The World's First (?) Tablature Composer Software - written in 1986 on an Amstrad CPC 464

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5-3-2026

I have restored many of the old songs I made with Tab Composer CPC in ~1986 from 40 year old cassette tapes! Check out the YouTube video for the details.

There is now a DSK image for CPC emulators with the restored songs and special version of Tab Composer CPC that can play back these older songs. Note that the songs were originally created with an ealier version of Tab Composer CPC, before I owned a DD1 disk drive, and there are using a different data format, and this version is also on the disk: tabcomp1.bas. However, this version has the drawback that it does allow load and playback, but not edit / visualization of the loaded data, unlike the latest "official" version of tabcomp.bas Hence, I have extended tabcomp.bas so that it can load the old song data. I have hence added a data conversion routine to the loader - this version is on the song disk under the name tabcompx.bas (x for conversion). So please use this version to load the songs. You will then also be able to edit and see the tablature data, not only play it back (as in tabcomp1.bas).

To use tabcompx.bas for loading a song and to play it back, use the l key to load a song. Just enter the filename without extension. You can see all the songs on the disk via the cataloge function: c. To play back a song, use p and answer the questions ("Geschwindigkeit" = "Speed", use 50, 100, ..., depending on the song; the other input prompts should be understandable for English speakers). You can always get the help page with the h key.

Note that loading one of the restored casette songs with tabcompx.bas takes much longer than with the "official" Tablature Composer on the tabcomp.dsk image, due to the required data conversion.

Moreover, I also retrieved the very first Version 0 of Tab Composer CPC from tape! It is very primitive, so don't use it for anything - it is archived here for the sake of completeness and "just for fun".

Background & Purpose

Having a keen interest in the history of computer music and music composition software, I am researching what officially counts as the world's first tablature composer software.

Currently, the Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tablature_editor still lists "Tab Composer CPC" as the first such program (created in 1986), but the purpose of this Github repo and Wikipedia page entry is to have a correct historical account - so if you should know of any earlier Tablature programs that fit the bill, please let me know, so that the Wikipedia page can be corrected!

This GitHub repo exists to provide evidence for the claims on the Wikipedia page.

Tab Composer CPC ("Tabulations Composer")

So here is my contender for "The World's First" such program - "Tabulations Composer", written in 1986 on my Amstrad CPC 464 in Locomotive BASIC 1.0 I mainly wrote it to help me practice for my guitar lessons.

Tab Composer CPC

The YT video demonstrates how to enter a piece of music in Tablature notation using the WYSIWYG graphical editor, and also music playback. Playback uses the CPC's 3-voice polyphonic GI AY-3-8912 sound chip, which was ubiquitous and quite capable for the time.

Here you can find the Locomotive BASIC program sources, as well as a DSK image that you can run in a CPC Emulator.

I used this program myself to create the music for my BASIC games back in the day, e.g., the 6 highly polyphonic songs in "MANIC".

Development & Historical Context

I started the project in spring 1986 and didn't own a disc drive yet, so first versions of this rather large BASIC program were developed on a purley cassette-based CPC system. This definitely required a lot of patience.

I worked on this program for months, and transcribed dozens of songs from my guitar tab book with it.

Guitar tablature creator software became available much later on the PC AFAIK, and I had no inspiration for this program. I might have seen Chris Hülsbeck's 1986 "Sound Monitor 1.0" on the C64, which is considered the first Sound Tracker program, but no Sound Tracker or something remotely similar was available on the CPC at that time.

There were other CPC music composition programs available though (e.g., "The Music System" by Rainbird), some as early as 1985 when the CPC 464 was released. However, these used standard sheet music notation, not Tablature, and don't count as Sound Trackers either.

Publication Attempts

It never got published - I made two attempts by sending it to the editors of "Happy Computer", and then to the DMV Verlag, which was the publisher of the premier CPC magazine in Germany back in the day, "Schneider CPC International". It was rejected twice due to high complexity, poor documentation, and being of interest to a limited readership / audience only. My publishing attempts probably started in September 1986, and the latest letter of rejection arrived in February 1987 (from DMV). Here is the evidence.

The documentation I wrote back in the day was a mess - I didn't own a printer yet, and my handwriting was poor, so from that point of view it is not surprising that the program got rejected.

I succeeded in selling / publishing other type-in programs for both the CPC and later the Amiga though and eventually made enough money so that I could afford the CPC disk drive as well as an Amiga 500 with 1084 monitor back in the day.

Reflections

Even 35 years later, this is still a usable piece of software, and you can see that entering a piece of Tab music doesn't take long! With a bit of practice, as you can see in the video, it only takes about 5 minutes for the first part of the Bach Minuet shown.

I definitely paid some attention to usability aspects as well and went through a number of iterations. Correcting false notes is not very convenient - but the idea was that "content" needed to be protected from accidental deletions. A single left arrow key hence only deletes the note immediately left to it, and does not go back further, potentially deleting more stuff by accident (there was no UNDO). Hence, the special "correction string" at the top was used to manaveour the cursor back / to the left. Definitely not very convenient - I'd implement that differently today. However, note correction is rarely needed anyway.

The Evidence

My letter including the hand-written program documentation to, and response from, the "DMV Verlag" is presented in the evidence/ folder.