This is great. The original has become pretty hostile to users over the years, which is especially unacceptable since users have contributed most of the content that defines the site.
These days I’m a fan of Songsterr. Even handed them my credit card - I love that you can play along with the actual tracks, backing tracks (YouTube) or midi. I find myself learning more songs than the UG way.
If you have Guitar Pro, you can download the gp files from Songsterr and open them directly in GP. I like this because I can then have the same features (apart from the Youtube bit) with all of GP's added goodies.
This is absolutely awesome. I've been learning guitar since ~15 months now and I strongly dislike the ads and popups in all (most?) of the guitar sites, and this is a perfect simple interface that does the job and doesn't waste time. Great idea and great execution.
PS @kmille I was missing sorting the table, so I took some code off of SO and made a pull request. It isn't using jQuery so it might break some code conventions you have, but I'll be glad to have the sorting feature if you can merge and deploy the new code! Again thanks for ideating and making this.
Ultimate Guitar has gotten worse over the years. I noticed they're featuring TikTok-like videos on their home page now which gave me a laugh. I switched to Songsterr a while back and it's amazing. I highly recommend it for anyone looking for tabs.
It's a "BYOM" (bring your own music) situation as opposed to a library like Ultimate Guitar. But it's reasonably easy to import stuff. You can import a Guitar Pro file from Ultimate Guitar, Songsterr or wherever — our MusicXML and GP importers are excellent, seasoned by nearly a decade's worth of development and edge cases.
We've also recently launched a PDF/photo scanner, using machine learning to extract the musical semantics (in case you have some music on paper or in PDF). https://www.soundslice.com/sheet-music-scanner/
We've also got a full-featured notation/tab editor, and lots of musicians use it for transcribing source recordings. https://www.soundslice.com/transcribe/
Also relevant: we've never had ads, we've never taken funding and we've been profitable for years. Sustainable, product-driven and musician-first.
I've seen this software used on a couple different video lesson platforms (I am currently subscribed to Open Studio). It works really well. Occasional browser funniness, but otherwise a really solid tool for learning music. Great work!
I'm pretty much self-taught so some of the terms you mentioned are new to me. I like using tabs to learn new music, I fail to see how what you're saying is related to that?
If you're saying to not use tabs but to play by ear I do that too, though I find it a time consuming process and sometimes just want to go by tabs.
> If you're saying to not use tabs but to play by ear
These are not the only possibilities. A musically-based understanding of the fretboard would let you play directly from sheet music, chord charts or lead sheets. (Classical guitarists do this as a matter of course.)
Of course ear training (what you do when playing by ear) is a big foundation for that skill, but that should not be time consuming, either. A good player should be able to "find" the right note on the fretboard on the spot, not just by trial and error.
> some of the terms you mentioned are new to me
Is solfège new to you also? You know, the old Do-Re-Mi etc. That's something that even most "self-taught" people learn to sing to from childhood, and properly used it can be a great foundation for thoroughly understanding a relative instrument like the guitar.
- Sheet music: It looks like a completely different language, I don't have an idea of how it works nor can I read it. I can't believe that people can read it without specifically learning it?
- Chord charts: Never heard of this and Google doesn't give me anything relevant either. All I'm seeing are pictures of 6 strings with the frets to play highlighted with a dot symbol. If you mean that, then I think that's even easier than tabs and anyone who can read tabs can read it.
- Lead sheets: Never heard of it either and on googling it looks like sheet music, and I can't read it either.
- Playing by ear: I'm training myself by playing nursery rhymes but admittedly it's slow especially on higher bpm songs where I find it hard to remember or distinguish individual notes. E.g. I recently figured out Amazing Grace, but I know I'm very far away from being able to figure out the solo of Sweet Child o Mine by ear (which I learnt from YouTube). I wish there sequence of recommended tracks for the same, to slowly upgrade the skill of playing by ear.
