This is pretty nice, and there's already a lot of tools out there. I've built some of my own tools to scrape their tabs and store all my own stuff since I expect they will continue locking tabs down more like they already have. I'm a lifetime UG pro member but they keep pushing the envelope too far to monetize more.
There's no path for OSS in this domain unfortunately because tabs are often licensed and owned by the publishing companies (or the artists at the very least). Oliver Tree is one dingbat who had most of his tabs taken down at one point despite being a total of 4 chords per song.
I'm pretty unhappy with the state of the space considering anyone can listen to a song and write a tab out.
I suspect it would take a long while for an open source project to run into this limitation, especially if the tabs were distributed soulseek-style.
Has anyone attempted to make a fair use for education argument about this? Tabs aren't so much an actual creative work as instructions for how best to play a work. Because there's no timing information it's often impossible to reconstruct the actual music just from them.
Chords have even less information, a guitar chord transcription may have no resemblance to the notes actually played in a recording.
The transcriptions (created by people) are always going to be seen as derivative works, unfortunately. It doesn't matter how closely it matches the recorded performance. But the fact that text-based tabs remained online (at least more so than transcriptions, powertabs, etc.) is likely because of the lower fidelity.
It's not just that the transcription is a (transformed) reproduction of the original piece. The record companies have the (exclusive) right to (sell) the transcriptions, sheet music, etc. of music they hold the rights to. They have that right, regardless of if they are actively or ever going to actually publish any.
I would guess a fair use defence would be feasible in the right case, but I'm not sure if that was ever tested in court. Most of the operators of tab websites were just people, they didn't stand a chance. If I remember correctly, Ultimate Guitar was/is one of the few sites that was big enough to negotiate with the MPA.
Dang, that’s a bummer to hear about Oliver Tree. Love his schtick, never realized he was taking the music so seriously. I always assumed it was intentionally simple to the point of mockery.
There are spaces where free copies of licensed content are widespread. Of course, I don't know anything about them, but I'm sure they provide a valuable force against capitalism.
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.
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?
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.
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 remember OLGA, the On-Line Guitar Archive. In the 1990’s when I was learning to play guitar in my teens, OLGA hosted enough user-generated text-based tabs for me to learn every song I’d ever heard/wanted to play, for free.
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.
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.
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.
WRT the sibling comment, and your "click for the repo" comment, unless we're now honoring the "license":"ISC" in package.json as formally legal, there is no license in your repo
I bought a year of pro and returned it 24 hours later at a loss (I had signed up using a non refundable promo code)
The app straight up doesn’t work: playlists don’t actually load the next song when you expect, it takes way too long to load a sheet, and then you have to navigate to “chords” on each song in the playlist, which introduces MORE loading. They could save so much time by not loading shit I straight up don’t need. Oh, and you can’t manually sync songs for offline use, that’s the cherry on top, you are at the whim of their syncing schedule after you favorite a song.
I hate what ultimate guitar has become. Before it evolved into the current ad-laden, walled-garden rat trap that it is now, it basically was just a search engine for tabs. What amazes me is that so many hobbyists made Guitar Pro tabs in their spare time and uploaded them for free to the internet. Then UG came along and indexed them. For a time, that was good. Now UG operates like it owns that content. It's been so heavily SEO'd that you basically cannot search Google anymore without getting railroaded there. You need to search elsewhere.
Their UI sucks. I resorted to hoarding the .gpX files locally and using TuxGuitar. But TuxGuitar sucks too...
Regardless, thanks for doing this. This space could use some disruption. I don't want to support a site that used to be a simple search engine and mutated into a commercial walled-garden that exploits the creative works of thousands of people who originally did it for free. (oh wait...)
