Staff and tab paper
Notation on top, tablature underneath, joined into one system — so the rhythm and the fingering are read as one thing.
Tab says where to put your fingers and never says when. Standard notation says when with complete precision and leaves you to work out where, which on a guitar is genuinely ambiguous — the same pitch is available in as many as four places. Putting the two on top of each other and joining them into one system gives you both, and it is how nearly every printed guitar book has done it for forty years.
The join matters. This sheet draws a vertical line at the start of the system connecting the staff to the tab, and runs every bar line straight through both, so a bar on the staff is unambiguously the same bar on the tab underneath. Two separately ruled staves that merely happen to sit near each other do not give you that, and the first time the two drift out of alignment mid-page you find out why it is worth having.
The gap between the staff and the tab is deliberately generous. Stems and beams hang below the notation staff, and on many published layouts the rhythm is written with stems in the tab as well, so the space between the two is working space rather than air. Five staff spaces keeps them clear of each other at every staff height the generator offers.
Both halves size independently. The staff height control moves the notation staff, the tab spacing control moves the tablature, and the two are set by different considerations — one by how big you want to write notes, the other by how much room a two-digit fret number needs.
Four systems is what a page holds, and that is the honest cost of this sheet: a staff plus a gap plus six tab lines is roughly three times the height of tab alone. If you are running out of page, the staff height and the tab spacing come down independently, and dropping the staff to rastral No. 3 buys most of a fifth system without touching the tab.
Staff and tab paper by instrument
- Staff and tab paper, any sizeThe full generator — any staff height, six systems
- Blank sheet musicFive-line staves · manuscript paper at any staff height
- Guitar tab paperSix lines · one per string, spacing you can set
- Bass tab paperFour lines · wider spacing for high fret numbers
- Ukulele tab paperFour lines · tighter spacing, short neck
- Grand staff paperTwo staves joined by a brace · piano, harp, organ
Questions
Why write both notation and tab?
Because each one is missing what the other has. Tab gives you a fingering and no rhythm; notation gives you a rhythm and, on a fretted instrument, an ambiguous fingering. Written together the rhythm is read off the top and the position off the bottom, which is why guitar publishers settled on it.
Can I use this for a five-string bass?
Yes — set the tab lines control to five and the tab half becomes a five-line bass staff under the notation. The system still joins and the bar lines still run through both. Six works for a six-string bass or a standard guitar the same way.
How do I check a staff-and-tab system printed at the right size?
The two halves are set by separate controls, so check them separately: the five-line staff should measure the staff height you chose, and the six-line tab should measure five times the tab spacing — 22.5 mm at the 4.5 mm default. If one is right and the other is not, you have found a genuine bug rather than a printer setting; if both are short by the same fraction, the print dialogue shrank the page.
Other tools
- Staff and tab paperBlank manuscript and tablature ruled to a staff height you can measure with a ruler, not to whatever the PDF you found happened to be.
- Beading graph paperCharting paper drawn from the bead's own measurements, so the beads on the page are the size of the beads in the tube.
- Cross stitch pattern paperCharting paper at the size your stitches will actually be, for the count of fabric you actually have.
- English paper piecing templatesPick a shape, type the side length you actually want, and print it at true size.
- Bubble answer sheet generatorScantron-style answer sheets, built to your question count.
- Blank clock facesClock faces with hands drawn where they genuinely belong — at 3:45 the hour hand sits three quarters of the way to four, because that is what a clock does.
- Blank periodic tableEvery blank periodic table online is a fixed image.
- Attendance sheet and gradebook gridsPaste twenty-eight names, choose a month, print.
- Printable graph paperAny spacing you like, in millimetres or inches, printed at true size.
- Printable dot grid paperDot paper at the spacing you actually use — 5 mm for a bullet journal, or whatever you type.
- Printable lined paperCollege ruled, wide ruled, or handwriting paper with a dashed midline — at the real spacings, not an approximation.
- Year in pixelsOne cell a day for a whole year, drawn for the year you name — so February is the right length and the months stop where they actually stop.
- Savings and goal colouring chartsType your goal and how many cells you want.