- Soflege: Haven't heard the term, and I'm not from a western country and we don't use Do-Re-Mi. Though if you mean "scales" (specifically the major scale I guess?), sure I know them, and understand how they are all relative, but again fail to understand how they are related to being able to play a new song on the guitar.
I'm glad to hear your perspective on things because learning music is not something I ever bothered to do until recently, thanks for sharing your thoughts
> Haven't heard the term, and I'm not from a western country
Understood. Indian music uses Sa-Re-Ga-Ma-Pa-Dha-Ni, but it means the same thing. The key to understanding that system is that Mi-Fa and Ti-Do (Ga-Ma, Ni-Sa) are half-step intervals (consecutive frets on the guitar), every other interval is whole step (skip a fret). Historical Western solmization doesn't even use Ti (the indian Ni), so everything always revolves around that single Mi-Fa and there are fewer syllables to remember - "mutations" where the syllables rotate in meaning are used instead. (If you search for videos talking about "Italian solfeggio" there's an episode of the Nikhil Hogan podcast talking about why these older systems actually make musical sense, despite seemingly being more complex. This system was what professionally educated musicians learned back in the 18th century.)
So if you know what solfège note you're playing, that tells you immediately how nearby places on the guitar fretboard will relate to the scale. Notes on other guitar strings are also related musically via interval relationships that depend on the tuning, and can be derived quite easily or committed to memory.
BTW, I think anyone who's interested in music to any extent should learn to read standard notation, even if they only play guitar. It's the language that literate discourse about music has relied on for hundreds of years, at least in the West. And the basics are quite simple, being founded on the diatonic scale just like solfège.
Ahhhh... This brings back sweet memories of a music theory/practical harp, grad student that I used to date. She was always able to instantly play any pop songs I requested as harp arrangements; watching someone truly play an instrument as if from feeling is magical.
But I really feel like guitar playing is a different beast all together. There is no other instrument with the amount of "players" that the guitar has, ranging from low skill to high. But in general, I've watched multiple people teach themself up to a level where they can go no further on their own. Then you take your learning on a specific path. Classical training if you want to end up as a studio musician or composer; non classical if you want to be the guitarist in a moderately successful hardcore band. (Does playing Warp Tour make you a success?)
That's what happened to the three best guitarists I've known, and I suppose my point is this: GP can, and should, skip the not-so-fun stuff for the time being. Guitar is unlike other mainstream instruments, and simply playing is the best way to improve (even if it means developing bad habit)
But why is it that musical awareness of what you're actually playing on the instrument has to be the "not so fun" part, compared to just mechanically following some existing tab? I would dispute that point. I would also dispute the notion that "the guitar is too unlike" other instrument families and standard learning methods cannot possibly be applied to it.
But how do I know what solfege note I'm playing with a single note, since it's all relative?
From what I can think of, I can either need to know the song's key (and will have to rely on the internet for the same because I don't have perfect pitch?), or I'd need to have at least 3 or 4 notes to figure out what major scale it might possibly be? (And still it isn't enough I might be wrong).
When you learn a song by ear, you'll know how each note of it relates to the key (which is the "home" note, and the one that the song might end with). You also know where the half-steps are in the scale. These are basically enough to know your solfège/solmization syllables for that song. Note names and perfect pitch are irrelevant because most of the time you'll be playing fretted notes, so just shifting your hand location on the fretboard lets you play different pitches - the actual "note" pitch is arbitrary. Notes played unfretted (that you can't just move around) are rarer, so you can always think of them as falling outside the pattern and learn them as such.
> would let you play directly from sheet music, chord charts or lead sheets
Are the sites for those less terrible than they are for tabs? The problem here isn't using tabs to learn things, it's that the tabs sites are full of ads and popups (and terrible layouts and all kinds of other things not so easily addressed with an adblocker).
I can sight read sheet music and I still use tabs constantly. It’s just another tool, and one I rather like for learning guitar type music. It has neither impeded my understanding of the guitar nor my understanding of music in general, so I’m with you in not being sure what OC is on about.
