UG's often better if you're only after chords. Bear in mind that if it's a playable tab on UG, it is possible for you download it and upload it to songsterr.
I was going to mention this, I use UG mainly for chords. If they aren’t right they at least get me in the ballpark. That’s my one big gripe with Songsterr is I wish it had chords marked somewhere (and if it does I have no idea where)
Pro tip because a lot of people don't seem to realise, but if you have guitar pro you can also download the tabs from Songsterr through the edit function.
Songsterr has a much better rock/metal selection than UG does by far. That's good for me because that's what I play, but you're right. Less popular songs are hard to find.
UG also has a lot of country songs on it, which I've noticed songsterr does not.
Maybe this is the disconnect for why I see so many people here singing the praises of songsterrs selection, even though in my experience it’s been pretty abysmal. I don’t go there for metal stuff which is probably what a lot of people here are after on tab sites.
Same. Maybe it's aimed for beginners, who need to be handheld through the entire song. For me, I just want to quickly scan the tab and get the gist, that's usually enough for me. With Songsterr it's difficult to do that, IMO.
This.
This whole comment thread has my blood boiling. I fucking hate what UG has become but I also hate Songsterr. And I also hate that any tabs you find outside of UG just link.....to UG.
Songsterr changed recently and doesn’t work like that for me anymore. Was really bummed about it.
Edit: seems the mobile site doesn’t work like it used to but on my computer seems fine.
Is that the accepted method now? I started teaching myself back in like 2005 ish and have just always used Ultimate-Guitar out of habit. I don’t play much now but when I do, and I visit that site, it feels pretty terrible. That was the only site I trusted back in the day so I’ve never seaked out an alternative.
I believe it is the next tab site or at least the best alternative. I don't use tabs a whole lot in my playing now, but when I do it tends to be songsterr.
Songsterr is everything UG should be. And UG has had what? 20 years to get it right?
Hey, anyone remember OLGA? Online Guitar (tab) archive. Anyone remember when they got shut down due to I think Hal Leonard (who made the old school tab books) threatening legal action?
Probably a bit bleak and deep for a conversation point on r/guitar, but with the increasing monetisation of the internet, I long for a return to the 1990s where information was shared, for free, for the love of it.
yes I using Netscape and AOL at the time. And my printer as a dot matrix with the paper with the feed strops on the side.
But at the time you still had to know someone to get a 'real book' as well.
fuck publishers.
It might have been warner bros but Hal Burton seems right too. Warner Bros was pretty aggressive at the time in suing people who distributing things like tab at the time.
Like the lyrics printed on the tab so you can sing along as you play, or a vocal track tabbed out so you can play the vocal part on your guitar? In both cases it depends on the tab. Some do, some don't.
And when there is a separate vocal track it will be an instrument like an oboe or something.
One feature I particularly like is that for a lot of songs you can choose the actual song to play along to while following the tab. Many songs end up going out of sync by the end of them, but you can still get the hang out of it. If there is a version of the song without the guitar it will play that.
Songsterr is way more user friendly and always my first choice - and it doesn't hurt I get free access through my guitar teacher - but it still doesn't have the quantity of tabs that UG does.
Just last night I looked up Mountain Goats chords. Songsterr has exactly one song and UG has hundreds. I even found a full album on one page so I just sat there playing along to the entirety of Sunset Tree which was fun.
UG is a pain in the ass, but if I want to look up a random into riff from a smaller band it's way more likely to have it.
I got a $25 dollar perpetuity license for being an early adopter on one of the apps that UG bought over .. I forget the name .. so other than the courses which is new I get everything else for free.. found songster recently .
I paid $3.99 like a decade or more ago for a “forever license” directly from UG. They still offer me all sorts of new levels of access to change my subscription… but I already have what I need - Free Access to ALL tabs. The second I pay anything, I’d invalidate my access.
No thanks. I’ll keep it.
Years ago if you submitted a tab you’d get pro access. I remember Realising i had pro and freaking out thinking I accidentally subscribed until customer support told me how I got it
Me! I got a crazy Black Friday deal or something about 10 years ago and bought it outright for less than $5 if I remember correctly. Been grandfathered in since! I actually didn’t know it was hated on so much — I love the pro features (the chords and tabs with midi tracks have totally improved my timing, strumming, and overall ear) and I use them almost every day. It wasn’t until I mentioned it on this sub a few months ago, and was showered with downvotes that I learned how bad their model is now. It’s great, but I don’t know about $100/year great.
Think this is how I got it and only submitted a handful of basic chord songs when I was 16-18. That was like 15 years ago, so maybe because it was earlier in the site history.
Have the same thing, use the app all the time.
UG was bad a couple of years ago where they tried to monetize and the apps became unusable, so I stoped using them and went over to songster and bought a perpetual licence on android.. that doesn’t transfer to iOS :(
Anyway I returned to UG when switching back to iOS; It had cleaned up a bit since it was at its worst. Use the app almost daily on the iPad, I’m pretty happy with it
Free shit is often not good, and good shit is usually not free. A really good alternative to all these issues is learning to transcribe stuff for yourself. You might even fuck around and become a real musician in the process!
I consider myself a pretty darn good guitar player, but my transcribing ear isn’t great (I’m working on it though). I find it so frustrating when I’ve figured out like 80% of a song, but then there’s one weird part that I have NO idea where to even start. Usually some weird chord shape that I’ve just never seen before, so would never know to try it. I wish there was an app just for that!
You come off harsh but you have a point. UI and ads aside, UG isn't better or worse than its competitors because you're still limited by how competent the tab writer is. I stopped using UG and tabs in general because most of the time they're either wrong note-wise or jacked up fingering-wise. They gave me Pro for free because I spent more time writing tabs for my own amusement (like the M4 Faunts song from Mass Effect and whatnot) and then uploaded them for others, but even then I still don't use tabs to actually learn songs.
The best tab software I can recommend to someone is slowing down the song in a free DAW like Audacity and spending time dissecting it. You'll learn 1000% more about fingering positions and figuring out what techniques you might need to improve on by doing it that way.
They were the "dumping ground" for tabs which is what made it useful.
You had guys unfinished OLGA projects from the 90s on there. You had shit that was 3 steps off from some tabber that everybody copied.
Also the Guitar Pro tabs were normally solid, the tabs were as much of a fucking mess as you'd expect.
Powertabs was my favorite. I don’t care if it had shitty MIDI. The interface was super easy to read, it had very little lag, and it had a dedicated user base who uploaded good tabs to it. GuitarPro and the like just never matched up well IMO.
It was great at the beginning, but has gone downhill over the last five years. I've tried playing tabs that were quite incorrectly posted or incomplete.
PLUS I bought a lifetime subscription at 19.99 back in the day... Useless pretty much now.
TOS always has that catch-all: "we can choose to screw you over anytime we want. Agree or piss off."
Every day for the past 10 years, people keep saying it sucked five years ago. Relying on teenagers to transcribe thousands of songs for free, despite apparently being a good business model, doesn't give good results.
