"Enter TableauMan": Creating Useful Data Visualizations with old school Guitar Tab and Metallica

Off to Never Never Land... I've always been a big guitar dork and the other day I had a weird idea. I thought what if I took some of the massive amount of text-based guitar tablature available on the net, and somehow programatically imported it into a normalized database structure. Could I do it quickly, and then, WHAT could I possibly DO with this data. Would anyone give a shit? Well, I do. I decided to test it out - some python, a sample tab file (heh), and a few hours later I had... well, a table of oddly formatted song data ~5k rows deep. What the hell do I do with this? Let's throw it at Tableau, add a dash of 'creative usage', and viola you have...

Version 0.1 of the "Hackified TABleau Guitar Learning System"! Just kidding, kinda..

The thing is, I built my process so I *could* crank through more song files and visualize them in this same way - not to mention the chord-naming and note transcription that I had planned, but got hella tired before it was fully implemented, so it's left out for now. [box type="tick" style="rounded" border="full"]Give it a try, I also integrated a video that is keyed to particular parts / phrases of the song, so you can select a song "part" (via the icons), the tab will skip there and the video will queue up to that particular part. You can also just scroll through as-is - it is the exact sequence for the song, including solo (I tested it extensively)[/box]

Could you use this to learn Sandman? HELL YES, if you don't mind scrolling and clicking...

Kinda cool, eh? [box type="info" style="rounded" border="full"] Do you enjoy Metallica-themed Data Visualizations? Check out MetallicAnalysis for ton more![/box] If you want the code of my "tab crunching" python script, check this post here.