Tablature is great. While it doesn’t contain as much musical information as traditional music notation, it is in many ways more useful to a guitarist trying to figure out their favorite track. Combined with careful listening, guitar tabs can help you orient yourself around how to play a particular piece of music – not just the notes, but where on the neck they should be played.
Given that tabs can be easily read from an ascii text file, it’s not surprising that the popularity of tabs has grown as the popularity of the net has. Heck, even before there was a “world wide web” there was a usenet group dedicated to tabs, and an ftp archive based on that group.
That being said, tabs can be confusing, because they contain no information about timing. You have to play, experiment, and guess. That’s not such a bad thing, really, as it forces you to listen closely to the music and work on your ear, but given that many tabs are home made, they are often filled with errors, in the wrong key, or simply confusing using tabs can be frustrating.
Enter Songsterr.com.
Songsterr is something fantastic: automated tabs with midi audio playback attached. Somebody – I don’t know who – has added timing and instrument information to tabs, so you can listen to a midi rendition of a song while watching the tab scroll by.
This is amazing. It combines front-line web technology with a traditional tool to create something new and incredibly valuable.
There are extras you can buy if you choose to pay for them, such as the ability to play at half speed or tweak other aspects of the viewing/listening experience. But merely using the free service is incredibly valuable. You are actually watching the tabs in synch with the audio, so you know exactly what note to play, where to play it, and when to play it.
I don’t know who runs Songsterr. I suspect it’s in that quasi-legal space that a lot of music chord and tab sites are under, because it moved to Songsterr.com from an earlier web address. (The record companies used to try to crack down on tabs, back in the pre-Napster days. I doubt they’ve completely forgotten about them since). Sometimes the tabs are imperfect, and the midi renditions of the songs can lack nuance.
But I don’t care. Songsterr is one of the best music-learning tools you can find on the web, even when you just use it as a free service. It’s a better way to learn songs that a lot of the Youtube videos. Check it out the next time you’re struggling to learn a song.
It’s automated tabs and it’s awesome.
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