This is a community for designs specifically crafted to make the experience worse for the user. This can be due to greed, apathy, laziness or just downright scumbaggery.
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.
You should probably buy it though! You know, just in case!!!
Use https://freetar.de as your front-end to Ultimate Guitar - much nicer
I will add https://www.songsterr-downloader.com to this, works for both Songsterr and UG
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 link suggests you still have to purchase Guitar Pro though
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!
Yeah as a bass player I never fell for that video for one second lol. Get out of here with all those strings!
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.
Yeah, and now to reach the minuscole download button you have to scroll an entire page that is trying to sell you their pro tabs.
Songsterr is nice, but unfortunately they still have way less tabs than UG
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've been relearning to play guitar recently and running into crap like this too. Finding any quality tabs is insanely difficult nowadays.
A decade+ ago I could find anything I needed on UltimateGuitar and it was great. Short of ear-training, I haven't found anything that compares now.
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.
Funny enough, I think I have that cable somewhere. Had a blast with that game years ago. Shame it won’t play on Xbox Series X/S but I think it works on Steam. I’ll have to check.
The drums were badass though. They’re reselling for like $300+ nowadays, which is insane.
Rocksmith doesn't do drums afaik, you might be thinking of rock band?
Yup. Got them mixed up.
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.
As a fellow guitarist I thank you for your heroic efforts <3
It's crazy looking back and seeing how many songs I've worked out. Over 400. It's a great hobby and helps build skills for the future for sure.
It used to be
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.
Lovely. Sort of makes me glad I gave up playing. That and no longer having calluses on my fingertips.
Aw:( I dont think an annoying website design should shy you away from playing music. Being able to express yourself with guitar is more than worth having to deal with UGs shittiness, or calluses for that matter, even if it just means playing your own rhythm of G-C-D, or some simple chord progression.
Maybe if you pick it back up one day, try not to think of it as a chore to learn songs you like from tabs, and instead just explore the instrument and the sounds you can make with it.
It wasn't what made me quit, I'm just glad that I don't have to deal with that shit because I'm not still playing.
I've tried a lot of musical instruments in my life and while I enjoyed the guitar for a couple of years, I just didn't feel like I was ever going to be skilled enough on it to really enjoy it, so I moved on. And I didn't like the calluses at all.
That's too bad, but if you didn't enjoy it then there's not much point in continuing.
I guess my point was you don't really have to deal with UG or be very skilled to enjoy playing, but if you didn't like it (calluses are kind-of a must, tbh) then it's not worth sinking time into, imo
Oh I still use it regularly. There's still no better collection of free tabs online that I know of. Just stay away from the subscription part.
UG is just a brand of the old days. Most of what is on there these days is either plain incorrect, or a payment scam, like this video
Right-click, block element.
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.
I will never not be upset at the bull that was pulled with OLGA. EMI, HFA, and MPA and their servants in the judiciary can all go die in a fire
Yea harry fox sucks. OLGA was the best!
Good song
I miss Olga.
I miss taborama
They completely messed up their iOS apps. I’ve had this for tabs for eons and bought a lifetime license. I think for no ads.
Now, you keep getting more aggressive subscription pushes.
*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
Just from the post here, it's pretty gross to have supposed links to video tutorials for virtually every song, only to realize that each "thumbnail" is the same picture with new words over it. They imply they have more things in their premium section than they do.
I've used UG a ton, and it was, in fact, a great resource back in the day. Now, there are just so many other things that don't shove quite so many misleading things in your face. Of course, you can just block the elements, but it's a principle thing.
I also haven't used them in the last couple of years. I used them as my first resource learning back in high school, then found better options, and then came back to the above ads. They could be better now, though the existence of this post leads me to believe not.
Yeah, I hear you and don't think you're off base or anything. Per my above peer comment, I think I'm just accepting our new norm and blocking when I can. I sell software and have done so since before LinkedIn. There are few ways to get attention now. The anarchist in me is disgusted and tries to spend time in nature. The middle aged defeated man sees that we live in fucking Minority Report 😔
I get ya. I still got enough vim and vigor to get fuckin pissed at it rofl.
Share this with you, cause your last comment reminded me of it.