Realistically, he cannot contact all the thousands of content creators. Also I doubt that UG is paying them in any case. He should include author nicknames though.
Hopefully, bro scraped the content in case UG bans him. There will not be good electric guitar music past 2010s anyway, so no missing out on new content...
I never really got into their stuff. Frankly, it's just too much. I definitely see why people like them- especially those who play music themselves. It's hard not to marvel at the technical skill on display. But imo from the music-as-a-tool-to-stir-some-emotion standpoint, they have some of the most sterile popular music I've ever heard. Wonder how the music-oriented HN crowd feels about this.
There definitely is amazing guitar music still being put out though, so I'm not sure what GP's on about. Huge fan of players like Guthrie Govan myself.
There’s a video where they are watching fans cover their stuff. Guitars, but also a harmonica, trumpet, etc. The quality of the submissions was mind-boggling, and the interpretations helped illustrate the intention of the original songs. That plus the supportive reactions of the band really changed my perspective on exactly what you’re describing. So heartwarming.
There must be some variation of Zawinski's Law that explains the flaming dumpster that apps/sites like UG turn into. I feel like MuseScore is going in that direction too.
I was hoping by now we would have solved the problem of a decentralized repository of user-generated content without need for monetization.
> I was hoping by now we would have solved the problem of a decentralized repository of user-generated content
IMSLP is monetized but far from terrible. The problem with sites like UG and MS is that they're essentially hosting bootleg content, which is only okay for as long as you can fly under the radar. IMSLP is the wholly above-board approach.
Oh hallelujah, I've got a lifetime sub due to buying their app back in the day and was grandfathered in, so I can escape some of the marketing, but their crazy, pants-on-head UI makes guitar harder a lot of the time.
I've gone to ultimate-guitar since the early 2000s. Some of my tabs are still on there. Visiting it today is a god-damn tragedy. What a mess of a site. I'll definitely be trying this.
Same. I made many online friends on the forum and it used to be my e-hangout in the early to mid 00s. I fondly remember the IRC channel we used to hang out in. I think I have a tab or two published on the site as well. Every time I pop back in for a visit these past few years it always pushes me back away.
The only things from that era that didn’t get outright worse stayed the same (Craigslist).
What was beautiful about the internet then was there were so many corners were monetization either wasn’t easy or wasn’t chased so things could just exist.
Sites need to monetize because how else will they pay for Amazon ElasticLambda to serve their users’ click X-Y coordinates to T5 FireAnt, their distributed backend, on a planetary scale?
Ooh, this is a godsend. UG is so full of dark patterns and nags it's almost unusable. It's a travesty and whoever runs such scam on community provided content should do some serious soul searching.
Transposing chords doesn't seem to be implemented (or should the plus/minus buttons do that)?
I played a ton of guitar in high school and UG was my go-to resource for a lot of stuff. I then stopped for a long time due to career, marriage, kids, etc, only to pick up the ol’ axe again this year. I dutifully opened up UG and was shocked at how horrible it was. Ok fine, I’ll download the damn app you dirty bastards. Oh, you mean I’m still accosted by all the dark patterns in the app too? I can only assume any PII given to them is sold quickly and efficiently.
FWIW, I have really enjoyed seeing what old artists have put out post-COVID. Seems like a big creativity boost. For example, I really hadn’t checked in on Joe Satriani in years. Nothing in his work had stood out to me in a long time. His 2022 “Elephants of Mars” though is just excellent. The opening track has a guitar entry at about two minutes in that you can’t help but scrunch your face and bang your head to.
Literally the same experience as me. I had not been to UG since I started my career as a dev. I now have thoughts and opinions about the internet. UG goes against basically every single one of them.
