About TabWhale

Reading Standard Music Notation (SMN) is not an easy job as it requires music knowledge and a lot of practice. Since it's the complete form of music representation, it's capable of translating any song, on any instrument, to a human-readable structure.

Is that necessary? Let's say you are a beginner, learning your first instrument. You want to learn a few songs, but those sheets are hard! If you knew you had to learn Standard Music Notation first, probably you wouldn't even have bought the instrument. What a waste of time and money, you might think. You start searching for a few lessons on YouTube and find out you can learn a few songs without it. Then, you find out the instrument you're learning has an easier
way of representing songs: the tab. That's good news! You can learn any song you want without ever needing to read Standard Music Notation. You listen to the song, read the tabs, and play it on your instrument.

These alternative ways of writing songs are important for beginners. It removes the complexity. The objective was never to learn Standard Music Notation; it was to play the instrument, learn songs, and have fun.

The Standard Music Notation becomes necessary when you want to learn a song but it's not available as tabs for your instrument. Since the SMN is the de facto way of representing music, someone on the internet will probably have written it and published it somewhere. It will probably be an arrangement for another instrument, but it's not a problem since you can transpose the sheet and adapt to your needs.

So, where does TabWhale fit in this story? TabWhale wants to make it easy to read and write tabs for your instrument of choice. It provides tools to improve the learning experience. It's a site where players of any musical instrument can easily create and share tabs. A place where an Ocarina tab can be automatically translated into a Kalimba tab, and vice-versa.

TabWhale is a very young website. The focus now is to provide the best experience for Kalimba players. After reaching this goal, it should do the same for the next instrument players. Maybe it's for Ocarina players, maybe for Flute, maybe Guitar or Ukulele. We don't know until we get there, right? 😅

Our website is tabwhale.com. We also have a blog where you can learn about Kalimba.