by George Zhou

Created on: May 31, 2010

In our world today, there are quite a few aspiring guitarists. However, they lack the rare ability to pick out the notes of a song just by ear. Therefore, for our amateur but aspiring guitarists, many helpful and elite guitarists have contributed to free guitar tab sites to pave roads for our nation's apprentices.

Now free guitar tabs are quite easy to come across. The most used and probably the best website for free guitar tabs would easily be

www.ultimate-guitar.com. This site claims to have over 300,000 guitar, bass, and drum tabs. However, from my own personal experience, I believe this site has much more than just 300,000 tabs. Moreover, this site is also a hub of guitarists. They have contributed to the site to create a great community, making www.ultimate-guitar.com a great resource for tutorials on theory, technique, and hardware. You can also get an instant dose of music news on the site.

Now specifically, the tabs on the site are very accurate. There are usually many versions of a tab, to show the differing opinions of guitarists on how a piece should be played and allows the user to pick a tab for their preference. Every single tab will also include an auto-scroll bar, allowing the guitarist to seamlessly play at rhythm while watching the tab, without any unnecessary pauses.

Ultimate Guitar contains the common text format of their tab, submitted by users, but there are also many other formats that they support. The simplest is video, which is usually a link to Youtube, giving users the ability to use tab and also watch a tutorial of the song, simulating a real live teacher for the curious guitar learner. Ultimate Guitar also supports Guitar Pro software and Power Tab software. Both pieces of software are have bonuses to your experience of reading tab. They can play the tab back for you, letting you decide if it is accurate of not.

Another great site for guitar tabs is www.911tabs.com. This website is basically a site that links to other guitar sites that will have the guitar tab you searched for on their site. 911tabs is especially useful if you cannot find the tab on Ultimate Guitar.

Lastly, there is a more professional but limited "site" for guitar tabs. That would be GuitarEdge. This is not exactly a guitar site, but it is the online version of a print magazine. Subscription is free and you get an issue every month. With the issue, there are 5 artist approved tabs (meaning the tabs are approved and are 100% accurate). These tabs don't last too long (only for 60 days) but you can print them at your will. Once they expire, you can still buy them for $1 at GuitarInstructor.

Tabs are a simple and easy way to read music and great for starting musicians who do not have the aural skills to pick out songs by ear and can't read standard notation yet. Tabs are in great abundance in the internet due to helpful musicians. Use them to your advantage and hone your skills on the guitar.

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