What an assistant can do

Once connected, an assistant has a large set of tools covering the music and how it’s organised — upwards of sixty, and growing. You don’t call them by name — you ask for what you want and the assistant picks. This page is about the shape of what’s possible, and the edges.

Reading and understanding

It can list your bands and songs, read a whole song note-for-note, and — usually more useful on a long chart — ask for a summary: the structure, the sections, the cascaded tempo and meter, how dense each track is, with no notes at all. It can also ask for the performed timeline, which is the repeat-expanded running order with absolute times, and a tempo map for anything that needs to line up with audio.

It can read the band’s members, its activity feed, and its trash.

Writing music

This is the substance of it. An assistant can:

Create songs and add, insert or delete measures.
Write notes into any measure and voice — the content-authoring path, and the one that does the real work.
Add and configure tracks: instrument, name, tuning, capo, clef, staff count, which staves show, drum view, voice count.
Set song and bar attributes: title and credits, tempo (including gradual rit. and accel. ramps), time and key signatures, repeats and alternate endings, pickup bars.
Name sections — Verse, Chorus, Bridge — and remove the marks again.
Retune and transpose a track, keeping the pitches and re-fingering them, or shifting by a set number of semitones.

Everything goes through the same path the collaborative editor uses, so an assistant’s edits merge with what people are typing and appear live in any open editor.

Takes, organising, and talking

It can work with takes — list them, branch one, rename it, preview a merge as a three-way diff, and merge with per-measure choices. It can file songs into folders, build and reorder set lists with notes and breaks, duplicate a song, move one to the trash and restore it, and compact one that’s grown large.

It can read and write comments: open a thread on a beat or bar, reply, resolve, and delete its own messages.

And it can import a Guitar Pro (.gp), MusicXML or NSF file into a new song, or export a song as MusicXML.

What it deliberately can’t do

Some things are left to the web app on purpose, not because nobody’s got to them:

Not available	Why
Creating or renaming bands, changing roles, removing members, transferring ownership	These change who can see and edit your music. The web’s confirmations and ownership rules are the guard, and an assistant has no equivalent.
Sending invites	An assistant that can invite is an assistant that can send mail in your name.
Anything to do with billing	It’s money. Nothing an assistant writes needs it.
Platform administration	Not something any normal account carries.

It can still read your band’s membership, so it can reason about who its work is for — it just can’t change it.

The guards

Tools refuse rather than guess when a request would quietly lose work:

Deleting bars that have notes is refused unless you explicitly insist.
A repeat end has to close an actual repeat, and alternate endings have to sit inside a repeat block.
A shorter tuning or fewer staves is refused while notes would be dropped by it, and points at the retune tool instead — which re-fingers rather than discarding.
A transpose that pushes notes off the fretboard does what you chose: refuse and tell you, drop them, or move them by an octave. Refusing is the default.
A merge is refused while conflicts are still undecided.

Before you let one loose

Two things worth knowing, because they’re not what you’d assume:

So for anything ambitious — rewriting a section, restructuring an arrangement — branch a take first and point the assistant at that. It gets a free hand, main stays untouched, and you merge back the parts that worked. This is what takes are for, and it’s a better answer than hoping.

Second: the assistant acts as you. Its work shows up under your name in the activity feed, and it can reach every band you’re in — not just the one you were thinking about when you asked. Say which song and which band you mean.

A note on the protocol

The technical reference — the transport, the OAuth flow, every tool’s exact parameters — lives with the code, in apps/tabula/mcp/README.md. These pages are for using it, not building against it.