Published Notation vs the Songsterr GPs

The question

Songsterr's Zappa tabs are community and AI made. The archive built on 28 August holds published notation for these same two records, so each tab can be checked against a source with real editorial standing rather than taken on trust. One song per pass. This is pass 1, Zomby Woof, chosen because it has two independent published sources, three tabs to compare, and the odd-meter writing that makes a transcription easy to get wrong.

What the published side actually says

Two independent sources. Their overlap is limited, so what they give is combined coverage without contradiction rather than mutual corroboration. Sloots documents one passage, Brown documents a different one, and neither confirms the other's bars.

1. Kasper Sloots / Paul Pappas, zappa-analysis.com

Full score of Zomby Woof from 1:39 to 2:10, updated fall 2024, deposited at the I-depot in The Hague. He identifies it as a transcription from the recording. A separate interlude image on the same page is reproduced from the Over-Nite Sensation Guitar Book, page 64, serving as a comparison rather than as the source of the excerpt. He prints thirteen bars, running 7/8, 5/4, 10/16 ×4, 7/8, 6/4, 4/4 ×5.

2. Ryan Brown, DRUM Magazine

"It has lots of fives, including groups of five sixteenth-notes and quintuplets. The song also has a lot of different time signatures."

"I always hear the 15/16 section as two groups of notes: one group of four eighth-notes, plus one group of seven sixteenth-notes."

Four eighths is 8/16, plus seven sixteenths is 15/16. The arithmetic checks.

The three Songsterr tabs against that set

Album track length is 5:11. Drum-track data read from Songsterr's own revision API.

Two of the five staves on s5820647 contain rests and nothing else. A survey of 34 Zappa tabs across both records found this on three of them, and never on a tab built in the editor. Incomplete uploads are the pattern here, and they appear across tools.

The alignment test

A matching list of labels proves less than it looks like, since the same labels could sit in the wrong bars. Sloots states his own timestamps and prints thirteen bars, so the tab's tempo map gives a check on both the span and its contents.

Thirteen bars is both the count Sloots prints and the closest duration match, at 32.00 s against 31.0 s. Its endpoints sit at +2.07 s and +3.07 s, so the tab runs about one second long across the passage. The thirteen-bar run is 7/8, 5/4, 10/16, 10/16, 10/16, 10/16, 7/8, 6/4, 4/4, 4/4, 4/4, 4/4, 4/4, which is the order and the page breaks Sloots prints.

Computed from the tab's own signatures and its six tempo marks (88, 76, 88, 90, 82, 88 bpm). This corroborates the bar map at the level of labels and span. It is not a per-bar proof of the notes, and confirming that needs the album master.

Verdict for Zomby Woof

Pass 2: Penguin In Bondage

Chosen for the deepest published coverage on either record: eleven notation images across four transcriptions, one of them by a member of the band.

Per-part notes, rests excluded: Lead Guitar 619, Rhythm Guitar 1,992, Bass 769, Drums 1,547, Vocals 172.

Pass 3: Village Of The Sun

This one changes what the comparison can even claim. The published set covers three different performances, and each has its own meter map.

Album length 4:16. Both AI tabs notate 4:32, about 6 percent long. Note counts exclude rests.

Pass 4: Cheepnis

Version check first, as pass 3 requires. The published transcription is labelled "Cheepnis, opening" and links back to Roxy & Elsewhere, so it is the album take. The tab notates 6:29 against the album's 6:34, 1.3 percent short, which is consistent with the same take. Its one synced video returned nothing when queried, so the version match comes from the duration and the page label rather than from the video.

Per-part notes, rests excluded: Lead Guitar 192, Rhythm Guitar 3,064, Bass 1,068, Drums 2,266, Vocals 779. All five staves carry notes.

What is ready for the next passes

Every song on both records that has published notation in the archive and at least one Songsterr tab.

Penguin In Bondage has the deepest published coverage at 11 images. Echidna's Arf and I'm The Slime have the most tabs to separate, at five each.

Method

Songsterr notation comes from the public meta API and its CloudFront path, with no browser and no login, which is the route recorded in the songsterr-tab-guide skill. Published notation comes from the Zappa drum archive built 28 August. Meters, tempo maps and note counts are read from the tab JSON directly. Nothing here is read off a rendered screenshot.

Two repairs were needed to the archive during this pass. Its Zomby Woof page had been saved as a Cloudflare interstitial rather than content, and 21 other pages had the same problem at the tail of the crawl, so 13 real pages were refetched. Separately, the first crawl kept images only from pages that mentioned drums, which left most per-song notation for these two records missing: 113 further images were fetched and validated.