I honestly don't understand why it ended up like that. Did they really have that much trouble monetizing the largest collection of community-made content for guitar playing? Did YouTube eat their lunch in that regard? I imagine they had editorial staff for the articles (going off my 12+ year out of date memory), was that what was costing them so much? I really have no clue.
woah, me too! stopped during college and I decided to take guitar serious this time and get some lessons which i started in July. it's been a huge improvement and super fun.
check out Plini and Intervals, some of my favorites in the same vein as Satriani.
also, I've found guitar pro to really be worth it. Sheet Happens publishes official tabs, and all their PDF tab books come with guitar pro files as well and theyre pretty good quality. Sheet Happens has a permanent guitar pro discount code too.
FYI TuxGuitar is a FOSS player that can load/play/edit PowerTab and GuitarPro files. Multiplatform too. It's not completely 100% bug-free, but it's good enough to load and play most tabs flawlessly.
Or for a more robust piece of software (especially if you do tabbing/composing yourself or you want to generate/edit a tab from a MIDI file), MuseScore is also FOSS and can import GuitarPro files no problem. With its recent UI overhauls it's really become top-notch IMO.
i didn't realize musescore opened guitar pro 7/8 files (which is what sheet happens publishes)! sadly tux guitar support stopped at gp5. I will definitely be checking out musescore, thanks for the rec!
For whatever reason, UG's omnipresent video of a guy supposedly playing the song of the currently viewed tab always grates me more than it should. Probably because it's always an acoustic regardless of song.
But also the fact it is pinned to a spot on the viewport and always moving out of the corner of my eye.
UG is now owned by (Muse Group), which also owns MuseScore, Audacity, StaffPad, etc.
They've had their fair share of controversy beyond just dark-patterns on UG. From adding telemetry into Audacity[0], causing a bunch of drama and multiple forks of Audacity, To (most notably, in my opinion) having their director of strategy, Daniel Ray, publicly threaten to report/have the Chinese government whisk away the developer of a Github repo for a MuseScore sheet music downloader[1]
1. This is really excellent. I looked up some tab that I had added to the site, and it does a great job presenting it. Most importantly, it does it in a very printable format.
2. If you a classical guitarist, or interested in classical guitar, you should check out https://www.classtab.org/ which is a gem of the internet.
I notice that searching by artist can be inconsistent; for example, if I want the song "Sinners Defeat" by Mors Principium Est, I can find it if I search by title[1] but it doesn't appear in results by artist[2], while on UG I get that song plus a few more[3] (text tab only).
Very handy--the search is fast and looks like a search ought to look. Nice work!
It's community content however due to UG's monetization they are subject to tablature licensing rules (hence why some artists can't be found on there).
If you were to gain attention hosting their scale of tabs, you would likely run into legal hurdles pretty quickly.
For example a full archive of most sites dating back to the 90s already exists here: https://tabarchive.mikethetech.com/index.php. However he does not have permission to actually share it.
128 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 212 ms ] threadThese days I’m a fan of Songsterr. Even handed them my credit card - I love that you can play along with the actual tracks, backing tracks (YouTube) or midi. I find myself learning more songs than the UG way.
[0] https://www.chordify.net
Also Chordie works for me too
https://www.chordie.com/
Tabs plus sheet music, synced with original source recordings, with the web's best learning/practice features.
Example: https://www.soundslice.com/slices/txqfc/
It's a "BYOM" (bring your own music) situation as opposed to a library like Ultimate Guitar. But it's reasonably easy to import stuff. You can import a Guitar Pro file from Ultimate Guitar, Songsterr or wherever — our MusicXML and GP importers are excellent, seasoned by nearly a decade's worth of development and edge cases.
We've also recently launched a PDF/photo scanner, using machine learning to extract the musical semantics (in case you have some music on paper or in PDF). https://www.soundslice.com/sheet-music-scanner/
We've also got a full-featured notation/tab editor, and lots of musicians use it for transcribing source recordings. https://www.soundslice.com/transcribe/
Also relevant: we've never had ads, we've never taken funding and we've been profitable for years. Sustainable, product-driven and musician-first.
