What are the most used guitar positions?

Abstract

The playing of stringed instruments can be notated with symbolic tablatures, indicating for each note, the string, and the position on the fretboard at which it has to be played. We propose an encoding for tablatures in which the hand position on the fretboard is encoded to ease computational analysis and generation of guitar music. We analyze a corpus of 1022 guitar tablatures in standard tuning that were accurately transcribed in the corpus MySongBook, spanning metal, rock, pop, jazz/blues, and baroque/classical/romantic repertoires. We show how some of the proposed encodings reveal relevant statistics and some invariance properties on such guitar music. We show study unusual guitarist gestures around the G/B string pair due to its interval of major third, compared to the perfect fourth between other adjacent pairs of strings. We study the corpus across genres and textures (rhythm and lead parts) and how same relative chord positions are used along the fretboard. We distribute sets of 1000 most frequent vectors in different encodings for these five music genres.