Guitar Pro's tabs are quite accurate, because it translates them directly from standard annotated sheet music.
Most tabs made from text are worthless, I agree, but tabs in conjunction with sheet music is a pretty useful learning tool. Get some classical pieces, like Bach, and you'll learn tons.
EDIT -- and the benefit of Guitar Pro over the free-versions out there isn't just the many extra features it has, but the fact that it has a large fanbase with some very devoted and serious musicians putting out tabs that really showcase all the intricacies of a piece.
get guitarpro6, or even 5 (it's more user-friendly, but lacks in playback quality and advanced features), it's an amazing program for learning guitar, chords, scales, and can be a great help in learning to read sheet music.
now, internet tabs are usually crap, and realistically only pdf and gpro tab formats are reliable (with the occasional powertab), and not even those most of the time. the only reliable tabs are made from sheet music, but many tabbers have low standards or don't put enough effort into it.
if you want to learn chords to strum pieces around the campfire and such, the net is full of reliable material, instructional videos, chord charts, especially if you're looking for electric guitar and pick use.
if you want to learn to play more advanced stuff however, you need to either get your hand on decently accurate tabs, or learn to read sheet music, but that's a long way off for beginners and good sheet music for guitar isn't that available (though the net is full of piano sheet music if you know enough to transcribe). that on top of the music theory websites, scale charts etc. the net is full of.
i've been working with guitarpro for years, tabbing classical guitar pieces from sheet music, or making occasional nab arrangements from other instruments, and i definitely agree with this statement
and the benefit of Guitar Pro over the free-versions out there isn't just the many extra features it has, but the fact that it has a large fanbase with some very devoted and serious musicians putting out tabs that really showcase all the intricacies of a piece.
anyway, if anyone needs some help with guitarpro5 or 6, tabbing, or has questions/needs help with classical guitar material, finger picking, or sheet music in general, pm me and i'll try to help if i can.
With modern music, classical music doesnt have much chordal and progressional relationship with most genre common today. I believe that Jazz is the way to go, not that it hurts learning a Bach piece on guitar!
Jazz though, when it comes to chords, is probably harder to deal with. It transgress a lots of preconceived rules that were in application until modern classical music came into the mix, but most of those artists experiment to dissonance, which is a key element of jazz.
Diminished and 13th chords FTW!
A good song to start with is My Funny Valentine. For Non-Classical genre that can help the ears, i would propose The Smiths and R.E.M. Mostly The Smiths, there's alot of songs that are really challenging to learn by ear.
Yeah... I guess for me personally I'm not really looking at investing a whole lot of time into excelling my guitar skills... I just want to be able to play nice pop songs to impress the ChickyDees.
On March 29 2011 16:07 HowSoOnIsNow wrote: Personally, i believe that using tabs is for the beginners to use. Being a professional musician (worked on some records in Montreal and in Thailand) i can't really recommend guitarist to use tabs other than to figure out the harder parts of solos.
If you are just playing guitar purely as a hobby and you dont have time to invest into learning the craft, i guess it's okay, but don't always use them if you are taking it seriously.
The first trick is to tune your guitar without a tuner. You got to have the C note imprinted in your mind. You have to be able to recognize the basic chords by ears. The major and the minor ones. You should know to a certain extend what a 7th, minor 7th and major 7th sounds like. It's normal to confuse the 6th and the 9th extention, or th 4th and the 2nd, but you should at least have an idea.
As for solos, it's important to recognize the patterns. You starts with the cliches, and then the more technical ones. You should get a sense of when a players is doing finger tapping or sweeping an arpeggio. i'm not saying that you should know right away that the guy's sweeping a Fadd 11. You should also try to listen to other instruments, and imagine how could you translate it on a guitar. Don't take piano, as it won't be truly representative, but saxophone and wind instruments can be good tests . I took a whole day once to arrange A Love Supreme by John Coltrane. My god, the number of sweep arpeggio in this piece....
So, it's great to start with tabs, but once you come across a nice song and you can't play it just because there's no tab for it (and 90% aren't accurate anyway)well that just sucks.
sure. I can pick up melodies okay but how do you pick up chords? I find chords hard to dissect out.
On March 29 2011 16:07 HowSoOnIsNow wrote: Personally, i believe that using tabs is for the beginners to use. Being a professional musician (worked on some records in Montreal and in Thailand) i can't really recommend guitarist to use tabs other than to figure out the harder parts of solos.
If you are just playing guitar purely as a hobby and you dont have time to invest into learning the craft, i guess it's okay, but don't always use them if you are taking it seriously.
The first trick is to tune your guitar without a tuner. You got to have the C note imprinted in your mind. You have to be able to recognize the basic chords by ears. The major and the minor ones. You should know to a certain extend what a 7th, minor 7th and major 7th sounds like. It's normal to confuse the 6th and the 9th extention, or th 4th and the 2nd, but you should at least have an idea.
