Converting sheet music to tab

I had an enquiry via the Contact Form at the bottom of the page asking about a way to scan in sheet music and convert it to bass tab. I’m sure there are lots of others wondering about this kind of question so I thought I’d do some research and post the answer. Unfortunately the solution is not only inefficient but also expensive. According to what I could find out on some of the guitar forums, the only way to scan and convert sheet music to tab is to use a program called Finale Notepad to convert the music to tab. That program is twenty dollars. But that’s not all, there is a Finale program called PrintMusic which you will need to scan the music in. That costs about one hundred dollars. You will find the products at Finale Music

Power Tab is freeware but you can’t scan the music in – you have to type it.

With both of these solutions you might end up with bass tab that has to be changed around to get better fingering, which would have to be done by someone who can read music and knows the location of the notes on the bass fretboard. Unless you are playing your own original pieces you might be better off typing in the title of the song and “bass tab” into Google. There are a lot of sites that archive bass tabs – if you type “bass tabs” alone into Google you will get over two million results!

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Converting sheet music to tab

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