# Modeling Bends in Popular Music Guitar Tablatures

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.12307 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12307/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 5 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [DadaGP: A Dataset of Tokenized GuitarPro Songs for Sequence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.14653/) (2021)
- [Automatic Composition of Guitar Tabs by Transformers and Groove Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.01431/) (2020)
- [GTR-CTRL: Instrument and Genre Conditioning for Guitar-Focused Music Generation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05393/) (2023)
- [Learning To Generate Piano Music With Sustain Pedals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.01216/) (2021)
- [Symbolic Music Playing Techniques Generation as a Tagging Problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.03436/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [GOAT: A Large Dataset of Paired Guitar Audio Recordings and Tablatures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22655/) (2025)
- [From MIDI to Rich Tablatures: an Automatic Generative System incorporating Lead Guitarists' Fingering and Stylistic choices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09052/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Tablature notation is widely used in popular music to transcribe and share guitar musical content. As a complement to standard score notation, tablatures transcribe performance gesture information including finger positions and a variety of guitar-specific playing techniques such as slides, hammer-on/pull-off or bends.This paper focuses on bends, which enable to progressively shift the pitch of a note, therefore circumventing physical limitations of the discrete fretted fingerboard. In this paper, we propose a set of 25 high-level features, computed for each note of the tablature, to study how bend occurrences can be predicted from their past and future short-term context. Experiments are performed on a corpus of 932 lead guitar tablatures of popular music and show that a decision tree successfully predicts bend occurrences with an F1 score of 0.71 anda limited amount of false positive predictions, demonstrating promising applications to assist the arrangement of non-guitar music into guitar tablatures.