As for solos, it's important to recognize the patterns. You starts with the cliches, and then the more technical ones. You should get a sense of when a players is doing finger tapping or sweeping an arpeggio. i'm not saying that you should know right away that the guy's sweeping a Fadd 11. You should also try to listen to other instruments, and imagine how could you translate it on a guitar. Don't take piano, as it won't be truly representative, but saxophone and wind instruments can be good tests . I took a whole day once to arrange A Love Supreme by John Coltrane. My god, the number of sweep arpeggio in this piece....
So, it's great to start with tabs, but once you come across a nice song and you can't play it just because there's no tab for it (and 90% aren't accurate anyway)well that just sucks.
sure. I can pick up melodies okay but how do you pick up chords? I find chords hard to dissect out.
I pick the base notes and find the scale. Usually by knowing theory you can predict most if not all the chords. If they turn out different than the basics, it's usually a small number of them, so it's not so difficult to pick the remaining right chord by trial and error.
Can anyone tab the song "sleep" by godspeed you! black emperor? I understand it's extensive so perhaps if anyone knows a link to the song. I've tried all the major guitar tab sites and no luck =/
Anyways, I'm a fingerstyle sort of guy. I love it when you can make the guitar sing (to make up for my lack of any vocal ability).
My problem is not having enough korean music to apply this style to. I'm currently learning Sungha's Haru Haru (which is exactly the type of music I want to play). Anyone have any other sites?
And here's my gift to this wonderful thread: songsterr.com
Go and check it out, it has tabs and it's completely free for the basics (which is all you really need). There's a bajillion different tabs on their, for electric guitar and acoustic. It even has playback (like GuitarPro) but requires no download (but you can download if you want to).
AFAIK it's not as popular as UG, even though it should be.
Hm, and check out heronymusic (Youtube). His music is what got me to start playing guitar so late (17 yrs). Now I play every day and it's been amazing. Specifically, check out his Forrest Gump theme song cover.
If there's anyone here who can tab the FG theme song by ^, please do so. It's in standard tuning, and I'll be eternally grateful ^^
On March 29 2011 18:17 Radical wrote: Instead of spending time looking up tabs, just learn some scales instead. You can't become a good or even mediocre player if you need tabs to be able to tell what someone else is playing. Also as someone said above, it's ridiculous how many tabs on the internet are not even close to correct. This is probably because no one who is even remotely serious about guitar would ever waste time tabbing out a song, unless they're a teacher of a student who has no ambition. So to summarize: tabs are a poor use of your time, and most of them are wrong anyway.
Tabs are good for learning quick. they are great way for hobbyist or just plain bad players to pick up music without the theory. Later on as you get better you'll naturally start picking stuff out and will find it more taxing to actually try to tab something than just play it as you hear it. Learning my ear is powerful and is more accurate IMO, even when you add room for interpretation, than just some random guy's tab. Play it how it sounds! Getting this point just takes time and experience, but then you can pick up some theory material and start your real learning. Applies to any instrument that they write tabs for; I started out this way as a drummer. Guitar has a lot more complexity than an idiophonic instrument, but yeah the idea is the same.
And as always, the best way to learn on any instrument is to just mimic what you like. Hear something awesome? try to play it. Can't? figure it out or get some help learning it, and now you've added that something to your repertoire, to build on later.
In short, tabs are great beginner tools. As you progress and get serious you'll find you don't even need them. And as some said before, the accuracy of tabs on the internet is questionable anyway, if not downright bad in most cases. Correcting tabs for MX was a hobby of mine for while; it's pretty amazing what some people will put down...
hey guys, can you help me figure out the chords for this song? the chords seem simple enough for really good players to figure out but I am not at that level yet ㅠㅠ please help me^^
On April 01 2011 02:52 white_horse wrote: hey guys, can you help me figure out the chords for this song? the chords seem simple enough for really good players to figure out but I am not at that level yet ㅠㅠ please help me^^
On April 01 2011 02:52 white_horse wrote: hey guys, can you help me figure out the chords for this song? the chords seem simple enough for really good players to figure out but I am not at that level yet ㅠㅠ please help me^^
On March 31 2011 07:33 StyLeD wrote: You can *borrow* GuitarPro via methods online <.<
Anyways, I'm a fingerstyle sort of guy. I love it when you can make the guitar sing (to make up for my lack of any vocal ability).
My problem is not having enough korean music to apply this style to. I'm currently learning Sungha's Haru Haru (which is exactly the type of music I want to play). Anyone have any other sites?
And here's my gift to this wonderful thread: songsterr.com
Go and check it out, it has tabs and it's completely free for the basics (which is all you really need). There's a bajillion different tabs on their, for electric guitar and acoustic. It even has playback (like GuitarPro) but requires no download (but you can download if you want to).
AFAIK it's not as popular as UG, even though it should be.
Hm, and check out heronymusic (Youtube). His music is what got me to start playing guitar so late (17 yrs). Now I play every day and it's been amazing. Specifically, check out his Forrest Gump theme song cover.
If there's anyone here who can tab the FG theme song by ^, please do so. It's in standard tuning, and I'll be eternally grateful ^^
I don't really see how you can learn from songsterr but doesnt seem too bad. heronymusic is pretty good. And did you only learn from these tabs/sites before trying to learn Haru haru? I am trying to aim at that level by the middle of the year.