Free Online Guitar Tabs: Should They Be Illegal?

Online guitar tabs, transcribed versions of popular tunes done by millions of our fellow pickers and posted on the web, have become the preferred method of song learning for a great many players. They are readily available on scores of tab sites and offer a fast and easy alternative to more traditional types of knowledge-gathering. The question I ask today is this: is posting one’s own version of someone else’s song a violation of their copyright and therefore against the law? Read more

Fight Club – Online Guitar Tabs vs. Playing Guitar By Ear

As a guitar instructor, I routinely deal with students trying to learn songs they want to play. After all, that’s the whole point of this thing of ours, right? The thing that I notice over and over, however, is the increasing dependence of most students on some sort of online tab website to provide the details on how a given song is played, rather than learning the song in the time-honored play-along-with-the-record ear-based method. Read more