Thanks for the reference. I think at this point I kind of want to just build my own UI to playback GP files. I looked into the guts of TuxGuitar and was pretty put off by how much code there is. It's kind of a hot mess. Really I want to use it to riff more in a jamming mode, more than a sit-down seriously study a piece of music. It needs to be useable from a standing/jamming position and have simplified controls like stop, start, tempo up, down, flip these tracks on and off, repeat this riff or section (but without a hard stop, just loop around, staying in time). TuxGuitar is clearly designed for people to make tabs, and not so much for playing along.
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 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!
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.
If you can’t avoid mobile, use an alternative browser with built in blocking like Duck Duck Go or Firefox Focus or Brave. It works great for me, since my phone can rest easily on my digital piano sheet music stand.
Just avoid Chrome, since Google’s business model is all about you seeing the autoplay and full screen ads from UG.
I love this, I wish all websites looked like this. UG's website is horrific flaming garbage. My only feedback is that I often picked songs to play based on the most popular/trending tabs, and I'd love to see that here too.
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.
Hey! I made project like this, but I reverse engineered the API from the Ultimate Guitar android application. I used BurpSuite and Frida to look at all the HTTPS requests that the app made and went on from there
Yesss awesome! UG's UI has just gotten progressively worse over the years. It's one of those sites you wish had just paused at a certain point and just stopped with what they had.
Love the return to text based chords/tabs (without all the other crap on top). That is all that is needed really.
This guitar/tab space is ripe for disruption if you ask me.
This is awesome! So much cleaner and easier to navigate compared to to UG, it isn't even funny. So much easier to navigate and focus on what's important. Thanks for sharing!
I added it to my Awesome Privacy Front-ends[1] list, hope that's okay!
Why does Wikipedia need one? The alternative project doesn't seem to explain this. (In fact, none of them do, but I can probably guess what's bad about most of them if I don't already know).
Among other things, it implements a whole new interface[1] that removes the "nagging" from Wikipedia. It also removes all tracking. The interface was a lot cleaner and was completely JavaScript-free until a few months ago, which is why I added it to the list.
While I personally don't mind the default Wikipedia website and actually prefer it, I can see why some people would want something more "modern".
I love this! I usually use the UG iPhone app which isn't great, so if this is PWA-abble, I'd be stoked. The biggest issue I have with UG is that it can't be used offline. Often I'm out camping or something and just need a refresher on the lyrics but am thwarted by connectivity
One question - is pagination broken or not implemented? eg. searching for a band with a large discography like Built to Spill / Okkervil River only returns a small selection of tabs. It actually doesn't seem to be the first page even, more of a random selection.
It’s kind of worth remembering that Ultimate Guitar used to have lots of the tabs removed because of copyright claims, so to some extent the advertising hellscape it is because they have to pay licensing to the record labels
Nitpick suggestion: Maybe link to Poetry for those of us not deeply in Python land? It was non-trivial for me to figure out that it’s some sort of package manager for Python. It’s also totally un-googleable so that didn’t help :-)
This right here. I was interested right up until I got to “You need poetry.”, at which point I closed the browser window. I have plenty to do without trying track down some rando developer’s dependencies.
Just FYI, for those who aren't neck deep in python land all the time, python is going through a bit of a packaging, environment, and dependency management explosion at the moment.
Lots of competing ideas and implementations are being thrown around, though probably not as bad as when javascript went through the same process. There is definitely a large benefit to seeing how things like rust have handled this space.
Anyway, poetry is part of this explosion, but is one of the relatively better known and widely distributed options, so much so that for anyone on-the-inside it probably seems obvious.
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.
This is awesome. May I please make one request which would make my life so easy - can you wrap the chords in square brackets? Tools like MySongbook will highlight the chords that way
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.
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)?
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]
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.
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!
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.
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.
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).
There's no path for OSS in this domain unfortunately because tabs are often licensed and owned by the publishing companies (or the artists at the very least). Oliver Tree is one dingbat who had most of his tabs taken down at one point despite being a total of 4 chords per song.
I'm pretty unhappy with the state of the space considering anyone can listen to a song and write a tab out.