The tabr package for creating guitar tablature (“tabs”) from R code is now available on CRAN. tabr provides programmatic music notation and a wrapper around LilyPond for creating quality guitar tablature.

This post is just a quick update to mention that v0.3.0 has now been released on CRAN. And since I don’t have much time for blogging, I’m basically just pasting the release notes here below.

But the key changes are these:

• Make fretbaord plots with ggplot.
• Much more robust note/phrase/chord syntax validation.
• A collection of music programming functions have been added for more easily transforming among scales, modes, keys, chords, notes, etc.
• Custom print methods that use a splash of color.
• A table containing thousands of guitar chords and associated functions for mapping chords.
• A bunch more vignettes! Yay, happy vignettes!
• Bug fixes

tabr 0.3.0 release notes

• Added fretboard_plot for making fretboard diagrams outside of the LilyPond tablature pipeline. This necessitates importing ggplot2.
• Added functions for phrase validation, coercion and decomposition back to original character string inputs.
• Added functions for note, pitch, chord and octave equivalence checks.
• Added a collection of functions for constructing and working with common chords. The chord constructors are among the chord_*-named functions and also have shorter x*-named aliases. These are “piano chords,” i.e., based on the condensed, defining intervals.
• Added guitarChords dataset containing several thousand formations of guitar chord voicings.
• Added helper functions that use guitarChords for obtaining guitar chord information and mapping between different defining properties of a chord, most notably the addition of gc_notes and gc_fretboard for mapping chord names to noteworthy strings and fretboard diagram syntax.
• Added helper functions for working with basic note/pitch strings.
• Added helper functions for working with musical scales and modes.
• Added helper functions for working with musical intervals.
• Added noteworthy class, used internally, optional for users (includes custom print and summary methods).
• Added mainIntervals dataset.
• Added more internal checks of note and chord syntax validity across functions that work with string representations (pre-phrase object construction).
• Update older functions to utilize the new, more robust and stricter validation checks and offer more consistent noteworthy class output.
• updated transpose to handle additional edge cases, including a new style option, strip.
• Updated and added new unit tests.
• Bug fix for case where NA-valued no-chord rests (s or r) were unnamed in output of chord_set.
• Fixed entry in tabrSyntax.
• Fix class assignment bug and updated as_phrase.
• Added a new column of relative interval size to internal .keydata helper table.
• Added new vignettes focusing on the programming aspect of tabr.
• Updated documentation.