This post came about from me seeing Inventive City as analyzed by @sazandora.
Polyphony should be available to free users. That is what I’m wishing for. This is entirely for the ease of transcribing melodies, accuracy, and the use of workarounds in the past and present that really show off the demand for the feature.
For example, in The Heritors of Arcadia in the solo, the first four bars consist of 3 8th notes and a 2-note dotted-quarter note chord. If I wished to accurately transcribe this, I would put in both notes of the chord. However, because I’m a free user, I’m blocked off from accurately transcribing the melody because of the lack of polyphony.
Inventive City is another song that can’t be accurately analyzed with only one melody voice. The melody in the verse has a very prominent lower voice that can’t be transcribed normally. With polyphony, now the tab is more accurate to the original song, and could provide some insight to what the lower melody could be doing in the song.
Red Swan has a repeating piano section introduced in the intro to the song, along with a choral background part. Because I’m limited to a single voice, I’m unable to transcribe either the piano chords, or the choral part, with the latter’s analysis being awkwardly incorporated into the chords. In the verse. the transition from the end of the main verse melody to a repeat of the intro piano/choral part is awkward, with the main melody being transcribed as a 2 bar-long high note and the piano part being put into the chord structure.
Crimson in the Black Sea ~ Legendary Fish as analyzed by @HertzDevil has polyphony, but dates back to 2014. Then, they used a glitch in an old version of Hookpad 1 where negative rests allowed for polyphony with only one voice, letting polyphonic tabs be submitted to the Theorytab database because the tab technically has only one voice. If glitches were needed to have polyphony, a feature that can be used for free in so many other music programs, in Hookpad and Theorytab, that should indicate that at least some people what polyphonic tabs in Theorytab, at least.
Love Live Sunshine S2 - WONDERFUL STORIES, also analyzed by @HertzDevil, was submitted in January of 2018, when Hookpad 2 was slowly being developed and Theorytab was still on Hookpad 1. Because of the lack of polyphony in Theorytab, HertzDevil often linked to polyphonic versions of the songs they analyzed, such as this link to the chorus section with all voices intact. As of September 29, 2018, the chorus tab shows all four voices being used and displayed in the Theorytab page, however I think this is a side-effect of the recent update for Theorytab to Hookpad 2, similar to how lyrics were displaying in Theorytab.
What should this wall of text of a thread mean to you? It should mean that there is demand for publicly available polyphony, as shown by the various tabs I’ve linked to above. It would help with accuracy for many songs, and allow for even causal users to use polyphony for when they need it.