If you don't want to create an account, you can browse the public stuff that's been posted: https://www.soundslice.com/community/
We don't do any Instagram-like "Please register to continue viewing this" nonsense.
If you're saying to not use tabs but to play by ear I do that too, though I find it a time consuming process and sometimes just want to go by tabs.
These are not the only possibilities. A musically-based understanding of the fretboard would let you play directly from sheet music, chord charts or lead sheets. (Classical guitarists do this as a matter of course.)
Of course ear training (what you do when playing by ear) is a big foundation for that skill, but that should not be time consuming, either. A good player should be able to "find" the right note on the fretboard on the spot, not just by trial and error.
> some of the terms you mentioned are new to me
Is solfège new to you also? You know, the old Do-Re-Mi etc. That's something that even most "self-taught" people learn to sing to from childhood, and properly used it can be a great foundation for thoroughly understanding a relative instrument like the guitar.
- Chord charts: Never heard of this and Google doesn't give me anything relevant either. All I'm seeing are pictures of 6 strings with the frets to play highlighted with a dot symbol. If you mean that, then I think that's even easier than tabs and anyone who can read tabs can read it.
- Lead sheets: Never heard of it either and on googling it looks like sheet music, and I can't read it either.
- Playing by ear: I'm training myself by playing nursery rhymes but admittedly it's slow especially on higher bpm songs where I find it hard to remember or distinguish individual notes. E.g. I recently figured out Amazing Grace, but I know I'm very far away from being able to figure out the solo of Sweet Child o Mine by ear (which I learnt from YouTube). I wish there sequence of recommended tracks for the same, to slowly upgrade the skill of playing by ear.
- Soflege: Haven't heard the term, and I'm not from a western country and we don't use Do-Re-Mi. Though if you mean "scales" (specifically the major scale I guess?), sure I know them, and understand how they are all relative, but again fail to understand how they are related to being able to play a new song on the guitar.
I'm glad to hear your perspective on things because learning music is not something I ever bothered to do until recently, thanks for sharing your thoughts
Understood. Indian music uses Sa-Re-Ga-Ma-Pa-Dha-Ni, but it means the same thing. The key to understanding that system is that Mi-Fa and Ti-Do (Ga-Ma, Ni-Sa) are half-step intervals (consecutive frets on the guitar), every other interval is whole step (skip a fret). Historical Western solmization doesn't even use Ti (the indian Ni), so everything always revolves around that single Mi-Fa and there are fewer syllables to remember - "mutations" where the syllables rotate in meaning are used instead. (If you search for videos talking about "Italian solfeggio" there's an episode of the Nikhil Hogan podcast talking about why these older systems actually make musical sense, despite seemingly being more complex. This system was what professionally educated musicians learned back in the 18th century.)
So if you know what solfège note you're playing, that tells you immediately how nearby places on the guitar fretboard will relate to the scale. Notes on other guitar strings are also related musically via interval relationships that depend on the tuning, and can be derived quite easily or committed to memory.
BTW, I think anyone who's interested in music to any extent should learn to read standard notation, even if they only play guitar. It's the language that literate discourse about music has relied on for hundreds of years, at least in the West. And the basics are quite simple, being founded on the diatonic scale just like solfège.
From what I can think of, I can either need to know the song's key (and will have to rely on the internet for the same because I don't have perfect pitch?), or I'd need to have at least 3 or 4 notes to figure out what major scale it might possibly be? (And still it isn't enough I might be wrong).
What am I missing?
Most of them look like this:
And all they’re telling you is which chords to play when.The ones with 6 strings are just giving you a reference for the chords if you don’t know how to play them.
I play guitar for a church and we use chord charts for all our music.
Are the sites for those less terrible than they are for tabs? The problem here isn't using tabs to learn things, it's that the tabs sites are full of ads and popups (and terrible layouts and all kinds of other things not so easily addressed with an adblocker).
