Website – http://steelguitarlessons.com
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Cell & text: 310-480-0717

Good question John !
... I'd also be interested

John McClung wrote:Victor, that's very amazing and helpful, how exactly is the syncing done, and how is accurate tab notation created? Think pedals and levers could work with this?

Sync'ing is as good as you are at tapping in the tempo. Tab accuracy is as good as YOU are at entering it.

Perhaps this should be explained: Soundslice is a web-based transcription tool. YOU do the transcribing, it hosts the transcription on the web. It that has a bit of a learning curve. You basically start with a youtube video or audio file you specify and manually type in the transcription and sync it yourself. I believe there are also options to import music notation from software like Sibelius and synchronize.

Either way, the first step is to play the video/audio and tap in the first beat of every measure for the portion you want to transcribe (don't have to get it perfect first go, you can slide/adjust these later). Then when you enter in your transcription to the tool manually, you would make sure the note durations (ex: 8th notes, rests, and quarter notes) are correct. If your tap tempo for the measures was good, then the notes should align, more or less. If not, you can actually slide the bars and notes themselves around to sync better.

While you transcribe you can slow down/and loop certain sections without changing pitch. It really is an amazing tool built by someone who clearly is a dedicated musician as well as a phenomenal coder.

As for pedals and levers, I'm not sure how these are notated in general for steel guitarists (I'm new). Soundslice has the basic guitar bend notation in there, so maybe that would be a stand in. You can also display custom explaining text when all notation fails.

The help section explains it better than I possibly could.
https://www.soundslice.com/help/

There are some video tutorials from some users on Youtube, but they seem outdated. You should just dive in and give it a try though.

As an educator, they have pricing plans to allow you to sell lessons on there too. I really think you should look into this over developing something on your own.

I should also say that their team is very responsive to feature requests. All it took for them to add 4 steel guitar tunings was a couple of emails.

So if there's something useful for steel guitarists they would probably add it if there was enough interest.

Victor -

I think you might be really onto something here - especially for beginner steelers.

And for us old timers, it would be kind of neat to allow faster tempo tunes (and speed picking) to be slowed down 'cause those passages can fly by.

I'll look forward to your next application.

Ron

Ron, my dream would be to have tab synced with video with audio, so you can see how it's played in tab, hear it in real time, and watch playing details. Guess that's my project for another lifetime, unless anyone knows some tricks I don't.

Victor, thanks so much for that lucid explanation! I'll look into all this in all my spare time!