Beginner Guitar Tabs

A quick Google of "guitar tab" yields five million responses. Even if, as the old adage says, eighty percent of everything is junk, that means there's a lot of good information out there.

OLGA (the On Line Guitar Archive), a huge guitar tablature source, reports that someone actually did a study on who creates and publishes tabs and why they do it. According to the study, by Thomas Chesney of Napier University in Edinburgh, Scotland, 98% of the tabbers he surveyed are males in their 20s. They publish their guitar tabs for a variety of reasons; Chesney summarizes the top three as "To share the song with others", "Ego", and "To improve guitar playing."

My problem with these free guitar tab sites, aside from the copyright implications, is timing. Most of them don't have an easy way to notate the rhythm of the piece I'm trying to learn. I guess that's ok if you're very familiar with the song and it's not too involved. But if I'm resorting to hunting down guitar tab it's because I can't figure it out on my own, so I'm already having trouble with it. If it wasn't hard to figure, I'd have already figured it. I've seen some tabs with letters on top: "e" for eighth note, "q" for quarter note, etc. That helps some. But my impression is that most of these tabbers are not too concerned with this stuff. Welcome to the folk process.

Neither problem has stopped me from sampling the guitar tab sites. Since I'm approaching fogie-dom I spend a lot of time sorting through names of bands I've never heard of and probably don't want to know anything about, looking for Duane Allman, Ry Cooder and Johnny Winter, or occasionally a classical piece. I can usually find them. I don't have much luck with Joe Pass or Jim Hall, but then, they have authorized books out, and I can't play the stuff in the books yet, so why am I looking for the unauthorized stuff?

I have to believe that, for the guys who sweat over creating these tabs in the first place, it's a helpful learning experience. It reminds me of the guitar players back in the 1960s who labored over old recordings of Blind Blake and Robert Johnson trying to capture every last detail, mistakes and all, so they could play songs "just like on the record." I never had that kind of patience or commitment, myself.

But the people who do have created an amazing resource for guitar players and learners, which is delightfully free and unfortunately probably illegal. So, while I'm waiting for my lawyer to call me back with advice on the matter, I'm going to see if anyone has figured out that Dickey Betts solo on "Every Hungry Woman."

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