See the structure your ears already hear
Drop in a Guitar Pro file. RiffAtlas finds every repeating riff, phrase, and section — then shows you exactly what to learn first.
You downloaded the tab. Now what?
You're staring at 130 bars of tablature. Some riffs repeat, some don't, and the tab doesn't tell you which. So you start at bar 1 and grind — learning bars you'll play once while missing the four-bar phrase that carries the entire song.
Hidden repetition
Most songs are 60–80% repeated patterns. Tabs don't surface that structure — they just give you a linear list of bars.
Wasted practice time
Without knowing what repeats, you spend hours on bars that only appear once — while the core riffs that define the song go unprioritized.
No big picture
You can hear the song has structure — verse, chorus, bridge — but the tab doesn't map those sections. You're navigating blind.
Every pattern. Every section. Every angle.
RiffAtlas now brings nine analysis views, catalog indexing, library statistics, and tunable scoring into one desktop workspace powered by the Topology engine.
Map the whole song before you practice it
A bar-by-bar pattern map turns the score into readable terrain. Repeated riffs share colors, unique passages stand apart, and the detail pane keeps the actual tablature one click away.
- ✓ Color-coded bar grid for repeated patterns and unique bars
- ✓ Section markers, rhythm hints, hand-position cues, and modifier dots on each cell
- ✓ Relationship overlay for transposed, rhythmic-variant, motif-reuse, and near-match patterns
- ✓ Resizable notation detail pane with occurrence navigation and print report
- ✓ Full-score minimap for jumping around long files
Separate authored sections from detected structure
Structure View combines rehearsal marks from the file with algorithmic boundary detection, then lines those sections up against patterns, repeat markers, complexity, tonal context, and self-similarity.
- ✓ Authored, high-confidence, and inferred section filters
- ✓ Timeline strip with boundaries, pattern colors, and repeat markers
- ✓ Section table with per-section complexity and tonal badges
- ✓ Self-similarity matrix for spotting repeated formal blocks
- ✓ Resizable detail pane for the selected section notation
Read the full track with analysis attached
Score View keeps the normal tablature reading experience, but adds the structural context RiffAtlas found: pattern ownership, consecutive runs, repeats, and the same renderer used in printable reports.
- ✓ Full-track tablature rendered from the analyzed Guitar Pro data
- ✓ Pattern-colored strips above bars for fast cross-reference
- ✓ Repeat markers, techniques, rests, timing, and modifiers preserved
- ✓ Density-aware SVG bar rendering for screen and print
- ✓ Print the full score view when you need a practice copy
See where the riff lives on the fretboard
Neck View translates the selected pattern into fretboard motion, so position shifts, stretches, dense frets, and playback timing become visible before your hands learn them the hard way.
- ✓ Animated fretboard playback with transport controls
- ✓ Density heatmap for high-traffic fret positions
- ✓ Filmstrip view of the pattern across time
- ✓ Hand-position profile with shifts, spans, stretches, and dominant position
- ✓ Pattern colors stay aligned with the rest of the analysis workspace
Follow every pattern occurrence in time
Timeline View lays pattern occurrences into swimlanes, making repeats, near matches, unique bars, and long-range form easier to compare than they are in linear notation alone.
- ✓ Swimlane layout for top-level pattern occurrences
- ✓ Zoom controls and fit-to-view navigation for long songs
- ✓ Unique-row treatment for bars that do not belong to a repeated pattern
- ✓ Relationship panel links related patterns from the selected occurrence
- ✓ Printable timeline pattern report
Rank the riffs by practice value
Prominence View sorts discovered patterns by coverage and granularity, helping you decide what matters first. Pattern cards now carry relationship counts, energy signatures, and picking hints where available.
- ✓ Pattern ranking by prominence score, occurrence count, and bar coverage
- ✓ Selectable checklist for building a practice plan
- ✓ Mini energy signatures and derived labels on each pattern
- ✓ Picking badges for tremolo, sweep, alternate, and cross-string demands
- ✓ Notation pane with related-pattern context and print report
Measure what makes a passage difficult
Complexity View breaks the track into kinetic demand, tempo density, technique demand, and cognitive load, then lets you tune the weighting to match the kind of difficulty you care about.
- ✓ Overall complexity tier plus four-dimensional radar chart
- ✓ Clickable dimension cards with detailed sub-score explanations
- ✓ Per-bar complexity curve with heatstrip for finding spikes
- ✓ Weight presets, custom sliders, before-and-after recalculation, and saved scoring config
- ✓ Section complexity breakdown with confidence filters
Understand the rhythmic personality of the track
Rhythm View summarizes how the part sits against the beat, then shows where syncopation, tuplets, mixed meter, and character changes happen bar by bar.
- ✓ Track-level rhythmic character such as straight, syncopated, swung, galloping, or irregular
- ✓ Strong-beat, weak-beat, off-beat, and tuplet ratio bars
- ✓ Dominant subdivision and mean syncopation metrics
- ✓ Per-bar syncopation curve with character heatstrip
- ✓ Mixed-meter flags surfaced from the rhythmic profile
Read the feel of the riff, not just the notes
Energy View turns each bar and pattern into a nine-dimension signature, so density, contour, register, dissonance, attack, and technique can be compared as musical shape.
- ✓ Terrain and dimension-grid subviews for the same energy data
- ✓ Nine dimensions including density, rhythmic density, register, contour, interval size, dissonance, technique, attack, and tempo-adjusted difficulty
- ✓ Track and pattern labels such as heavy, frantic, smooth, jagged, tense, and relaxed
- ✓ Overlay toggles for density, technique density, and tempo-adjusted difficulty
- ✓ Bar detail pane with previous/next navigation
Turn a folder of tabs into a searchable library
The catalog workspace indexes supported tablature files through the Topology Analysis Engine, tracks scan status, and lets you open analyzed scores straight back into the workspace.