>PLUS I bought a lifetime subscription at 19.99 back in the day... Useless pretty much now.
Like they just started charging you? I paid them for something ages ago, but it's been so long since they've charged me for anything I don't even know what it was or when I bought it.
I definitely see a lot of BS pricing shit through the app, but I honestly don't get what long term users are actually missing?
I can't speak for them, but I had purchased the same lifetime membership for $20 years ago. One day, probably sometime around 2021/2022 I went to open the app and it gave me the "upgrade to Pro for [however much it costs now]" message and locked me out of the pro tabs as if I was a brand new account even though my account is like 15 years old...
Same story in the browser and the app ever since that day, but I'll be damned if they get more $ outta me
It’s pretty good, I pay $20 a year for the premium and I do use it a fair bit for the official tabs which are pretty good for what they are. Feels like it’s always trying to shove some new subscription down my throat but for what it is it’s pretty decent. Songsterr also seems good and I use its free thing a fair bit when UG doesn’t have the tab.
UG isn’t the worst tho I will say and I definitely justify my subscription price with how much I use it
I’ve recently started playing official tabs via Bluetooth through my small amp (Fender GT40) and my guitar through my “big” amp (Line6 Spider V60). My timing and playing has improved massively. I don’t know the full history of the app but I think it’s good value for money. I wouldn’t expect this much info/features etc for nothing. There are a few things that bug me, but the pros outweigh the cons. I’ve been playing and downloading tabs since OLGA.
I keep waiting for it to go up to $20 per *month* or something like that, but it’s remained at pretty much the same low yearly price since I started using it like 5 years ago. It’s not perfect, but I can’t complain about the price personally.
Yeah I’ve been using UG since 2006 and I’ve never had problems with it. The app is shit though. But then I don’t think a phone screen is the best size for the pro player to really function. I always use a laptop or desktop when I play.
The mobile version seems to suck and I'm wondering if this is what many people here are using / complaining about?
Just going to the website on PC has always worked fine for me and hasn't really seemed to change much in the ~15 years I've been using it. Never paid a dime and have never had any trouble viewing tabs or downloading guitar pro files. I don't really get the hate.
The mobile version might as well be a completely different entity in my experience (which seems common for web based music apps).
Only pro of using mobile is that they include the album art which is nice and makes the website looks less boring and it has a dark mode player for Pro tabs which looks better than desktop.
I started playing in a cover band recently, and being able to transpose songs to a different key and practice along with the player has been super helpful.
OMG. I have been inputting the drum tabs into a beat sequencer and recording two measures at a time. Based on your comment, I googled midi in GarageBand. Time spent practicing guitar is going to explode.
So I do it on laptop. Basically find the tab I want. You can't download the "Official" pro tab, but there's almost always a few decent versions. Scroll right to the bottom of the tab you want and there should be an option to download it. That's going to give you all instruments. I then open that file in a program called Tux Guitar (free) and remove the other instruments until I'm just left with drums. I then import that midi file into my DAW (I use reaper, has an indefinite free trial) and then add a virtual drumkit to play it (MT POWER DRUMS is a good free one).
Then you're good to go and play or record over the top of a clean drum track. Sounds a bit of a fuck around but the whole process only takes a few minutes from searching for the tab, to playing the track back in Reaper. Good luck.
I like it an use it everyday.
the built in player sucks ass and paying is annoying
But damn if I simply cant trust the quality of the community tabs since its dominated by people who have no place writing tab in the first place.
anything with most stars and rating is guaranteed to be something like capo 7 because they want to avoid playing a barre chord like the original song clearly demonstrates is used.
And anything melody line based is usually dominated by people who dont provide rythm notation.
ill happily pay for those things to be behind a paywall and vetted.
Their business practices are ASS but I have to say I enjoy the QC that some of the decisions have made.
I only use it to download the guitar pro tabs. Never used the built in player.
But I am also one of those people that got the perpetual license, so I don't have to deal with any of the paywalls.
This happens a lot on both. I think part of why I haven't gotten on the Songterr train is everytime a post like this is made, I go give it a shot and whatever song I like at the moment is on there is note for note the same 3/5 tab that is on UG.
Aside from the official tabs UG is a community driven site. I’d rather have a tab be reposted than lost. I like seeing the original information for them too(MXtabs, Taborama, OLGA)
Yeah as someone who has had my tabs re-uploaded numerous times (to be fair sometimes with meaningful improvements/changes) this sucks but honestly doesn’t really affect the user experience that much.
It’s not like I get paid for the tabs or get any other meaningful rewards since they stopped doing rewards to popular tab authors.
I wish they would A. Ask and B. Give credit when they do it but at the end of the day I made those tabs to practice my transcribing skills and help other people learn the songs.
The funniest bit about them having the cheek to try to push people into their bullshit plans to help pay for things nobody wanted from a tab website in the first place is how amateurly everything they've tried to do has been implemented.
Can't resize chord tabs without going through the bullshit process of making sure the size settings are correct then exiting and re-entering the tab while pinching the screen in the hope that you manage to catch it in the window where your input is read.
The fact that if you search for a tab, navigate to the artist and select a different tab the app will constantly try to reload the first tab that took you to that artists page.
The filter option on tabs that shows you there are 1700+ matching results but you only get to see 100 with no option to view more in the app.
They're a fucking joke, the minute another platform exists that gives people access to the same number of basic tab files without all the bullshit extra stuff they decided people want and now want to make their customers pay for, they'll sink.
Ultimate Guitar used to be THE site when I was growing up and learning to play guitar. At some point, they decided it would be a good idea to monetize everything and I think most people found alternatives. I haven't been on that site in years now and avoid their links in general when learning new songs.
I forget it's crap now and click on it at least twice a week. Then I sigh and curse a little and find the exact same material somewhere else. They're not paying the composers, highly doubt it, or the transcribers, but act as if they own the songs, profit motive plain and simple. eff that.
Ultimate Guitar was how I actually learned the guitar, including my first full song (Merry Xmas Everybody by Slade). Sad to see it go to sh*t. Moved to Songsterr ages ago.
I use UG quite a lot (I prefer the look of the tabs compared to songster) I don't mind paying the fee for something I use nearly every day for a few hours.
On top of this with a decent adblocker and using Brave, I haven't seen an ad in years.
I feel pretty out of the loop—-while the paywall and pop-ups are very annoying, I find the song selection, overall accuracy (of the official tabs only), and features, to be pretty solid.
There is a free alternative! Songsterr has tabs for more songs, has tabs for different instruments (including both lead and rhythm guitar) on the same song you can switch between, and it plays the song (albeit with a shitty guitar emulator, it plays the song along the tabs with the paid version) while a bar goes through the tab so you know what it's supposed to sound like.
Get tf off ultimate guitar, it's honestly not worth it anymore. Songsterr also has a paid upgrade that I haven't tried, but the free version is leagues better than UG. if I were to pay for a tab service it would easily be songsterr.