Hopefully, bro scraped the content in case UG bans him. There will not be good electric guitar music past 2010s anyway, so no missing out on new content...
There definitely is amazing guitar music still being put out though, so I'm not sure what GP's on about. Huge fan of players like Guthrie Govan myself.
There must be some variation of Zawinski's Law that explains the flaming dumpster that apps/sites like UG turn into. I feel like MuseScore is going in that direction too.
I was hoping by now we would have solved the problem of a decentralized repository of user-generated content without need for monetization.
IMSLP is monetized but far from terrible. The problem with sites like UG and MS is that they're essentially hosting bootleg content, which is only okay for as long as you can fly under the radar. IMSLP is the wholly above-board approach.
What was beautiful about the internet then was there were so many corners were monetization either wasn’t easy or wasn’t chased so things could just exist.
Not so anymore!
As long as they maintain that pace, I'm fine with some changes.
I guess the upside to UG is that it encouraged me to learn by ear.
[0]: https://github.com/Pilfer/ultimate-guitar-scraper/pull/2
Transposing chords doesn't seem to be implemented (or should the plus/minus buttons do that)?
FWIW, I have really enjoyed seeing what old artists have put out post-COVID. Seems like a big creativity boost. For example, I really hadn’t checked in on Joe Satriani in years. Nothing in his work had stood out to me in a long time. His 2022 “Elephants of Mars” though is just excellent. The opening track has a guitar entry at about two minutes in that you can’t help but scrunch your face and bang your head to.
I honestly don't understand why it ended up like that. Did they really have that much trouble monetizing the largest collection of community-made content for guitar playing? Did YouTube eat their lunch in that regard? I imagine they had editorial staff for the articles (going off my 12+ year out of date memory), was that what was costing them so much? I really have no clue.
check out Plini and Intervals, some of my favorites in the same vein as Satriani.
also, I've found guitar pro to really be worth it. Sheet Happens publishes official tabs, and all their PDF tab books come with guitar pro files as well and theyre pretty good quality. Sheet Happens has a permanent guitar pro discount code too.
Or for a more robust piece of software (especially if you do tabbing/composing yourself or you want to generate/edit a tab from a MIDI file), MuseScore is also FOSS and can import GuitarPro files no problem. With its recent UI overhauls it's really become top-notch IMO.
But also the fact it is pinned to a spot on the viewport and always moving out of the corner of my eye.
They've had their fair share of controversy beyond just dark-patterns on UG. From adding telemetry into Audacity[0], causing a bunch of drama and multiple forks of Audacity, To (most notably, in my opinion) having their director of strategy, Daniel Ray, publicly threaten to report/have the Chinese government whisk away the developer of a Github repo for a MuseScore sheet music downloader[1]
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27727150
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27881539
1. This is really excellent. I looked up some tab that I had added to the site, and it does a great job presenting it. Most importantly, it does it in a very printable format.
2. If you a classical guitarist, or interested in classical guitar, you should check out https://www.classtab.org/ which is a gem of the internet.
I notice that searching by artist can be inconsistent; for example, if I want the song "Sinners Defeat" by Mors Principium Est, I can find it if I search by title[1] but it doesn't appear in results by artist[2], while on UG I get that song plus a few more[3] (text tab only).
Very handy--the search is fast and looks like a search ought to look. Nice work!
1. https://freetar.androidloves.me/search?search_term=sinners+d...
2. https://freetar.androidloves.me/search?search_term=mors+prin...
3. https://www.ultimate-guitar.com/search.php?title=mors+princi...
See: https://github.com/kmille/freetar/blob/main/freetar/ug.py
Please don’t think that UG is paying anybody to transcribe (or repair/moderate, desperately needed) the guitar tabs.
If you were to gain attention hosting their scale of tabs, you would likely run into legal hurdles pretty quickly.
For example a full archive of most sites dating back to the 90s already exists here: https://tabarchive.mikethetech.com/index.php. However he does not have permission to actually share it.