# GuitarFlow: Realistic Electric Guitar Synthesis From Tablatures via Flow Matching and Style Transfer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.21872 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21872/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (2022)
- [WaveNet: A Generative Model for Raw Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.03499/) (2016)
- [Improving and generalizing flow-based generative models with minibatch optimal transport](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00482/) (2023)
- [CNN Architectures for Large-Scale Audio Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.09430/) (2016)
- [High Fidelity Neural Audio Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13438/) (2022)
- [PANNs: Large-Scale Pretrained Audio Neural Networks for Audio Pattern Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.10211/) (2019)
- [Enabling Factorized Piano Music Modeling and Generation with the MAESTRO Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.12247/) (2018)
- [DDSP: Differentiable Digital Signal Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04643/) (2020)
- [Long-form music generation with latent diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10301/) (2024)
- [RAVE: A variational autoencoder for fast and high-quality neural audio synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05011/) (2021)
- [Frieren: Efficient Video-to-Audio Generation Network with Rectified Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00320/) (2024)
- [Multi-instrument Music Synthesis with Spectrogram Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05408/) (2022)
- [TimbreTron: A WaveNet(CycleGAN(CQT(Audio))) Pipeline for Musical Timbre Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.09620/) (2018)
- [Music2Latent: Consistency Autoencoders for Latent Audio Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06500/) (2024)
- [LAFMA: A Latent Flow Matching Model for Text-to-Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08203/) (2024)
- [KAD: No More FAD! An Effective and Efficient Evaluation Metric for Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15602/) (2025)
- [A Universal Music Translation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07848/) (2018)
- [DadaGP: A Dataset of Tokenized GuitarPro Songs for Sequence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.14653/) (2021)
- [Neural Music Synthesis for Flexible Timbre Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00223/) (2018)
- [DDX7: Differentiable FM Synthesis of Musical Instrument Sounds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.06169/) (2022)
- [GTR-CTRL: Instrument and Genre Conditioning for Guitar-Focused Music Generation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05393/) (2023)
- [GOAT: A Large Dataset of Paired Guitar Audio Recordings and Tablatures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22655/) (2025)
- [FretNet: Continuous-Valued Pitch Contour Streaming for Polyphonic Guitar Tablature Transcription](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03023/) (2022)
- [Expressive Acoustic Guitar Sound Synthesis with an Instrument-Specific Input Representation and Diffusion Outpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13498/) (2024)
- [ProgGP: From GuitarPro Tablature Neural Generation To Progressive Metal Production](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05328/) (2023)
- [Towards zero-shot amplifier modeling: One-to-many amplifier modeling via tone embedding control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10646/) (2024)
- [MIDI-to-Tab: Guitar Tablature Inference via Masked Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05024/) (2024)
- [Differentiable Modelling of Percussive Audio with Transient and Spectral Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06649/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [PianoKontext: Expressive Performance Rendering from Deadpan Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.12282/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Music generation in the audio domain using artificial intelligence (AI) has witnessed steady progress in recent years. However for some instruments, particularly the guitar, controllable instrument synthesis remains limited in expressivity. We introduce GuitarFlow, a model designed specifically for electric guitar synthesis. The generative process is guided using tablatures, an ubiquitous and intuitive guitar-specific symbolic format. The tablature format easily represents guitar-specific playing techniques (e.g. bends, muted strings and legatos), which are more difficult to represent in other common music notation formats such as MIDI. Our model relies on an intermediary step of first rendering the tablature to audio using a simple sample-based virtual instrument, then performing style transfer using Flow Matching in order to transform the virtual instrument audio into more realistic sounding examples. This results in a model that is quick to train and to perform inference, requiring less than 6 hours of training data. We present the results of objective evaluation metrics, together with a listening test, in which we show significant improvement in the realism of the generated guitar audio from tablatures.