Write and share guitar tabs online

The editor renders standard notation and tablature together, the way tab software has always shown them, and runs entirely in the page — there is no download, no licence and no desktop app. It works on a laptop the same way it works on the machine in the rehearsal room.

Every control in the palette is a readout as well as a button: the duration, the accents and the techniques all show the state of the note under the cursor, so you can see that a beat is already palm-muted without pressing it to find out.

A new tab starts empty. It does not have to be a tab of anything yet — you can write it, save it, come back to it and play it back without ever naming a song, which is usually how a riff becomes a song rather than the other way round.

If you already have a file, open that instead. Guitar Pro files — .gp, .gpx, .gp5 and .gp4 — and MusicXML both open in the editor, so a tab you wrote years ago in something else is not stranded there.

Note lengths, dots, rests and ties are on the left rail, with the technique set beside them: hammer-ons and pull-offs, slides, palm mute, let ring, ghost and dead notes, staccato, tremolo, harmonics, slap, pop and tap, trills and fingering.

Selections work across beats and strings at once, so palm-muting a whole passage or setting the fingering for a run is one press rather than one press per note — and one step to undo, not thirty.

A score can carry several tracks, each with its own instrument, volume and capo, so a part written for two guitars and a bass stays one document. Time signature and tempo are set per bar, and bars can be inserted, duplicated or filled from the one before them.

You can play the score back in the editor while you write it, which is the fastest way to find the bar where what you wrote and what you meant part company.

Every tab has a visibility. Private is yours alone — you can still play it in your own sessions and practise against it. Unlisted gives you a link that anyone can open, and nothing else: it is in no listing and no search, like an unlisted video. Published puts it in the tab catalogue under its song, where anyone can find it, play it and vote on it.

Publishing is the one step that needs the tab to name a song, because the catalogue is organised by song. Everything before that — writing it, saving it, sharing the link — works on a tab that is still just a tab.

The tab catalogue is every published tab, searchable by song or artist, with more than one version where more than one person has had a go. Nobody edits anybody else’s work: you fork the version you like and the copy is yours, which is why a song can carry a drop-D arrangement, a live one and a simplified one without them fighting over the same document.

A tab is only half the job. The other half is getting it in front of the people who have to play it, which is what the rest of Coda does — start a session and everyone in the room reads the tab you wrote on their own phone, following the same song at the same tempo. There is more on how to share sheet music with your band if that is the part you came for.

On your own, the practice player is the same score with a clock behind it, so the tab you wrote is the tab you learn from.