Help me if you can...

davismanLV

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Hey!! My black Washburn is in "Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire" tuning RIGHT NOW!!! That's a tough one! But once you work through it a while you get the hang of it. One of my problems (if you can call it that) is I need those "guitar blocks" showing the fret number and where to put your fingers. I can't read that 7 7 7 3 2 5 or whatever they do. I need the quick picture of where to put my fingers on the frets. Then I just memorize.
 

adorshki

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Ralph: is that the black single volume with gold lettering on the cover? That's the one I have and I noticed "She Came In Through The Bathroom Window" is not in there.
It is in mine, (think it's a first printing, had it since around '81 or so) but I always missed 2 George songs:
"Old Brown Shoe" and "I Me Mine".
Agree with Walrus about some transcriptions being "made easy" , but it's still a hell of a course in composition.
I discovered Ultimate Guitar when it was still "OLGA" ("On Line Guitar Archives"), before the publishers started pursuing their royalties for all the unauthorized transcriptions.
This was a short time after the Napster brouha.
I used think it was one way the transcribers intended to circumvent copyright infringement claims: there always one "bad " chord!
:glee:
But there was stuff on there from the '60's that was long out of print if it ever was in print.
I'd already exhausted my local sheet music sources, so I had no qualms about downloading while the downloading was good.
Then for a few months there were messages about the site being down due to legal issues, then finally it was gone for good.
Lo and behold a couple of years later when I was searching for another obscure tune I discovered Ultimate Guitar.
I realized it must have been a reincarnation of OLGA (or at least had absorbed OLGA's database) when I found the chart I was looking for was signed by one of my favorite transcriptionists: "Another Ace '60's tab from Andrew Rogers"
Loved that guy, he did a bunch of my favorites.
Here's one, complete with errors:
https://tabs.ultimate-guitar.com/t/the_yardbirds/over_under_sideways_down_crd.htm
But Ultimate Guitar offers a lot of extras for the fee, none of that stuff was available on Olga, and if it helps pay royalties then that's one of the single most important "pluses" in my opinion.
 
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walrus

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...I've just developed through practice and rote repetition.

Yep, me too. I look at numerous sources to get the most accurate, and then "memorize" a version that may have ideas from multiple sources (or not). Depends on the song, of course. Maybe leave some room in some songs for some improvisation with a quick solo or something.

Al, I remember OLGA - I think you are right that they became Ultimate Guitar.

walrus
 

merlin6666

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I used to like the ultimate guitar website when I used a computer and found many gems. Now that I am using an android phone more often I just get prompts to install their paid app which is spam. Also I am getting more interested what in styles like western swing and it's not very useful for that.Caters more to mainstream rock and pop.
 

fronobulax

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My Piano teacher, Mrs. Brown, took my Mom aside one day when I was about 9 years old and told her "You're wasting your money on piano lessons, he just memorizes everything." I could play the piece at the recital perfectly, but I wasn't looking at the dots on the paper. Drove her nuts.

My experience with tuba was such that at my peak I could compete against (say) a sophomore tuba major and still "win" some auditions. So I kind of thought I had the whole read/practice/play thing down. But I was getting frustrated on bass because there were things I needed to look at my left hand in order to play correctly. That seemed wrong so I talked to my teacher (majored in classical guitar). He said that he (and most classical guitarists) eventually have to memorize music to play it well and that memorization and muscle memory were much more important playing a stringed instrument than playing brass. Clearly you were ahead of your time.

On the songbook thing and the evolution, when I was buying and looking at them in the 70's I remember that the concern was the chord progression and the ability to produce a credible rendition on guitar or piano, regardless of the original or canonical performance. There are times when that is still useful, but I think in 2017 many more people are concerned with the performance and so what they want is really an annotated transcription. What notes were played, and when, what tuning, etc. I have found that bass guitar books that are not transcriptions are of little use to me and tend to duplicate information available on the internet, for free.
 

dreadnut

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OK, I lied. My "Beatles Complete" does have "Bathroom Window" in it. Printed in 1977 (Sixth printing,) Warner Bros.

Just found this disclaimer in the front of the book: "While the publisher has attempted to include all the songs known to have been written by The Beatles, copyright restrictions have made it impossible to print the entire body of works."
 
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JohnW63

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I often find a good set of TABS on a web site, that gets much of the song pretty well, but then, they have some thing like a chord obviously wrong. I don't know how they can get all the fiddly details right and a simple chord wrong.

My instructor has me using Guitar Pro for stuff. He either writes the stuff in it, as we list to a your tube version, or he finds the song already done in the Guitar Pro libraries. I think you need to pay a little extra to gain access to all of that.
 

adorshki

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I often find a good set of TABS on a web site, that gets much of the song pretty well, but then, they have some thing like a chord obviously wrong. I don't know how they can get all the fiddly details right and a simple chord wrong.
Wouldn't surprise me if you're seeing old transcriptions from the era when that was thought to be a safeguard against infringement suits.
As I mentioned in #22, there's a ton of stuff like that on Ultimate Guitar because they absorbed at least one old old database.
 

merlin6666

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I often find a good set of TABS on a web site, that gets much of the song pretty well, but then, they have some thing like a chord obviously wrong. I don't know how they can get all the fiddly details right and a simple chord wrong.

My instructor has me using Guitar Pro for stuff. He either writes the stuff in it, as we list to a your tube version, or he finds the song already done in the Guitar Pro libraries. I think you need to pay a little extra to gain access to all of that.

Many of the tabs on ultimate guitar are downloadable in guitar pro format too. That sometimes also helps as you can play along with the tab and get an idea of what it's supposed to sound like.
 
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