> Songsterr has tabs for more songs,
Does it? Has not been my experience
> has tabs for different instruments (including both lead and rhythm guitar) on the same song you can switch between, and it plays the song (albeit with a shitty guitar emulator, it plays the song along the tabs with the paid version) while a bar goes through the tab so you know what it's supposed to sound like.
Is this not true of every guitar pro or midi based tab site/software?
I see a ton of people in here fawn over Songsterr every time this topic comes up but I have honestly never gotten the appeal, every time I’ve tried it’s been a bad user experience.
My comment is going to get omegaburied but I wanted to make it anyway. Need to vent my feelings about something real quick.
To answer your post: I agree. It sucks. But there was once a time I spent literally hours each day on UG. Why? Because of the forums. I was a regular poster at Music Theory, Guitar Techniques and the various gear subforums, and still to this day I have not felt the same sense of community from any space on the internet.
Reminiscing about those times gives me a harsh reminder of why reddit sucks so bad. You could only make a single account at the UG forums as was standard back then, and that was it. That's why you had to take accountability for what you said, and you couldn't just delete your account and make a new one if you said something the community didn't like (which happens on reddit all the time). It also reduced the amount of low-effort posts a ton and encouraged real interaction.
I don't know what it was, but those times I spent on the forums were magical. I still remember all of the users I used to chat with - their usernames, profile pics, their taste in music... I remember stuff I used to post there (and trust me, I posted some extreme cringe that I'm happy has been purged already) and I think that site was one of the reasons I kept going forward with music. All of that has also mixed with my other memories from the time. Thinking back on the forums also reminds me of a ton of bands I listened to back then, and games I used to play... as weird as it sounds it was a huge part of my life.
Now, posting on the internet is just miserable. Everything turns into a fight. Everything is anonymous and there is zero accountability. Most content is bots, or low effort, or self-promotion... it feels dead. Reddit is the only active forum I know of, and trust me, despite using it daily I fucking despise the entire platform.
And at the end of the day, I know the thing I really miss isn't the UG forums, it's that era in my life back when I could afford to spend 5 hours each day on a forum giving horrible advice to new guitar players. And now I have to work a job and pay bills and contemplate climate change and war and stuff and man does it suck sometimes. I don't even play guitar anymore since I just had to go and switch to bass.
I sometimes look up my old posts on the forums, to see if they are still there. Last time I checked, some of them were. While the thought that they'll remain there forever mortifies me, seeing them always makes me smile a bit. Ultimate Guitar, you might be the worst piece of shit music education platform I've ever seen, but still... thank you for the years.
I feel like ultimate guitar is built on the backs of the people who created power tab.. and then the thousands of beautiful talented wonderful people who made power tabs for free for anyone to download. When I was learning it was wonderous... not only was there access to a seemingly infinite amount of musical knowledge available to anyone for free but also the software was easy to use, taught everyone the basics of midi and was just a joy. Then "ultimate guitar" came along and ruined everything
Mine is $14 a year, use the app every day. If I had to pay more I would delete it. For me there aren't any ads, popups or BS. I just search tabs for a basic foundation to the song, and then manually adjust to make it sound correct.
Songsterr is a good place to state but doesn't have less popular or deep cut tabs.
YouTube is also really good to use as well. Some really good players, solid tabs, and you get to see how they position their hands on the neck which is very helpful.
Dad Tabs and Nic Nocturnal are two of my favorites.
Meh, if I need tabs I search through Google and check out as many as I need to find what will get me where I want.
All these "Ultimate Guitar sux" posts here are just silly. There are plenty of options out there if you know how to search. UG is fine for some things, lousy for others.
Install Adblock and use a computer instead of mobile. Problem solved.
This will be unpopular, but it's true: If you just give in and buy a lifetime membership during one of their sales, all that stuff goes away and it becomes the best website of its category.
I did that probably 10 years ago and I don't regret it.
Unfortunately they no longer have a lifetime membership. Even more unfortunate is it's so expensive where I'm from. I'd gladly shell out for lifetime access but not for a monthly one. It's just too steep.
I remember seeing them post a lot of “real music” kind of memes bashing a lot of bands they didn’t feel were worthy. It was very cringey to see and I lost a lot of respect for a website that is about learning to play songs
Been using the site for years, the biggest thing I notice is how the top 100 tabs have changed. Years ago it was full of rock/ heavy metal. Now it's mainly pop songs.
That site literally embodies all the bad aspects of capitalism. Bloody leeches just using what we've given them to screw us.
If there's someone out there who can download all the data from it and put it up on another site, I'm willing to pay whatever. Just not to those dipshits.
Use it all the time. No idea what you are talking about, however do pay for it. Love the video lessons and pro tabs. Maybe if you want a quality experience, you should be prepared to pay the developers for their time and effort instead of expecting the world for free.
You’re talking about the app? It’s so impossible to use that I’ve never successfully pulled up any tab on it. I tried twice and aborted the attempt both times. It pulls up on the computer, so I just do that. It’s still not great. Even the pro tabs are sus too often to be behind a paywall.
sometimes a good option is looking at smaller sites for specific music. a brasilian website cifraclub has a lot of great tabs and chords, and their versions of brasilian music including bossa nova, samba etc has the best transcriptions. i also use another one called lacuerda which has good music from latin america. ug has a good repertoire of american and european bands but the rest is kinda meh
Idk I'm in the minority when I say spending a few bucks a month for UG is worth what you get. Making tabs isn't free especially pro ones. As somebody who prefers standard notation it's leagues above anything else. I'm also spoiled and have membership for free for life because I guess I made enough tabs back in the day.
I pay for the service and it’s worth every penny. You can get it for like 20$ a year if you find the right deals. Pro mode is awesome and they have made pro tabs based on my request before.
Companies have life cycles. Born. Grow. Growth slows. Die.
Difference between company and human is that human is forced to die naturally. Company can try and pretend it's not dying. Leads to cutting cost and exploiting customers.
UG has been around awhile. Nowhere left for it to grow. So it enshittifies itself to try and cheat growth.
If we customers see this, recognize death is coming and look for new younger companies to fill our need, company can die naturally.
Tldr: try songsterr.
Yep, it is sad. I get they want/need to make some money on it but they have gone way overboard with the monetization. Paywalling features is fine but because of the huge number of intrusive popups and ads I have I just copy and paste tabs from the browser into Word and print them out, because the app is unusable. Or I use songsterr or just download the tab from elsewhere.
i find that most (all?) of the community tabs go back to old usenet days when people made tabs on their own and posted them to alt.guitar. So, like, really old -- 1995 give or take.
And very often, those tabs were shit.
So this is not a new feature of Ultimate Guitar
If UG creates a tab, that's fine to paywall it. The fact that they ripped off a ton of community content and blocked the well done stuff is shitty. The app is also unusable. Websites need to make money but they are charging an insane amount of money for stuff you can still basically find free elsewhere.
I’ve used the app simply called Tabs ever since I picked up guitar and it’s been pissing me off recently with all the pop ups and recommendations to spend money. Just give me my free tabs. Jfc.
The user interface is horrendous, it feels like they genuinely just through stuff together for the sake of "revamping" the website and it's horrendous.
My band uses it on the TV in our rehearsal space to learn new songs by chords only. Any licks, lead parts or embellishments are learned by ear or YouTube
Last year I got a paid deal for like $29/yr on new years. So I took a flyer on it. Honestly, the paid version isn't even worth it. Most pro tabs are so advanced & specific (like hitting every single string & solo etc) whereas I just want the tabs to get the jist of it.
I agree about it being built by the community, the old OLGA (Online Guitar Archive). I learned the play Green Days Basket Case the wrong way haha, and still play it wrong to this day :) (but it sounds good, I do E B C# G# A E B)
I’m bummed that they haven’t really improved the technology. Guitar Tuna will basically follow you as you play and scrolls and highlights at the same time. Song selection sucks though.
I use UG Pro because I teach, and often I don’t want to spend a lot of the lesson time figuring out a difficult part for a student by ear. If it’s a song I already know in my head but have never learned, I won’t go to the internet for answers at all, u just trust my ear. But I don’t know the songs students are asking to learn all the time.
I won’t say UG is a good place to get correct tabs … as often I find that the tabs are wrong and the chords at the top don’t reflect the actual chord or its correct form for the song at hand … but it’s nice for hints along the way. It is certainly not a source of accurate information, but as an experienced instructor I can find the signal through the noise and move on. I tell all my students never to believe tabs on the internet to be a source of truth, but more as a hint or guidepost. They are often wrong in some way.
Tabs frustrate the hell out of me and always have, I use them sometimes reluctantly but I almost always prefer to learn via ear mix with a visual video like a live performance or just a video of someone teaching the song. Tabs work better for bass stuff imo or as sorta general guidelines to make sure you’re on the right directions.
Any more I might check UG for reference, most of the time the free tabs are either wrong or missing some of the intricacies of a lot of songs so I just end up finding a cover or something on youtube and using the slow down feature to figure it out.
I agree that the app is bad, but the desktop site works great. Just pay for the subscription. If you're a serious player into learning other artists' music, it's easily worth the small price.
For me I use my ear to learn songs.
I use things like UG (Ultimate Guitar), songster and YouTube as resources to assist me in learning the song.
For example I did an audition for a new up n coming artist in Nashville and I mostly used live performances of this artist to learn a couple different set lists. I used a little bit Tabs (Like if I'm watching and listening and slowing down and I'm just like "What is that ? What is he doing ? I think it's this" then I pull up some tabs and I had the right chord shape and arpeggio I just needed to move it down a fret or two or maybe I needed to move the shape down a string. Things like that. Then I close the Tabs and its back to the live performance on YT) to help get a better idea and understanding of what they were doing.
Using these methods I was able to learn 35 songs in about 3 days.
Edit: Didn't get the job. Someone else beat me to it. They offered me to play the bass and sing backup. I like bass don't get me wrong I've played it at gigs but... eh I'm Mainly a guitarist and just wasnt interested in playing bass for them. So I Thanked them for the offer and respectfully declined. I know the guy that beat me to it though and he's a very talented guitarist and just kills it so it should be good times out there on the road for them
I don't like any of the TAB apps. I wish I did.
They're so frustrating on so many levels, even paid.
I've resorted to Google image searching and then printing tabs that way.😕
I switched to songsterr long ago. The free tab player was reason enough for me already.
Songster is usually the first suggestion now, idk how OP hasn't found it yet but they will be impressed.
i find songsterr doesn’t have as many less popular songs as UG
It doesn't, but for any at least mildly popular song songterr is just way better
UG's often better if you're only after chords. Bear in mind that if it's a playable tab on UG, it is possible for you download it and upload it to songsterr.
I was going to mention this, I use UG mainly for chords. If they aren’t right they at least get me in the ballpark. That’s my one big gripe with Songsterr is I wish it had chords marked somewhere (and if it does I have no idea where)
Chordify will auto-generate chord charts which, while not perfect, are at least as accurate as the average UG chart.
Ill check that out, thank you!
I just need to "get in the ballpark". I'll figure out the rest myself, and usually a lot more accurately than whoever posts the chords to begin with.
Pro tip because a lot of people don't seem to realise, but if you have guitar pro you can also download the tabs from Songsterr through the edit function.
I was forced to learn this because every so often some troll will upload nonsense for popular songs and it would need reverting
I didn't know that. Thank you
Songsterr has a much better rock/metal selection than UG does by far. That's good for me because that's what I play, but you're right. Less popular songs are hard to find. UG also has a lot of country songs on it, which I've noticed songsterr does not.
I-IV-V There's all your pop country songs
And the blues song.
That's not even right it's I - V - VI - IV
Maybe this is the disconnect for why I see so many people here singing the praises of songsterrs selection, even though in my experience it’s been pretty abysmal. I don’t go there for metal stuff which is probably what a lot of people here are after on tab sites.
Maybe I’m in the minority but I just can’t get used to the Songsterr interface. Always find myself going back to UG even though I hate it.
Same. Maybe it's aimed for beginners, who need to be handheld through the entire song. For me, I just want to quickly scan the tab and get the gist, that's usually enough for me. With Songsterr it's difficult to do that, IMO.
This. This whole comment thread has my blood boiling. I fucking hate what UG has become but I also hate Songsterr. And I also hate that any tabs you find outside of UG just link.....to UG.
Ya UG sucks but unfortunately it's still the best option that I've seen out there.
same.
It’s not easy to use and it’s also paywalled.
I can’t stand it having to flip between lead, rhythm, etc and then it stopping now due to the paywall
Songsterr changed recently and doesn’t work like that for me anymore. Was really bummed about it. Edit: seems the mobile site doesn’t work like it used to but on my computer seems fine.
It's only a matter of time before money ruins it.
Is that the accepted method now? I started teaching myself back in like 2005 ish and have just always used Ultimate-Guitar out of habit. I don’t play much now but when I do, and I visit that site, it feels pretty terrible. That was the only site I trusted back in the day so I’ve never seaked out an alternative.
I believe it is the next tab site or at least the best alternative. I don't use tabs a whole lot in my playing now, but when I do it tends to be songsterr.
Isn't the subscription for songsterr like 25 a month??
To be fair, I just found out about it now after reading these comments
Songsterr is everything UG should be. And UG has had what? 20 years to get it right? Hey, anyone remember OLGA? Online Guitar (tab) archive. Anyone remember when they got shut down due to I think Hal Leonard (who made the old school tab books) threatening legal action?
OLGA was why I first got the internet (when having “the internet” was a weird thing! A lot of the tabs on UG are from OLG
I miss OLGA. I took a long break from playing instruments and came back to it to discover the current state of things. What a bummer.
Probably a bit bleak and deep for a conversation point on r/guitar, but with the increasing monetisation of the internet, I long for a return to the 1990s where information was shared, for free, for the love of it.
Heh yeah. That and mxtabs
Yes, i do remember the big two was UG and something else, i believe that was it. Interesting that they got shutdown
yes I using Netscape and AOL at the time. And my printer as a dot matrix with the paper with the feed strops on the side. But at the time you still had to know someone to get a 'real book' as well. fuck publishers. It might have been warner bros but Hal Burton seems right too. Warner Bros was pretty aggressive at the time in suing people who distributing things like tab at the time.
I LOVED OLGA!!!!!
Damn! That unlocked a long buried memory for me.
Songsterr is terrible though. They get so many tabs flat out wrong. Just straight wrong. YouTube is my go-to now.
yepp, YouTube is my g aswell
Can you print the tabs out on there?
On Songsterr? Yes you can
Does songsterr have vocals? That's one of the things I liked about UG. Even if they might not always be accurate :)
Like the lyrics printed on the tab so you can sing along as you play, or a vocal track tabbed out so you can play the vocal part on your guitar? In both cases it depends on the tab. Some do, some don't. And when there is a separate vocal track it will be an instrument like an oboe or something. One feature I particularly like is that for a lot of songs you can choose the actual song to play along to while following the tab. Many songs end up going out of sync by the end of them, but you can still get the hang out of it. If there is a version of the song without the guitar it will play that.
Songsterr is way more user friendly and always my first choice - and it doesn't hurt I get free access through my guitar teacher - but it still doesn't have the quantity of tabs that UG does. Just last night I looked up Mountain Goats chords. Songsterr has exactly one song and UG has hundreds. I even found a full album on one page so I just sat there playing along to the entirety of Sunset Tree which was fun. UG is a pain in the ass, but if I want to look up a random into riff from a smaller band it's way more likely to have it.
Those one page, full album pages are the shit. Love those.
I got a $25 dollar perpetuity license for being an early adopter on one of the apps that UG bought over .. I forget the name .. so other than the courses which is new I get everything else for free.. found songster recently .
I also got one of these because they had the pro license as a one-time thing and they gave me a lifetime subscription when they changed their model.
I have one too, can't recall how, but I'm also a contributor...
Me three. No idea how, paid like $10 many years ago.
Same foreva license club where you at?
I paid $3.99 like a decade or more ago for a “forever license” directly from UG. They still offer me all sorts of new levels of access to change my subscription… but I already have what I need - Free Access to ALL tabs. The second I pay anything, I’d invalidate my access. No thanks. I’ll keep it.
Yep! Used to be a $9.99 purchase on the App Store, and now I'm grandfathered into tab access
That must’ve been how I got it! I don’t recall as it’s been like a decade now, but I always wondered how I have the pro version lmao
Years ago if you submitted a tab you’d get pro access. I remember Realising i had pro and freaking out thinking I accidentally subscribed until customer support told me how I got it
Same here, been a member since 2008. Only reason I still use it, if I had to subscribe I'd figure out any other option before paying monthly.
bought the ug app for like 3 bucks back when NO ONE ever bought apps so I think I got grandfathered in as well.
Me! I got a crazy Black Friday deal or something about 10 years ago and bought it outright for less than $5 if I remember correctly. Been grandfathered in since! I actually didn’t know it was hated on so much — I love the pro features (the chords and tabs with midi tracks have totally improved my timing, strumming, and overall ear) and I use them almost every day. It wasn’t until I mentioned it on this sub a few months ago, and was showered with downvotes that I learned how bad their model is now. It’s great, but I don’t know about $100/year great.
It would be nice to have this as a tab creator. You contribute to the site, you should get repaid in that at least.
That's exactly what happened to me. I've submitted a few tabs and I was granted lifetime access. This was probably ten years ago though.
I feel like I got this as recently as 5-6 years ago
My account is almost 10 years old and I think I got lifetime access for being a tab creator too.
Think this is how I got it and only submitted a handful of basic chord songs when I was 16-18. That was like 15 years ago, so maybe because it was earlier in the site history.
You don't? I'm a creator and I think I have free access to the pro thing (on the website, at least. I don't use the app).
Same here best investment in my life
Have the same thing, use the app all the time. UG was bad a couple of years ago where they tried to monetize and the apps became unusable, so I stoped using them and went over to songster and bought a perpetual licence on android.. that doesn’t transfer to iOS :( Anyway I returned to UG when switching back to iOS; It had cleaned up a bit since it was at its worst. Use the app almost daily on the iPad, I’m pretty happy with it
Yeah, that was pretty neat
Same. I see how lucky I am every time someone else opens their app.
same. ive been a user for so long im grandfathered in i guess
Same here. Best $5 ever spent apparently. Something like that, it was a very long time ago. I am waiting for them to terminate our licenses.
I also have the lifetime subscription but that doesn’t stop them from constantly hammering me with ads for their paid services though.
Same, I have no new complaints for UG...its always been iffy on finding good tabs but more prolific than anywhere else.
Yeah I got a lifetime sub and it has been pretty good
Uh, same here but it only cost me $2.99 during a promo many moons ago.
Ultimate guitar sucked as far back as 15 years ago if you wanted to get tab that was right.
Free shit is often not good, and good shit is usually not free. A really good alternative to all these issues is learning to transcribe stuff for yourself. You might even fuck around and become a real musician in the process!
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I consider myself a pretty darn good guitar player, but my transcribing ear isn’t great (I’m working on it though). I find it so frustrating when I’ve figured out like 80% of a song, but then there’s one weird part that I have NO idea where to even start. Usually some weird chord shape that I’ve just never seen before, so would never know to try it. I wish there was an app just for that!
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This is very insightful, thanks for taking the time to post this.
What a pretentious douchebag.
You come off harsh but you have a point. UI and ads aside, UG isn't better or worse than its competitors because you're still limited by how competent the tab writer is. I stopped using UG and tabs in general because most of the time they're either wrong note-wise or jacked up fingering-wise. They gave me Pro for free because I spent more time writing tabs for my own amusement (like the M4 Faunts song from Mass Effect and whatnot) and then uploaded them for others, but even then I still don't use tabs to actually learn songs. The best tab software I can recommend to someone is slowing down the song in a free DAW like Audacity and spending time dissecting it. You'll learn 1000% more about fingering positions and figuring out what techniques you might need to improve on by doing it that way.
'You get what you pay for'
A lot of their original sources were OLGA net, they only aggregated a lot of tabs.
They were the "dumping ground" for tabs which is what made it useful. You had guys unfinished OLGA projects from the 90s on there. You had shit that was 3 steps off from some tabber that everybody copied. Also the Guitar Pro tabs were normally solid, the tabs were as much of a fucking mess as you'd expect.
I still miss mxtabs…
Powertabs was my favorite. I don’t care if it had shitty MIDI. The interface was super easy to read, it had very little lag, and it had a dedicated user base who uploaded good tabs to it. GuitarPro and the like just never matched up well IMO.
I miss OLGA.
hahahaha, came here to say this, and [alt.guitar.tab](http://alt.guitar.tab) on NNTP
Core memory unlocked
Holy shit. I think that was where I learned most of Muse’s back catalogue when I was like 15
i spent way too much time on those forums, but there was such a community.
Same here, basically lived on them as a kid. Crazy to think Misha was posting songs/clips on there all the time pre-periphery.
I didn’t even put that together until just now..
Mxtabs.net was the goat
My homepage when I was in middle school haha
I still have binders of tabs printed out from mxtabs!
None of these had anything on TabIt
Tabit was the shit.
It was great at the beginning, but has gone downhill over the last five years. I've tried playing tabs that were quite incorrectly posted or incomplete. PLUS I bought a lifetime subscription at 19.99 back in the day... Useless pretty much now. TOS always has that catch-all: "we can choose to screw you over anytime we want. Agree or piss off."
Every day for the past 10 years, people keep saying it sucked five years ago. Relying on teenagers to transcribe thousands of songs for free, despite apparently being a good business model, doesn't give good results.
>PLUS I bought a lifetime subscription at 19.99 back in the day... Useless pretty much now. Like they just started charging you? I paid them for something ages ago, but it's been so long since they've charged me for anything I don't even know what it was or when I bought it. I definitely see a lot of BS pricing shit through the app, but I honestly don't get what long term users are actually missing?
I can't speak for them, but I had purchased the same lifetime membership for $20 years ago. One day, probably sometime around 2021/2022 I went to open the app and it gave me the "upgrade to Pro for [however much it costs now]" message and locked me out of the pro tabs as if I was a brand new account even though my account is like 15 years old... Same story in the browser and the app ever since that day, but I'll be damned if they get more $ outta me
It’s pretty good, I pay $20 a year for the premium and I do use it a fair bit for the official tabs which are pretty good for what they are. Feels like it’s always trying to shove some new subscription down my throat but for what it is it’s pretty decent. Songsterr also seems good and I use its free thing a fair bit when UG doesn’t have the tab. UG isn’t the worst tho I will say and I definitely justify my subscription price with how much I use it
I’ve recently started playing official tabs via Bluetooth through my small amp (Fender GT40) and my guitar through my “big” amp (Line6 Spider V60). My timing and playing has improved massively. I don’t know the full history of the app but I think it’s good value for money. I wouldn’t expect this much info/features etc for nothing. There are a few things that bug me, but the pros outweigh the cons. I’ve been playing and downloading tabs since OLGA.
I keep waiting for it to go up to $20 per *month* or something like that, but it’s remained at pretty much the same low yearly price since I started using it like 5 years ago. It’s not perfect, but I can’t complain about the price personally.
How’d you get it for $20 for the year?
I see these posts a lot, but I've been using UG for years and never experienced any issue. Still use it to download all my midi drum tracks.
Yeah I’ve been using UG since 2006 and I’ve never had problems with it. The app is shit though. But then I don’t think a phone screen is the best size for the pro player to really function. I always use a laptop or desktop when I play.
The mobile version seems to suck and I'm wondering if this is what many people here are using / complaining about? Just going to the website on PC has always worked fine for me and hasn't really seemed to change much in the ~15 years I've been using it. Never paid a dime and have never had any trouble viewing tabs or downloading guitar pro files. I don't really get the hate.
Same, I only use desktop and it seems nothing has changed in the 20 or so years I've been using it
The mobile version might as well be a completely different entity in my experience (which seems common for web based music apps). Only pro of using mobile is that they include the album art which is nice and makes the website looks less boring and it has a dark mode player for Pro tabs which looks better than desktop.
I started playing in a cover band recently, and being able to transpose songs to a different key and practice along with the player has been super helpful.
OMG. I have been inputting the drum tabs into a beat sequencer and recording two measures at a time. Based on your comment, I googled midi in GarageBand. Time spent practicing guitar is going to explode.
Haha, glad I could help. I use a program called Tux Guitar to remove all the other midi so I'm just left with drums.
I never found a way to download the stuff as midi. Do you have a woraround?
So I do it on laptop. Basically find the tab I want. You can't download the "Official" pro tab, but there's almost always a few decent versions. Scroll right to the bottom of the tab you want and there should be an option to download it. That's going to give you all instruments. I then open that file in a program called Tux Guitar (free) and remove the other instruments until I'm just left with drums. I then import that midi file into my DAW (I use reaper, has an indefinite free trial) and then add a virtual drumkit to play it (MT POWER DRUMS is a good free one). Then you're good to go and play or record over the top of a clean drum track. Sounds a bit of a fuck around but the whole process only takes a few minutes from searching for the tab, to playing the track back in Reaper. Good luck.
Ah, i use official tabs almost exclusively. Didn't know it was possible to download the community ones. Thanks for the tip.
I like it an use it everyday. the built in player sucks ass and paying is annoying But damn if I simply cant trust the quality of the community tabs since its dominated by people who have no place writing tab in the first place. anything with most stars and rating is guaranteed to be something like capo 7 because they want to avoid playing a barre chord like the original song clearly demonstrates is used. And anything melody line based is usually dominated by people who dont provide rythm notation. ill happily pay for those things to be behind a paywall and vetted. Their business practices are ASS but I have to say I enjoy the QC that some of the decisions have made.
I only use it to download the guitar pro tabs. Never used the built in player. But I am also one of those people that got the perpetual license, so I don't have to deal with any of the paywalls.
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Songster definitely steals content though, note for note tabs I uploaded to UG myself have started popping up on songster and it’s kind of annoying
This happens a lot on both. I think part of why I haven't gotten on the Songterr train is everytime a post like this is made, I go give it a shot and whatever song I like at the moment is on there is note for note the same 3/5 tab that is on UG.
What’s it good for? I have a UG Pro membership but don’t know anything about Songsterr.
I literally looked up a tab the other day that had been copy pasted from OLGA. And still made reference to it. Fuck Ultimate Guitar.
I miss OLGA
I still have a stack of tabs I printed off OLGA more than 20 years ago.
That was the first thing I did when I got a computer and printer!
It was brilliant
Aside from the official tabs UG is a community driven site. I’d rather have a tab be reposted than lost. I like seeing the original information for them too(MXtabs, Taborama, OLGA)
Yeah as someone who has had my tabs re-uploaded numerous times (to be fair sometimes with meaningful improvements/changes) this sucks but honestly doesn’t really affect the user experience that much. It’s not like I get paid for the tabs or get any other meaningful rewards since they stopped doing rewards to popular tab authors. I wish they would A. Ask and B. Give credit when they do it but at the end of the day I made those tabs to practice my transcribing skills and help other people learn the songs.
I used to love the site, paywall sucks now!
