Traditional music notation is very general and powerful, but rather complex and eccentric and requiring special tools. Guitar tabs are easy to read, but a little awkward to write and for software to read, and are missing time information.
Alternative music notations like abc and guido seem a good kind of approach: straightforward and text-based. They are more digitally-oriented than traditional notation and tabs.
GITI is somewhat like abc but specialised for guitar, or like tabs but without the quasi-graphical form: easy to read and write for both human and software, and including plenty of musical information.
As a short introduction, GITI breaks down into a sequence of space-separated tokens – ‘sounds’, and they break into three colon-separated parts – ‘act’, ‘pitch’, and ‘time’.
For example: pluck : string 2, fret 4, vibrato : 1 quarter-note:
p:24v:4
Or more complex, a doubled-bend, then slide:
p:414+2=512:4e s:414/:*
A whole riff – Black Sabbath ‘Black Sabbath’:
@giti:e-2 @tuning:std @tempo:4:3.603 | 13=25:2 . 35:* | 24r1:2_4_8e s:24/:8s |
There you can begin to see: the act part is optional, chords are ‘=’-separated pitches, parts the same as the previous sound are notated with ‘*’, times are extendable with ‘_’, and bars and segments are optionally showable with ‘|’ and ‘.’.
The full description/specification is:
References: