guitar tabs blog

Music publishers take down tablature websites

2006-09-29T02:04:00.000-07:00

VICTORIA (CUP) - Remember when you worked out the finger-picking to that Johnny Cash song, wrote it on a napkin and then e-mailed it to your friend? Turns out, that's illegal.
Tablature is a textual representation of music that shows notes by string and fret. Several high-profile online tab archives recently received letters threatening legal action from the Music Publishers Association (MPA) and the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) of America.

A common feature of tab sites is a disclaimer that explains that the tabs are not for sale and are provided only for private study and educational purposes. Since no money changes hands and no one is selling the music as their own, site operators assumed that they weren't breaking any laws.
Not so. According to U.S. copyright law, the right to make and distribute arrangements, adaptations, abridgments, or transcriptions is the exclusive property of the copyright holder. This means that the MPA and the NMPA are well within their rights to ask that the tab websites be taken down and the offending material be removed.
Sites in question are the volunteer-run Online Guitar Archive (OLGA.net) and Ultimate Guitar Archive (Guitartabs.cc). The NMPA and MPA have yet to sue infringers, instead opting to use the take down provisions in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to threaten without suit.
That's pretty nice of the lawyers. After all, they could just sue the ad-revenue-just-barely-keeps-us-afloat tab site operators, pecking away at them in court until the legal fees bankrupt them. The lawyers' letters use phrases like "good faith," "penalty of perjury," and "demand," but should really say "or else."
It's a case of technology being ahead of the music industry's business model. In a statement to the New York Times, an MPA spokesperson estimated that a single guitar tab could cost $800 per song to produce, license, and format for downloading.
What a lack of forward thinking.
Anyone who can play a song can write a tab, from a monkey with an accordion to the fattest racehorse in the world.

Learning a song from a tab is as much of a burden as it is a boon: there aren't standards built into the format; time signatures are hard to represent; common chords go unlisted and they're riddled with mistakes.

After many failures, a music publisher-sanctioned solution to distribute electronic sheet music and tabs will be developed. The artist will then have control of their music and get the revenue they deserve from the sales or licensing of their songs. Perhaps they'll distribute them through their MySpace websites, a method that most artists have embraced to communicate with their fans.

How has this affected the guitar player? There's no way the music publishing industry can seamlessly fill the gap they created by taking down these archives.
They can provide all the Bob Dylan tabs in the world in book form, but for obscure songs or classics the tech-savvy guitarist will tirelessly search the same way as they do now: newsgroups, message boards, or lower-profile websites.
The regulation of electronic sheet music is just another step in the commercialization of the Internet, but that won't stop guitarists from picking and clicking their music online.

Now music industry goes after guitarists' Web sites

2006-09-10T02:59:00.000-07:00

The Internet put the music industry and many of its listeners at odds thanks to the popularity of services such as Napster and Grokster.

Now the industry is squaring off against a surprising new opponent: musicians.

In the last few months, trade groups representing music publishers have used the threat of copyright lawsuits to shut down guitar tablature sites, where users exchange tips on how to play songs such as Knockin' on Heaven's Door, Highway to Hell and thousands of others.

The battle this time involves free sites such as Olga.net, GuitarTabs.com and MyGuitarTabs.com and even discussion boards on the Google Groups service such as rec.music.makers.guitar.tablature and alt.guitar.tab, where amateur musicians trade "tabs" — music notation especially for guitar — for songs they have figured out or have copied from music books.

"People can get it for free on the Internet, and it's hurting the songwriters," said Lauren Keiser, president of the Music Publishers' Association and chief executive of Carl Fischer, a music publisher in New York.

Keiser said that before the early '90s, the most popular printed tablatures typically sold 25,000 copies in a year. Now they sell 5,000 copies at most.

But Mike Happoldt, a member of the '90s band Sublime whose music is sold in sheet music books, said he sympathizes with the tab sites.

"I think this is greed on the publishers' parts," said Happoldt. "I guess in a way I might be losing money from these sites, but as a musician I look at it more as a service."

Napster Redux: Music Publishers Take Aim At Web Sites For Copyright Infringement

2006-08-21T11:04:00.000-07:00

Here we go again. The music industry is targeting Web sites that allow users to share music. This time it's not recordings, but helpful hints on how to play the guitar.

Industry groups representing music publishers in recent months have intimidated guitar tablature sites such as Olga.net, GuitarTabs.com, and MyGuitarTabs.com with copyright lawsuits if they don't shutter their offerings that let guitar players exchange tips on how to play songs, according to a report, "Now the Music Industry Wants Guitarists to Stop Sharing," in The New York Times on Monday.

The publishers complain that tablature sites post parts of copyrighted sheet music without paying royalties to composers. "People can get it for free on the Internet, and it's hurting the songwriters," Lauren Keiser, president of the Music Publishers' Association, told the Times.

But the publisher of Guitar Tab Universe contends sites like his promotes guitar playing and, in turn, propels sales of sheet music. "The publishers can't dispute the fact that the popularity of playing guitar has exploded because of sites like mine," the Times quotes Robert Balch. "And any person that buys a guitar book during their lifetime, that money goes to the publishers."

I feel a compromise is coming, with guitar tablature sites paying some type of royalty. These sites draw lots of traffic, which then attracts advertisers. The paper cites a study by comScore Media Metrix, an Internet statistics service, showing that Ultimate-Guitar.com attracted 1.4 million visitors in July, twice the number from a year earlier. There's just too much money at stake for both sides to not allow these sites to operate.

Introduction to Ear Training

2006-08-17T10:10:00.000-07:00

Introduction to Ear Training

By David Hodge

Photo Credit: Ray Larsen

Tune Up

Introduction

One of the most important skills a guitarist—or any musician—needs doesn’t involve the use of either one’s hands or an instrument. It’s listening. Being able to hear and understand music can help in many ways, from figuring out songs and riffs directly from recordings to enhancing your soloing and improvising chops.

Many beginning guitarists think that good ear skills are beyond their reach, but in fact just about anyone can easily develop them with a little practice. And listening can be practiced almost anytime and anywhere—you don’t have to have a guitar at hand, and you can work on your ear training while listening to your radio or CD player or even while singing in the shower.

To get you started, I’ve broken down the act of hearing and recognizing chords into two simple components. Included with each component are a few audio examples.

Basic Chord Types
As a guitarist, you play chords all the time, but do you listen to them? Different chords have different tonal qualities that distinguish them from each other. Major chords sound bright and “happy,” while minor chords sound “sad” or somber. Play an E-major chord followed by an E minor, and listen to the difference. Notice that you’ve changed only one note—the G# (the first fret of the G string) of the E-major chord becomes an open G note when you play an E minor. But what a difference that one note makes.

Now try an A major and an A minor, and follow that up with D major and D minor. Again, you’re only changing one note each time. You might hear that the difference is very noticeable on the D-major chord, and we’ll come back to that in a moment. For now, listen to Audio Example 1 and try to pick out which chords are major and which ones are minor. Don’t worry about whether it’s a C or a B (or whatever); just concentrate on telling the difference between the major and the minor sound. It may seem simple—but if you can get this difference down, you’ve gotten your ear training off to a good start.

Audio Example 1

Of course, there are many chords besides the major and minor ones. Seventh chords (technically called dominant sevenths) and major-seventh chords turn up quite frequently, so let’s examine the sounds of those chords next. Audio Example 2 demonstrates the differences between the major chord, the major seventh and the dominant seventh. You can hear how the major seventh sounds a little unsettled, but not unpleasantly so—it’s a bit sad and a bit happy at the same time. Some people find it jazzy. The dominant seventh sounds more unsettled, like you’re waiting to arrive at another chord in order to resolve the tension of the dominant.

Audio Example 2

Being familiar with the sound of augmented and diminished chords, as well as other embellished chords such as the sixth, ninth, eleventh, etc., will help you improve your ear. But for now, learning to recognize these four—major, minor, and these two sevenths—will give you a strong foundation on which to develop your ear training further.

Chord Voicings
Now that you’re working on these four types of chords, it’s time to talk about chord voicing. Play the following chords in the first position: E major, then A-major, then D-major. Listen to the way the notes ring, and pay particular attention to the highest note you hear; in each case, the highest note is a different part of that particular chord’s makeup. For E major, the highest note (the open E string) is the root note, while the same open E note is the fifth of the A-major chord. In the D-major chord, the third of the chord (F#) is the highest note.

Play the D chord again and then slide it up the neck so that you’re playing the seventh fret of the E string, the eighth fret of the B and the seventh fret of the G string—while continuing to play the open D string. This is a G-major chord, but you can hear it’s very different from a first-position G-major. You are playing a different voicing of the G-major chord, one that has qualities similar to those of a first-position D-major chord.

Let’s examine this more closely in Audio Example 3. First, you’ll hear a D-major chord in first position. Then you’ll hear it played in an “A shape” (X X 0 7 7 5), which has an A (fifth fret of the first string) as the highest note. Finally, you’ll hear the D-major chord played in an “E shape” (X X 0 11 10 10), where the root (the D at the tenth fret of the first string) is the highest note. Being able to distinguish between these voicings will help you pick out various barre chords or whether or not a song is being played with a capo. (If you listen to the Beatles’ “Here Comes The Sun,” for example, you can hear that the opening chord has a D shape by listening to its highest note.) To simplify things here, concentrate only on playing and listening to the top three strings.

Music industry threatens guitar tablature sites

2006-08-15T09:36:00.000-07:00

First it was services that provided music, then it was sites that offered lyrics. Now the music industry has trained its legal guns upon guitar tablature, and several of them have already been shuttered.

Last December, the Music Publishers' Association (MPA) chose to take action against web sites that posted either sheet music or tablature (a simplified form of notation used by guitarists) in order to "protect the interests of the creators and publishers of music so that, [sic] the profession of songwriting remains viable and that new and exciting music will be continued to be created [sic] and enjoyed for generations to come."

The MPA represents businesses that make money from the creation and sale of sheet music and tablature. If, as I did last week, you've ever walked into a music store and look at a note-for-note transcription of a Beatles album, you'll have a good idea of what these firms sell. They're understandably unhappy about trying to compete with free tablature available on the Internet, especially when people rip off their work and post it online (most tabs are user-created, but such copying does happen).

In response to the campaign, the MPA admits that it received many letters and e-mails from concerned music fans, and that many of these people talked about their frustration with the fact that the Internet was the only place to get tabs of most songs. The MPA says that "it is the presence of the unauthorized free product that is largely to blame for that situation," implying that once it rids the Internet of the scourge of sheet music piracy, guitarists will be awash in a sea of accurate transcriptions.

The campaign has already had notable success. "Guitar Tab Universe" went dark back in July after receiving a letter from attorneys hired by the MPA and the National Music Publishers' Association. Manager Rob Balch wonders where the line should be drawn between infringement and simply figuring out how to play a song. "When you are jamming with a friend and you show him/her the chords for a song you heard on the radio, is that copyright infringement?" he asks. "What about if you helped him/her remember the chord progression or riff by writing it down on, say, a napkin... infringement? If he/she calls you later that night on the phone or e-mails you and you respond via one of those methods, are you infringing?"

Now one of the largest tab respositories in the world has taken down its archive. The Online Guitar Archive (better known as OLGA) also received a letter back in June, and has recently gone dark. The site suffered a similar outage nearly a decade ago after threats from the Harry Fox Agency, but reappeared a short time later. Now the site is down again, and all visitors can access is a link to the letter.

And the music industry's war of attrition continues. It has even gone worldwide.

While the MPA may be well within its legal rights here (and it seems as though they are), it's less clear that the campaign in general is a good idea. As someone who learned to play the guitar before ever learning to send an e-mail, I might point out that the tablature situation for guitarists was never ideal. While billions upon billions of accurate transcriptions of my favorite bands no doubt existed on shelves somewhere, the most important shelves for my purposes were the ones at the local music center. These were well-stocked, but still never had more than a couple dozen books, meaning that if you wanted music for some band that you loved but which had not yet cracked the top 50, you were out of luck.

While I can understand the frustrations of sheet music publishers, the people who want to play these songs are fans. They want to learn a band's songs. That's the sort of popularity most groups would kill for, and it's not clear that alienating this group of fans is ultimately good for musicians. Music publishers might do a bit better, but the musicians who license their rights need to be aware of what these groups are doing on their behalf.

Lego Guitar - does this play ?

2006-08-09T09:46:00.000-07:00

On this website one guy posted some pics he made from a lego guitar.
Wonder how its sounds ? Well, according to the photographer this guitar had to be retuned after a few chops, so it was pretty useless. Nonetheless, its really nice constructed.

Song lyrics heading for track information

2006-07-14T06:53:00.000-07:00

The company that provides instant CD track information for applications including Apple's iTunes and Napster has obtained licences to add song lyrics to that information.

Gracenote, whose database is accessed every time a CD is ripped in any of dozens of subscriber applications, announced that it has obtained the rights to words of more than one million songs from major publishers including BMG, Universal and Sony/ATV.

'When we first approached the publishers with this, they were excited,' Ross Blanchard, Gracenote's vice president of business development told Reuters. 'They thought lyrics had been an untapped resource for them and there's quite a bit of lyrics being taken for free on the Web.'

Blanchard said that the company will now talk to all of its partners about its plans to offer 'legal and accurate' lyrics on the Web.

Lyrics have been available from unauthorised sources for some time. Apple has added a lyrics field to iTunes and provides the ability to transfer them to an iPod. Subsequently developers created several tools available for searching and downloading lyrics, although the practice is a breach of the songwriter's copyright.

Indeed, late last year the US Music Publishers' Association president Lauren Keisecalled for the imprisonment

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of the owners of websites that contain song lyrics as well as guitar tabs and musical scores.

Her remarks followed legal action by Warner/Chappell Music, subsequently curtailed, against Walter Ritter, author of pearLyrics, a popular lyric search application. Privately publishers knew that they could not justify a legal assault on unauthorised sites while they had no alternative to offer.

The deal with Gracenotes will ensure that songwriters can enjoy an extra slice of the online music cake.

'This licence creates a new revenue stream which will guarantee that songwriters are paid for their work,' said Nicholas Firth, chairman and chief executive officer of BMG Music Publishing. In fact it will mean that they are paid twice - once in royalties when you buy a CD or download - and once again in licensing fees. Moreover, not all of the anticipated $4bn in extra revenue will reach the writers, some of it will be absorbed by the publishing companies.

Blanchard said that he does not expect the additional cost of lyric licensing to have a significant impact on the price of digital music.

'This extra element should help drive sales growth,' he said. 'There are a lot of ways the services will derive value outside of adding an extra charge.'

Additional services could include the ability to search for songs by lyrics and the use of audio recognition software to identify tracks.

But before all that is possible, Gracenote's team of editors is sifting through publishers' submissions to check for accuracy and omissions.

'This content doesn't exist in a library,' said Jim Hollingsworth, Gracenote's senior vice president of sales and marketing. 'This is a painstaking process.'

guitar karaoke - Does this suck ?

2006-07-05T12:56:00.000-07:00

A website has started to offer kareoke versions of songs. Say if you want to play along your favorite you can now buy a version of that song without the guitar!

Would you use it ?

here is the original article:

Website Offers New Spin On Karaoke
CMJ.com - 43 minutes ago
For every fan who downloads guitar tabs like it's a job, good news—Dream Musician, Inc., a Florida company, launched an online store devoted to instrument ...

technorati tags:guitar, play, karaoke, legal, music

Metallica - enter sandman, played by two nuts

2006-07-03T14:00:00.000-07:00

One guitar, on drummachine and two idots :)

On this video we see some of my friends playing Enter Sandman from
Metallica. Here are the Metallica tabs

To see what you can do with just one guitar, a drummachine and a webcam,
click to following link

Feel free to leave your comments, note that these guys are NOT
professionals. Be gentle :)

whoehoe! first guitar tabs blog

2006-07-03T11:23:00.000-07:00

Well glad you find my blog.
The guitar tabs blog website is all about creating my guitar tabs website.

In the following post I will keep you informed on the whereabouts of the guitar tab site.

A little background on the website:
Since I am a hobby guitar player I wanted to learn some pop songs the easy way. So I started collecting guitar tabs from several sources and downloaded them to my pc. Now my collection is grown to the extent it could fill a database, I thought it was time to create a website with it.

First I want to point you to my favorite band: The beatles. Why?
Because the tabs tend to be simple.... well not always, but a lot are! Go here to see the beatles tabs.

More next time!