Power Tab Taxonomy 101
Power Tab Taxonomy 101
I've added a couple of new category related fields to the header information portion of the Power Tab file format with the hopes that it will help people better catalogue their files. These fields will eventually be added to the PT Librarian with full searching and filtering capabilities. What I need now is some input on the categories themselves. The goal is to keep the list of categories as small as possible. If there are any categories that you think should be added, combined, replaced or removed from the following lists, please post a comment. Thanks.
Genre
The first field, is the genre field, which indicates the music genre of the song or lesson. I went to a handful of popular music related Web sites, (allmusic/amazon/etc) and jotted down the primary musical categories they use for navigating their sites. I took the most common items among the sites, and came up with the following list:
Alternative
Blues
Children's Music
Christian & Gospel
Classical
Country
Dance
Easy Listening
Electronic
Flamenco
Folk
Heavy Metal
Holiday
Jazz
Latin
New Age
Other
Pop
Rhythm & Blues
Rap
Reggae
Rock
Soundtrack
Unclassified
Vocal
World
Lesson Category
The second field, is a category field that applies to lessons. This field represents the area of study the lesson entails. For this item, I went to a handful of guitar, bass and percussion lesson sites and jotted down as many topics as I could find. Here's the list:
Intervals
Scales
Chords
Modes
Keys
Chord Progressions
Rhythm
Soloing
Arpeggios
Alternate Picking
Tapping
Slapping
Bending
Sliding
Hammer/Pull
Harmonics
Fingerpicking
Flatpicking
Slide Guitar
Artist Style (i.e. How to play like 'x')
Flams
Rolls
Fills
Pedal Hi-Hat
Open Hi-Hat
Bass Drum
Exercises/Warm-ups
Other
This list is the one that will need some tweaking. Instructors will have a better feel than I about which categories are more important/popular than others.
I've added a couple of new category related fields to the header information portion of the Power Tab file format with the hopes that it will help people better catalogue their files. These fields will eventually be added to the PT Librarian with full searching and filtering capabilities. What I need now is some input on the categories themselves. The goal is to keep the list of categories as small as possible. If there are any categories that you think should be added, combined, replaced or removed from the following lists, please post a comment. Thanks.
Genre
The first field, is the genre field, which indicates the music genre of the song or lesson. I went to a handful of popular music related Web sites, (allmusic/amazon/etc) and jotted down the primary musical categories they use for navigating their sites. I took the most common items among the sites, and came up with the following list:
Alternative
Blues
Children's Music
Christian & Gospel
Classical
Country
Dance
Easy Listening
Electronic
Flamenco
Folk
Heavy Metal
Holiday
Jazz
Latin
New Age
Other
Pop
Rhythm & Blues
Rap
Reggae
Rock
Soundtrack
Unclassified
Vocal
World
Lesson Category
The second field, is a category field that applies to lessons. This field represents the area of study the lesson entails. For this item, I went to a handful of guitar, bass and percussion lesson sites and jotted down as many topics as I could find. Here's the list:
Intervals
Scales
Chords
Modes
Keys
Chord Progressions
Rhythm
Soloing
Arpeggios
Alternate Picking
Tapping
Slapping
Bending
Sliding
Hammer/Pull
Harmonics
Fingerpicking
Flatpicking
Slide Guitar
Artist Style (i.e. How to play like 'x')
Flams
Rolls
Fills
Pedal Hi-Hat
Open Hi-Hat
Bass Drum
Exercises/Warm-ups
Other
This list is the one that will need some tweaking. Instructors will have a better feel than I about which categories are more important/popular than others.
posted by Power Tab at Saturday, June 17, 2006
14 Comments:
Sounds pretty good so far. My only is suggestion is perhaps the addition of theme tabs (Television, Movie, Video Games, ...) as they can be quite popular as well for categorizing.
I equate all 3 of those as being the soundtrack genre.
Perhaps Tv, Movie and Video Games could be Soundtrack subgenres?
They're definately subgenres, but I'm trying to avoid the "finite-ness" of a subgenre field.
Do you guys feel that splitting the soundtrack genre into 3 separate genres is absolutely necessary?
Fusion!!
I see. I just never thought to having them grouped under "Soundtrack". Makes sense, though.
I think there should be a place for trance, psychedelic, and techno type songs... maybe even classic rock. just a friendly suggestion. :) but especially trance!!
I think there needs to be a standard.
The difference between something like this, and Quicken, is the files are being distributed. If I download a file that has the genre as "Christian and Gospel", another that's "CHRISTIAN", and a third that's "Christian & Gospel", then I've esentially got 3 files that should be represented by 1 genre, but are instead represented by 3. You also have to worry about things like spelling mistakes.
If a genre was left out, a person could use "Other" or "Unclassified", and submit the genre for approval to be added to the standard.
A Ska function would be really good. Sub-Genre's would be nice, but generally, I would like it so it would come under the same thing, your example being "Christian" and "Christian and Gospel". A sub-Genre feature, if implemented, would need to be done before the release of the final, it could be un-finished for the beta, but I think it should be finished by the final version, and be decided upon. BTW, this is a good idea Brad!
Hi!
Nice work!
Could this be of any interest?
It's a list of "guitar performance techniques"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Guitar_performance_techniques
Keep it up!
Thanks for the list, just the type of thing I was working for.
Hi,
Good ideas, but I would also like some bugs in Powertab Editor Ironed out. At this time when you file a Tab as lesson "performances notes" don't get printed, while these are quite important, especially for lessons (and since I use PT editor a lot for my lessons...).
What is also most annoying is the "enharmonical notation" at times.
I can imagine PT editor development is not on your priority list since it should be according to your words be replaced by version 2, but in this light I find it strange you develop yet another soft relating to PT editor 1.7 instead of releasing the long awaited PT editor V.2.
I hope you don't take this critiscism badely since I love to use PT. editor. I also use Sibelius G7 and Guitarpro 5 and did shell out some some money for these, but frankly prefer the workflow of PT Editor.
Sincerely,
Hugo
I agree with the idea of NOT creating sub-genres. Lets be honest if you live long enough everything becomes classic something. So if it looks like a duck and walks like a duck... you guessed it.
I beileve you need to amke powertab where you can actually edit the sheet music part and print sheet music.
Post a Comment
<< Home