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 repetition. Visualized.
RiffAtlas runs a multi-stage analysis pipeline on your tablature and presents the results in two purpose-built views.
See the whole song at a glance
Every bar is a colored cell. Same color means same pattern. The grid instantly reveals verse/chorus structure, recurring riffs, and unique passages — without reading a single note.
- ✓ Color-coded pattern map of the entire score
- ✓ Multi-track support — switch between guitar parts
- ✓ Click any bar to see full tablature notation
- ✓ Minimap for navigating long songs
- ✓ Print any pattern's notation for practice
Learn what matters first
Patterns ranked by how much of the song they cover. The top pattern might appear 7 times across 28 bars — that's the riff you learn first. The one that appears once? Learn it last.
- ✓ Patterns ranked by prominence score
- ✓ Full tablature notation per pattern
- ✓ Exact and near-match occurrences identified
- ✓ Multi-track support — switch between guitar parts
Serious analysis under the hood
The Topology engine runs a 10-stage pipeline — exact matching, phase-offset collapse, containment detection, composite analysis, fuzzy matching, and more. It doesn't just find repeated bars. It finds repeated phrases, detects near-matches, and filters out noise so you see the patterns that actually matter.
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 in TerrainView or ProminenceView. Print notation. Start practicing what matters.
Works with your files
Open Guitar Pro files directly — no export step needed.
More formats coming. 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 has two main views. Terrain View gives you a bird's-eye color map of the entire score — identical bars share colors, so repeating sections jump out at a glance. Prominence View ranks discovered patterns by a weighted formula, putting the most prevalent phrases at the top of the list so you can prioritize your practice 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.