UltimateGuitar shows a fake tutorial video with the title of the song you're trying to learn. Clicking it just brings you to the sign-up page for their premium subscription.
They also always have a countdown on the top of the page, suggesting their unbelievable 80% off deal is about to end and you should buy it now or it‘ll be gone forever! Quick!
It‘s not ending. It never ends. It just resets at the end of the day.
The guys running this site are dickheads.
Songsterr has the option to download all of the transcriptions, current or past, from the website itself. Just click on the revision date at the top of the tab and it will bring up a list with all of the revisions with a download button next to them.
The funniest thing is when you are looking at the tab for a metal song that uses only ultra-distorted, 8 strings guitars with the lowest tuning, and the proposed tutorial shows a gentle finger picking on an acoustic guitar.
I will not fall for your deceptions today, Ultimate Guitar!
I remember when U-G used to be good. You just downloaded the user submitted tabs and there you go. Now thing thry have are ASCII charts from 2010 and ads.
Songsterr is much better now, even if most of it's tabs are suspiciously similar to the same user submitted guitar pro files I remember from back in the day.
ASCII guitar tabs go back to the 1990s (at least). I wrote a couple out there that stayed in search engines top results for those songs for multiple decades.
This is the same company that bought up the open source Musescore and brought us Muse Hub: An insanely bloated launcher for MuseScore that was not told would be installed when installing Musescore. Muse Hub takes half as much RAM, storage, and load time as Musescore itself, despite doing 1% of what Musescore does. It also defaults to running at startup, which feels like a sign it might be spyware.
I basically taught myself using UGs tabs a long time ago. I pains me that I never learned how to properly play or understand music technically. I left off somewhere between beginner and intermediate level, and I've struggled to find a platform that can help me relearn without getting bored or impatient.
I really miss the thrill of learning to play guitar and would give anything to properly learn now, but time and patience is short. My guitars are collecting dust and I really miss the feeling I used to get back when I’d learn a new song.
Uh, rocksmith will probably be a thing to try. It's a rhythm game that uses a real guitar. I've played it for a few years and I still don't know how to play guitar but I can play rocksmith pretty well. It has custom dlc that you can download and a shitload of fan made charts.
You'll need their proprietary guitar to USB plug. You can use other ones but you need a crack program and honestly it's not worth the hassle to get it working.
The UG tabs were great for motivation and mixing things up, but the basics will never change. Unfortunately a lot of learning any instrument is monotony and practice. You're going to have to work through that if you want to pick it up again. Without tabs to lean on I've just found it fun to noodle around with impromptu riffs and see what comes to me.
I was a bit lucky I guess because I worked myself a bit more solidly into the intermediate range and my fingers still remember all my chords. I just don't have the same finger stamina and my chord transitions are a lot sloppier. I'll just be happy when I can jump back into a nice fingerpicking flow again though.
I made a UG account ten years ago to make accurate tabs and I've managed to scrape my way into the top 200 users on the site. I feel like no progress has been made and the site will continue its brain drain into oblivion. It's sad because it could be such a great resource.
I haven't played guitar in years, but tabs of virtually any song you can think of used to be really easy to find on lots of different free sites. Is that not true anymore?
they're still available for free, UG is sorta the main clearinghouse now and the days of googling "band - song chords" and being taken to someone's geocities page have passed but the information is still there. There's just a whole bunch of unnecessary garbage built into the subscription that they try to sell you.
Pretty sure that's actually illegal in the USA and EU. They're advertising a service that you pay for before finding out they do not offer it. That's blatant false advertisement.
*Decades worth of content free website with tons of features, also tries to make a living using standard ad practices for the premium product.
Ftfy
Sorry.. bootlicker I guess. I've gotten thousands of hours of joy from that site. I'm still using tabs from half a lifetime ago. The mobile app is fantastic too. I've supported them when I've had the cash. A lot cheaper than lessons would have been for 30 years.
Why does any of the value they've brought to you and others preclude a shitty and predatory business decision? I've had their pro membership for years, but the fake youtube video is some premium, grade A dogshit.
That's a totally reasonable point of view. I guess I just don't think that's worse than any other ad bullshit. My bar has been set by my experience. Of all the wars we're losing, ads isn't one I fight anymore. But I understand it's a big deal for people.
I've been a subscriber for years and think it's very much worth it. They keep improving on the site with new features regularly. I also take lessons. My musical tastes are a little out of the norm and teacher is older so most of what I want to learn is new to him. Printing up tabs ahead of time saves him the trouble of tabbing out the song while I just sit there. More time is spent learning. Yeah they're not all 100% correct but it's usually close enough to save time
Wow that's incredible. As a kid "back in my day," I had to find an old man to ear and transpose what wasn't one of the 15 tabs in existence on the Internet yet. I probably have a hand written tab somewhere in a box.
You can like the product, or at least the product of the past, while also acknowledging that the business practices they engage in today are shit, consumer-unfriendly, and that the actual content hasn't kept up with the rate they've decided to 'monetize' their site. There is no dichotomy, both can be true. So yeah, how's that boot?
That's a totally reasonable response and I agree with you. I suppose I'm just having cognitive dissonance bc I don't know what practices I'm supposed to have observed. I still use the site and the apps and haven't seen anything unfriendly. Monday afternoon was my last visit iirc