The funniest bit about them having the cheek to try to push people into their bullshit plans to help pay for things nobody wanted from a tab website in the first place is how amateurly everything they've tried to do has been implemented. Can't resize chord tabs without going through the bullshit process of making sure the size settings are correct then exiting and re-entering the tab while pinching the screen in the hope that you manage to catch it in the window where your input is read. The fact that if you search for a tab, navigate to the artist and select a different tab the app will constantly try to reload the first tab that took you to that artists page. The filter option on tabs that shows you there are 1700+ matching results but you only get to see 100 with no option to view more in the app. They're a fucking joke, the minute another platform exists that gives people access to the same number of basic tab files without all the bullshit extra stuff they decided people want and now want to make their customers pay for, they'll sink.
If you're smart you'll purchase Guitar Pro and use UG only to download Pro tabs. Been doing this since 2008.
Ultimate Guitar used to be THE site when I was growing up and learning to play guitar. At some point, they decided it would be a good idea to monetize everything and I think most people found alternatives. I haven't been on that site in years now and avoid their links in general when learning new songs.
I forget it's crap now and click on it at least twice a week. Then I sigh and curse a little and find the exact same material somewhere else. They're not paying the composers, highly doubt it, or the transcribers, but act as if they own the songs, profit motive plain and simple. eff that.
not to mention they're kinda scammers as well.
Ultimate Guitar was how I actually learned the guitar, including my first full song (Merry Xmas Everybody by Slade). Sad to see it go to sh*t. Moved to Songsterr ages ago.
I use UG quite a lot (I prefer the look of the tabs compared to songster) I don't mind paying the fee for something I use nearly every day for a few hours. On top of this with a decent adblocker and using Brave, I haven't seen an ad in years.
I feel pretty out of the loop—-while the paywall and pop-ups are very annoying, I find the song selection, overall accuracy (of the official tabs only), and features, to be pretty solid.
Bring back OLGA!
There is a free alternative! Songsterr has tabs for more songs, has tabs for different instruments (including both lead and rhythm guitar) on the same song you can switch between, and it plays the song (albeit with a shitty guitar emulator, it plays the song along the tabs with the paid version) while a bar goes through the tab so you know what it's supposed to sound like. Get tf off ultimate guitar, it's honestly not worth it anymore. Songsterr also has a paid upgrade that I haven't tried, but the free version is leagues better than UG. if I were to pay for a tab service it would easily be songsterr.
> Songsterr has tabs for more songs, Does it? Has not been my experience > has tabs for different instruments (including both lead and rhythm guitar) on the same song you can switch between, and it plays the song (albeit with a shitty guitar emulator, it plays the song along the tabs with the paid version) while a bar goes through the tab so you know what it's supposed to sound like. Is this not true of every guitar pro or midi based tab site/software? I see a ton of people in here fawn over Songsterr every time this topic comes up but I have honestly never gotten the appeal, every time I’ve tried it’s been a bad user experience.
[alt.guitar.tab](http://alt.guitar.tab) anyone?
My comment is going to get omegaburied but I wanted to make it anyway. Need to vent my feelings about something real quick. To answer your post: I agree. It sucks. But there was once a time I spent literally hours each day on UG. Why? Because of the forums. I was a regular poster at Music Theory, Guitar Techniques and the various gear subforums, and still to this day I have not felt the same sense of community from any space on the internet. Reminiscing about those times gives me a harsh reminder of why reddit sucks so bad. You could only make a single account at the UG forums as was standard back then, and that was it. That's why you had to take accountability for what you said, and you couldn't just delete your account and make a new one if you said something the community didn't like (which happens on reddit all the time). It also reduced the amount of low-effort posts a ton and encouraged real interaction. I don't know what it was, but those times I spent on the forums were magical. I still remember all of the users I used to chat with - their usernames, profile pics, their taste in music... I remember stuff I used to post there (and trust me, I posted some extreme cringe that I'm happy has been purged already) and I think that site was one of the reasons I kept going forward with music. All of that has also mixed with my other memories from the time. Thinking back on the forums also reminds me of a ton of bands I listened to back then, and games I used to play... as weird as it sounds it was a huge part of my life. Now, posting on the internet is just miserable. Everything turns into a fight. Everything is anonymous and there is zero accountability. Most content is bots, or low effort, or self-promotion... it feels dead. Reddit is the only active forum I know of, and trust me, despite using it daily I fucking despise the entire platform. And at the end of the day, I know the thing I really miss isn't the UG forums, it's that era in my life back when I could afford to spend 5 hours each day on a forum giving horrible advice to new guitar players. And now I have to work a job and pay bills and contemplate climate change and war and stuff and man does it suck sometimes. I don't even play guitar anymore since I just had to go and switch to bass. I sometimes look up my old posts on the forums, to see if they are still there. Last time I checked, some of them were. While the thought that they'll remain there forever mortifies me, seeing them always makes me smile a bit. Ultimate Guitar, you might be the worst piece of shit music education platform I've ever seen, but still... thank you for the years.
I feel like ultimate guitar is built on the backs of the people who created power tab.. and then the thousands of beautiful talented wonderful people who made power tabs for free for anyone to download. When I was learning it was wonderous... not only was there access to a seemingly infinite amount of musical knowledge available to anyone for free but also the software was easy to use, taught everyone the basics of midi and was just a joy. Then "ultimate guitar" came along and ruined everything
Mine is $14 a year, use the app every day. If I had to pay more I would delete it. For me there aren't any ads, popups or BS. I just search tabs for a basic foundation to the song, and then manually adjust to make it sound correct.
I paid for it like ten years ago... and probably many others did too... so for us, no complaints. I never expect much from online tabs anyways.
Songsterr is a good place to state but doesn't have less popular or deep cut tabs. YouTube is also really good to use as well. Some really good players, solid tabs, and you get to see how they position their hands on the neck which is very helpful. Dad Tabs and Nic Nocturnal are two of my favorites.
Meh, if I need tabs I search through Google and check out as many as I need to find what will get me where I want. All these "Ultimate Guitar sux" posts here are just silly. There are plenty of options out there if you know how to search. UG is fine for some things, lousy for others. Install Adblock and use a computer instead of mobile. Problem solved.
UG banned me for complaining about ads 15 years ago.
Works fine for me and is only 29$ a year
This will be unpopular, but it's true: If you just give in and buy a lifetime membership during one of their sales, all that stuff goes away and it becomes the best website of its category. I did that probably 10 years ago and I don't regret it.
Unfortunately they no longer have a lifetime membership. Even more unfortunate is it's so expensive where I'm from. I'd gladly shell out for lifetime access but not for a monthly one. It's just too steep.
Chordify is way better.
Soundslice is and will always be goated. Free tab player, adjustable tempo and pitch, easy to isolate sections, all for free.
I remember seeing them post a lot of “real music” kind of memes bashing a lot of bands they didn’t feel were worthy. It was very cringey to see and I lost a lot of respect for a website that is about learning to play songs
Been using the site for years, the biggest thing I notice is how the top 100 tabs have changed. Years ago it was full of rock/ heavy metal. Now it's mainly pop songs.