- ✓ Catalog root selection with scan progress from the Topology Analysis Engine
- ✓ Search, filters, sortable rows, and status badges for indexed files
- ✓ Entry states for analyzed, partial, error, missing, and fingerprinted files
- ✓ Double-click an available entry to open it for analysis
- ✓ Resizable bottom detail pane for selected file metadata
Compare an entire library, not just one song
Statistics mode aggregates dozens of dimensions across the catalog and ranks files by top and bottom values, turning a pile of tabs into a map of what your library contains.
- ✓ Aggregate statistics across 54 catalog dimensions
- ✓ Top-10 and bottom-10 rankings per dimension
- ✓ Dimension categories for complexity, rhythm, tonal, picking, and energy data
- ✓ Degenerate-dimension and tie-band handling for cleaner comparisons
- ✓ Catalog scores update when saved complexity weights change
Keep library and scoring preferences under your control
The control panel centralizes catalog management and complexity scoring preferences, including saved weights that can immediately re-rank the catalog without a full backend re-analysis.
- ✓ Manage the catalog root and library scan settings
- ✓ Edit and save complexity profile weights
- ✓ Persist scoring preferences across sessions
- ✓ Trigger catalog re-scoring when relevant weight changes require it
- ✓ Use the same scoring model in Complexity View and catalog rankings
Serious analysis under the hood
RiffAtlas reads Guitar Pro data directly, runs structural pattern discovery, section detection, tonal analysis, rhythmic profiling, complexity scoring, energy signatures, picking analysis, and catalog aggregation, then turns that data into views you can actually practice from.
Pattern Relationships
Flags identical, transposed, rhythmic-variant, motif-reuse, and near-match relationships so variants do not disappear into noise.
Complexity Profiling
Scores kinetic demand, tempo density, technique demand, and cognitive load with user-tunable weights.
Rhythm & Energy
Combines syncopation, beat placement, subdivision, density, contour, register, dissonance, attack, and technique into readable profiles.
Library-Scale Cataloging
Indexes supported tab files, tracks analysis status, and aggregates dimensions across your collection.
Three steps to structure
No cloud. No account. Just a desktop app that works.
Open a tab file
Native Guitar Pro 7/8 files or MusicXML. No conversion needed — just open the file you already have.
Topology analyzes
The engine runs a multi-stage pipeline — exact matching, fuzzy matching, noise reduction — in under a second.
See the structure
Explore patterns across four views — Terrain, Score, Prominence, and Complexity. Start practicing what matters.
Works with your files
Open Guitar Pro files directly — modern or legacy, no export step needed.
Got a library of legacy tabs? They just work. RiffAtlas runs locally on your machine — your files never leave your computer.
Frequently Asked Questions
The short answers. For the longer story, read how RiffAtlas came to be.
What is RiffAtlas?
RiffAtlas is a desktop application that analyzes guitar tablature files and visually maps out repeating patterns. Load a Guitar Pro file, and RiffAtlas instantly shows you which bars are identical, which are similar, and how they relate to each other — so you know what to practice first.
What tabs does RiffAtlas support?
RiffAtlas works with native Guitar Pro 7 and 8 files
(.gp)
as well as MusicXML exports
(.xml,
.musicxml).
We recommend using .gp
files directly — no export step, no quirks. If demand warrants it,
additional formats can be added in the future.
How does it work?
RiffAtlas sends each file to the local Topology engine, which parses the Guitar Pro data and builds a structural profile of the score: repeated patterns, near matches, section boundaries, tonal context, rhythm, fretboard movement, complexity, energy, and picking demands. The desktop app then turns that analysis into purpose-built views: Terrain for the pattern map, Structure for song form, Score for full notation, Neck for fretboard movement, Timeline for occurrences, Prominence for practice priority, Complexity for difficulty, Rhythm for syncopation and beat placement, and Energy for musical feel. The catalog can also index a whole folder of tabs so you can search, filter, compare, and rank your library instead of opening one file at a time.
Who is this for?
Anyone who's ever stared at a 120-bar tab and wondered where to even start. If you learn songs by identifying what repeats — figuring out which phrases give you the most coverage for the least effort — RiffAtlas was built for exactly that workflow. If you've ever found yourself scribbling bar numbers in the margins of a printout, drawing arrows between repeated sections, you already know why this exists.
Does it work for every song?
Songs are living, organic creations — the level of inner-score repetition varies wildly. A heavily riff-driven metal track will light up like a Christmas tree. A progressive piece with minimal repetition will show fewer patterns, because there are fewer patterns to find. The quality of the tab matters too — a well-transcribed Guitar Pro file produces better results than a rough one.
What platforms does it run on?
RiffAtlas is a desktop application for Windows, macOS, and Linux. No web or mobile versions are planned for v1.x.
What will it cost?
RiffAtlas will be a one-time purchase in the $15–$25 range. One license, one user, valid for all v1.x releases — including every feature on the v1.x roadmap. No subscriptions.
When will it be released?
The core analysis engine is proven and working. We're currently in the heavy-testing phase: throwing hundreds of real-world tabs at it, verifying accuracy, and polishing the UI. A release date will be announced once testing wraps up.
What's on the roadmap beyond the initial v1.0 release?
Future enhancements under consideration for the v1.x series include batch analysis reports, song section detection (e.g., "these bars look like a solo"), retrograde pattern detection, and cross-track analysis — finding similarities between bass and guitar parts, for example.
Be first to try RiffAtlas
We're building toward a public release. Drop your email and we'll let you know when early access opens.
One email when we launch. That's it.