I miss the golden age of the late 90’s when tabs were easy to get and free.
this post was submitted on 07 May 2024
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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All the sites are heavily enshittifed nowadays. Sad.
I really blame Musecore for this, and all of the social engineering that big tech has been doing for years to make profiting off of selling user submitted content seem acceptable.
The golden days of Ultimate-Guitar uaer submitted tabs and pirated Guitar Pro 5 (which my guitar teacher gave to me on a burned CD) Good times.
I just get actual music sheets so I can play the song on any instrument I know how to play. They don't seem to be hard to get but if you don't know how to read them it's not helpful. Could learn; it's not hard.
Ultimate-Guitar has a massive library of free tabs. You don't need their Pro subscription.
The thing about ultimate guitar is that you can't hear the playback without the pro subscription. That's an important thing for me to have.
So like, I know this might sound weird, and I hate to be "that guy" but...
Is it really necessary? I get you probably want to play it like it's guitar hero, which is cool and great and all. Just, you could also queue up the song in youtube and do it old-school style.
It's just, good not to be too dependent on your limitations when learning an instrument. At some point, you will surpass them.
Good luck though, don't let me bring you down.
I've never played guitar hero so I don't know what you mean by that. I'm learning bass and want to be able to hear the rhythm and actually hear the bass in the program because it's hard to hear in a lot of songs. Eventually I will get to a level where I don't need that, but at this point in my journey I do. YouTube is a lot harder to use than tab programs for me.
Don't fucking let anyone tab shame you my friend. Use them if you need them. The important thing is you are playing and learning and having fun. You can always learn new things too when you are ready.
I’ve never played guitar hero so I don’t know what you mean by that.
If you've seen the Simply Guitar or Yousicion ads (I'm not linking them, too cringe!), you've got the general idea.
UG Pro's midi player didn't exist when I first started playing with the guitar, so something I'll do with tab or sheet music, when I need to hear something to understand what I'm reading, is to enter the tab or standard notation into MuseScore and use it to create a midi track I can listen to. You can speed it up or slow it down as necessary.
It's also possible to take a midi file, open it using MuseScore, and it will convert the midi data into standard notation. From there you can have it translated into tab. Tab created this way isn't great, and you will have to modify the fret choices it makes to make the song playable, but it will get you in the ball park. The rest is just learning your instrument/tuning, what notes are where, that sort of thing.
Most popular songs should have a midi file available, especially popular music pre-2010ish. Downloading mp3s on a 56k modem sucked! Midi's were a much faster download.
Another thing you can do is take the audio track your interested in learning from and load it into a DAW. Use an EQ filter to isolate the instrument, and add a boost after the EQ so you can hear the instrument clearly. Depending on the DAW, you may also be able to slow down the track and pitch shift it back up into the correct frequencies. This is a bit more difficult but will let you learn directly from the musician you're interested in. I seem to recall an application that could do this in a more automated fashion, but I don't remember what it was called.
So what you did here was tell a guy who is learning how to play the guitar to "LOL just play it."
You can download PowerTab or TuxGuitar for free. You can also sail the high seas and get the GOAT, Guitar Pro 5. With those programs you can download the Guitar Pro/PowerTab versions of the songs on UG and have all the full featured playback that you want.
I must be a dummy, I cannot find a way to download anything off UG other than PDF. (I do have a premium subscription.)
Can you spell it out for me? Where the heck are the Guitar Pro or PowerTab versions? I just looked around for 5 minutes and could not figure it out.
Edit to add: I saw someone else with the same question and someone posted a pic. I swear to God I have never seen this button in UG!
Gotta choose the Guitar Pro version of the tab in the search results then scroll aaaaalll the way to the bottom of the page to find that button.
Ah hah, now I get it. Thanks!
Awesome. Glad you found it! Enjoy!
TYVM. I think a big part of my problem is I had been grabbing chords for most things, not tabs... And when I did get tabs I was looking at the Official ones which don't have this download.
Pirate Guitar Pro, install it, and download the GP files from Ultimate Guitar. Easy.
I was having the same issue in The past few years so I finally said fuck it and just forced myself to learn things by ear and or finding notes/chords and going from there to figure out the rest. I've been playing for decades so it was time to do that anyway. It's worth it though as you can figure out stuff effortlessly eventually and it'll make you an even better player.
Pirating by being better at the instrument. Love it.
I've been able to play by ear for years but it's not effortless, it's much easier to see a chord progression first at least.
So I'm still stuck in the Tab world a bit, except I look up chords to songs then play around with the chords until I have something cool, but that is the beauty of playing finger style, it can sound cool in different ways depending on the strings you play
You can get torrents full of the archives from sites that used to host tabs for GuitarPro and pirate that software, the one downside is , its like tens of thousands of tabs so its a bit much to organize.
Songsterr seems usable to me with adblocking on, Also I often just search YouTube and find videos with tabs displayed.
Songsterr is usable with adblocking on however I still get annoying popups in the middle of playing that say switch to premium. You also can't change the playback speed without premium which is very annoying.
Are you not able to use the element zapper to block the pop-up from appearing?
How do I do this?
With Ublock Origin, click on the extension and at the bottom there is "element zapper" and "element picker". I usually select one of these, then use it to select the unwanted pop-ups.
Just be careful, sometimes the popups are designed to blank out the whole page you're trying to view. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't
How do I do this?
Tux Guitar is free and can read and edit Guitar Pro tabs.
or a better alternative out there with a database of tabs as large as the two have
https://www.justinguitar.com/store/tabs
I don't know if it's good enough for your needs, but they have a 7-days trial, so you can check it out for free.
~~BOOM!~~ Only works for non-official / premium from Ultimate-Guitar, so I don't know if that's what you wanted. This works for Songsterr, though.
~~I know you can download stuff from MuseScore for free and MuseScore has guitar tabs but I don't know if you can download guitar tabs directly..~~
This is exactly what I was looking for, thanks!
An app called Lamucal can make them for you, lyrics and all.
An older app (now defunct), can be found on archive.org, called Riffstation, can do the chords.
Once you have a version of your song you can put it in an app called JustChords. This app will store, display, and transpose your songs. It also has a search feature to pull tabs from other sources.
Hm, I never used songsterr but guitartabs has always been based for me.
I kinda stopped using tabs years ago and just started learning by ear though... [subtle brag]
I'll check that out, although I'm learning bass right now so hopefully they have bass tabs too.
That's the goal for someday, hopefully I'll get to a point where I can learn by ear. Gotta get familiar with the fretboard and get a decent level of dexterity first.
Songster has a loophole... If you call it that
Sign up for free account..log in..
Then.. go to the tab you want ...at the bottom... You hit "Edit" once.. Then the "Download" button option is available to click... Download and enjoy
( On PC web browser)