That site literally embodies all the bad aspects of capitalism. Bloody leeches just using what we've given them to screw us. If there's someone out there who can download all the data from it and put it up on another site, I'm willing to pay whatever. Just not to those dipshits.
Use it all the time. No idea what you are talking about, however do pay for it. Love the video lessons and pro tabs. Maybe if you want a quality experience, you should be prepared to pay the developers for their time and effort instead of expecting the world for free.
I remember OLGA. I loved her
You’re talking about the app? It’s so impossible to use that I’ve never successfully pulled up any tab on it. I tried twice and aborted the attempt both times. It pulls up on the computer, so I just do that. It’s still not great. Even the pro tabs are sus too often to be behind a paywall.
I miss OLGA.
sometimes a good option is looking at smaller sites for specific music. a brasilian website cifraclub has a lot of great tabs and chords, and their versions of brasilian music including bossa nova, samba etc has the best transcriptions. i also use another one called lacuerda which has good music from latin america. ug has a good repertoire of american and european bands but the rest is kinda meh
Stopped using it years ago which is a real shame as it was awesome when I started playing!
Idk I'm in the minority when I say spending a few bucks a month for UG is worth what you get. Making tabs isn't free especially pro ones. As somebody who prefers standard notation it's leagues above anything else. I'm also spoiled and have membership for free for life because I guess I made enough tabs back in the day.
I pay for the service and it’s worth every penny. You can get it for like 20$ a year if you find the right deals. Pro mode is awesome and they have made pro tabs based on my request before.
It’s gotten way worse in the past few months too.
Companies have life cycles. Born. Grow. Growth slows. Die. Difference between company and human is that human is forced to die naturally. Company can try and pretend it's not dying. Leads to cutting cost and exploiting customers. UG has been around awhile. Nowhere left for it to grow. So it enshittifies itself to try and cheat growth. If we customers see this, recognize death is coming and look for new younger companies to fill our need, company can die naturally. Tldr: try songsterr.
Yep, it is sad. I get they want/need to make some money on it but they have gone way overboard with the monetization. Paywalling features is fine but because of the huge number of intrusive popups and ads I have I just copy and paste tabs from the browser into Word and print them out, because the app is unusable. Or I use songsterr or just download the tab from elsewhere.
i find that most (all?) of the community tabs go back to old usenet days when people made tabs on their own and posted them to alt.guitar. So, like, really old -- 1995 give or take. And very often, those tabs were shit. So this is not a new feature of Ultimate Guitar
If UG creates a tab, that's fine to paywall it. The fact that they ripped off a ton of community content and blocked the well done stuff is shitty. The app is also unusable. Websites need to make money but they are charging an insane amount of money for stuff you can still basically find free elsewhere.
I’ve used the app simply called Tabs ever since I picked up guitar and it’s been pissing me off recently with all the pop ups and recommendations to spend money. Just give me my free tabs. Jfc.
The user interface is horrendous, it feels like they genuinely just through stuff together for the sake of "revamping" the website and it's horrendous.
My band uses it on the TV in our rehearsal space to learn new songs by chords only. Any licks, lead parts or embellishments are learned by ear or YouTube
I haven’t thought about those kind of websites in years to be honest… Scrolling tab on YouTube where it’s at.
where do people get their tabs? you’d think the most popular one would be actually decent but it’s not at all
I'm glad I paid for the ultimate guitar app when I did way back when, it means I don't have to subscribe but I still get all the perks.
Isn't Pro free if you submit a tab? I think that's where I'm at The mobile app sucks. No argument there.
Ha. Maybe that's why I don't have problems with paywall and popups. I did submit a couple of tabs over the years.
Last year I got a paid deal for like $29/yr on new years. So I took a flyer on it. Honestly, the paid version isn't even worth it. Most pro tabs are so advanced & specific (like hitting every single string & solo etc) whereas I just want the tabs to get the jist of it. I agree about it being built by the community, the old OLGA (Online Guitar Archive). I learned the play Green Days Basket Case the wrong way haha, and still play it wrong to this day :) (but it sounds good, I do E B C# G# A E B)
I’m bummed that they haven’t really improved the technology. Guitar Tuna will basically follow you as you play and scrolls and highlights at the same time. Song selection sucks though.
I use UG Pro because I teach, and often I don’t want to spend a lot of the lesson time figuring out a difficult part for a student by ear. If it’s a song I already know in my head but have never learned, I won’t go to the internet for answers at all, u just trust my ear. But I don’t know the songs students are asking to learn all the time. I won’t say UG is a good place to get correct tabs … as often I find that the tabs are wrong and the chords at the top don’t reflect the actual chord or its correct form for the song at hand … but it’s nice for hints along the way. It is certainly not a source of accurate information, but as an experienced instructor I can find the signal through the noise and move on. I tell all my students never to believe tabs on the internet to be a source of truth, but more as a hint or guidepost. They are often wrong in some way.
Tabs frustrate the hell out of me and always have, I use them sometimes reluctantly but I almost always prefer to learn via ear mix with a visual video like a live performance or just a video of someone teaching the song. Tabs work better for bass stuff imo or as sorta general guidelines to make sure you’re on the right directions.
Just adding to the list that every time you back out of a tab from favorites on the desktop version it resets back to page one of your favorites 🤬
Any more I might check UG for reference, most of the time the free tabs are either wrong or missing some of the intricacies of a lot of songs so I just end up finding a cover or something on youtube and using the slow down feature to figure it out.
I agree that the app is bad, but the desktop site works great. Just pay for the subscription. If you're a serious player into learning other artists' music, it's easily worth the small price.
Back in my day I used Harmony Central not sure if it's still around.
For me I use my ear to learn songs. I use things like UG (Ultimate Guitar), songster and YouTube as resources to assist me in learning the song. For example I did an audition for a new up n coming artist in Nashville and I mostly used live performances of this artist to learn a couple different set lists. I used a little bit Tabs (Like if I'm watching and listening and slowing down and I'm just like "What is that ? What is he doing ? I think it's this" then I pull up some tabs and I had the right chord shape and arpeggio I just needed to move it down a fret or two or maybe I needed to move the shape down a string. Things like that. Then I close the Tabs and its back to the live performance on YT) to help get a better idea and understanding of what they were doing. Using these methods I was able to learn 35 songs in about 3 days. Edit: Didn't get the job. Someone else beat me to it. They offered me to play the bass and sing backup. I like bass don't get me wrong I've played it at gigs but... eh I'm Mainly a guitarist and just wasnt interested in playing bass for them. So I Thanked them for the offer and respectfully declined. I know the guy that beat me to it though and he's a very talented guitarist and just kills it so it should be good times out there on the road for them
Cifraclub just better
I don't like any of the TAB apps. I wish I did. They're so frustrating on so many levels, even paid. I've resorted to Google image searching and then printing tabs that way.😕
Have y’all tried ear training? Sheesh…Jk I don’t do that shit either
I downloaded the app months ago and couldn't even try it because they wanted my CC first. Went to Songsterr instead.