Music Discussions

Recently, I found a couple of items that may be useful to those who play – or would like to learn to play – guitar. The first is a program that extends the functionality of tabs that you download. While the second is a great online resource – not just for tabs, but also for lessons, reviews, and forums.

The program, TuxGuitar, is oss/free software and has versions for Linux (of course, given the name is TuxGuitar), BSD, MacOS, and Windows so almost everyone should be able to run it. If you are running Linux, get the installer from the site, not the one from your distro’s repository as several distros (including Ubuntu) have not updated their repositories and are a couple of releases behind.

The feature that I find most useful is that it will play tabs through your speakers (or export them to midi) so you can verify that the tab you downloaded sounds correct before you set about practicing it. Also, the tabs will be displayed on the fretboard, keyboard, and staff so you can follow along as it is playing. This can prove extremely useful for difficult sections of a song. Also, TuxGuitar provides the ability to write your own tabs and export them to a variety of formats including Lilypond and PDF. Speaking of file formats, both Guitar Pro and PowerTab formats can be imported so there are thousands of tabs online waiting to be downloaded.

This brings me to my second recommendation. Ultimate-Guitar.com has tabs that are searchable by artist and song, and even has many full albums to download at once. And, even better, many of these tabs are in Guitar Pro or PowerTab format so they can be imported into TuxGuitar with no hassle. For those who are not ready to jump into playing a tab yet, there are also many lessons provided by this site. Tutorials are organized into categories of levels of difficulty and what they teach (for instance chords, scales, etc.). I have not checked out their forums yet to see how active or useful they are, as I am still sifting through the dearth of information in the lessons portion of the site; given how content heavy the lessons and tabs areas are though, I have to imagine that the forums are extremely busy.

I hope that these resources prove to be useful to you.