Right? It was such a great resource for such a long time and then they just butchered it.
Right? It was such a great resource for such a long time and then they just butchered it.
I played a ton of guitar in high school and UG was my go-to resource for a lot of stuff. I then stopped for a long time due to career, marriage, kids, etc, only to pick up the ol’ axe again this year. I dutifully opened up UG and was shocked at how horrible it was. Ok fine, I’ll download the damn app you dirty bastards. Oh, you mean I’m still accosted by all the dark patterns in the app too? I can only assume any PII given to them is sold quickly and efficiently.
FWIW, I have really enjoyed seeing what old artists have put out post-COVID. Seems like a big creativity boost. For example, I really hadn’t checked in on Joe Satriani in years. Nothing in his work had stood out to me in a long time. His 2022 “Elephants of Mars” though is just excellent. The opening track has a guitar entry at about two minutes in that you can’t help but scrunch your face and bang your head to.
woah, me too! stopped during college and I decided to take guitar serious this time and get some lessons which i started in July. it's been a huge improvement and super fun.
check out Plini and Intervals, some of my favorites in the same vein as Satriani.
also, I've found guitar pro to really be worth it. Sheet Happens publishes official tabs, and all their PDF tab books come with guitar pro files as well and theyre pretty good quality. Sheet Happens has a permanent guitar pro discount code too.
FYI TuxGuitar is a FOSS player that can load/play/edit PowerTab and GuitarPro files. Multiplatform too. It's not completely 100% bug-free, but it's good enough to load and play most tabs flawlessly.
Or for a more robust piece of software (especially if you do tabbing/composing yourself or you want to generate/edit a tab from a MIDI file), MuseScore is also FOSS and can import GuitarPro files no problem. With its recent UI overhauls it's really become top-notch IMO.
i didn't realize musescore opened guitar pro 7/8 files (which is what sheet happens publishes)! sadly tux guitar support stopped at gp5. I will definitely be checking out musescore, thanks for the rec!
Literally the same experience as me. I had not been to UG since I started my career as a dev. I now have thoughts and opinions about the internet. UG goes against basically every single one of them.
I honestly don't understand why it ended up like that. Did they really have that much trouble monetizing the largest collection of community-made content for guitar playing? Did YouTube eat their lunch in that regard? I imagine they had editorial staff for the articles (going off my 12+ year out of date memory), was that what was costing them so much? I really have no clue.
For whatever reason, UG's omnipresent video of a guy supposedly playing the song of the currently viewed tab always grates me more than it should. Probably because it's always an acoustic regardless of song.
But also the fact it is pinned to a spot on the viewport and always moving out of the corner of my eye.
UG is now owned by (Muse Group), which also owns MuseScore, Audacity, StaffPad, etc.
They've had their fair share of controversy beyond just dark-patterns on UG. From adding telemetry into Audacity[0], causing a bunch of drama and multiple forks of Audacity, To (most notably, in my opinion) having their director of strategy, Daniel Ray, publicly threaten to report/have the Chinese government whisk away the developer of a Github repo for a MuseScore sheet music downloader[1]
I've gone to ultimate-guitar since the early 2000s. Some of my tabs are still on there. Visiting it today is a god-damn tragedy. What a mess of a site. I'll definitely be trying this.
The only things from that era that didn’t get outright worse stayed the same (Craigslist).
What was beautiful about the internet then was there were so many corners were monetization either wasn’t easy or wasn’t chased so things could just exist.
Not so anymore!
Craigslist needs to be added to the list of national historical sites and should _never ever_ be allowed to change.
They've made small, thought out changes over the years that improved things. Small things like better gallery image handling and some filtering.
As long as they maintain that pace, I'm fine with some changes.
You have forgotten Bonzi Buddy.
Sites need to monetize because how else will they pay for Amazon ElasticLambda to serve their users’ click X-Y coordinates to T5 FireAnt, their distributed backend, on a planetary scale?
Yes, it's very sad to see work you provided for free to a community used to exploit these people.
Same. I made many online friends on the forum and it used to be my e-hangout in the early to mid 00s. I fondly remember the IRC channel we used to hang out in. I think I have a tab or two published on the site as well. Every time I pop back in for a visit these past few years it always pushes me back away.
Rest in peace, mxtabs.
I guess the upside to UG is that it encouraged me to learn by ear.
This is pretty nice, and there's already a lot of tools out there. I've built some of my own tools to scrape their tabs and store all my own stuff since I expect they will continue locking tabs down more like they already have. I'm a lifetime UG pro member but they keep pushing the envelope too far to monetize more.
There's no path for OSS in this domain unfortunately because tabs are often licensed and owned by the publishing companies (or the artists at the very least). Oliver Tree is one dingbat who had most of his tabs taken down at one point despite being a total of 4 chords per song.
I'm pretty unhappy with the state of the space considering anyone can listen to a song and write a tab out.
I suspect it would take a long while for an open source project to run into this limitation, especially if the tabs were distributed soulseek-style.
Has anyone attempted to make a fair use for education argument about this? Tabs aren't so much an actual creative work as instructions for how best to play a work. Because there's no timing information it's often impossible to reconstruct the actual music just from them.
Chords have even less information, a guitar chord transcription may have no resemblance to the notes actually played in a recording.
The transcriptions (created by people) are always going to be seen as derivative works, unfortunately. It doesn't matter how closely it matches the recorded performance. But the fact that text-based tabs remained online (at least more so than transcriptions, powertabs, etc.) is likely because of the lower fidelity.
It's not just that the transcription is a (transformed) reproduction of the original piece. The record companies have the (exclusive) right to (sell) the transcriptions, sheet music, etc. of music they hold the rights to. They have that right, regardless of if they are actively or ever going to actually publish any.
I would guess a fair use defence would be feasible in the right case, but I'm not sure if that was ever tested in court. Most of the operators of tab websites were just people, they didn't stand a chance. If I remember correctly, Ultimate Guitar was/is one of the few sites that was big enough to negotiate with the MPA.
Artists and/or their publisher own all tabs made for their song? How does that work?
They don't own the tabs, they own the rights to publish transcriptions of the music.
Dang, that’s a bummer to hear about Oliver Tree. Love his schtick, never realized he was taking the music so seriously. I always assumed it was intentionally simple to the point of mockery.
There are spaces where free copies of licensed content are widespread. Of course, I don't know anything about them, but I'm sure they provide a valuable force against capitalism.
microeconomics man. the product is not optimized for you, it's a tool to scrape $ out of ya.
I expect they're just gonna keep going till we're barely happy with it, or a little under that.
I feel like this has to be breaking the terms of service for the site
It's community content and bandwidth can't be that big? can't someone mirror the backend too?
It's community content however due to UG's monetization they are subject to tablature licensing rules (hence why some artists can't be found on there).
If you were to gain attention hosting their scale of tabs, you would likely run into legal hurdles pretty quickly.
For example a full archive of most sites dating back to the 90s already exists here: https://tabarchive.mikethetech.com/index.php. However he does not have permission to actually share it.
I hope you don't read this comment because that's breaking my terms of service.
And? You say that like punishment or retribution is expected for breaking someone's ToS.
I made a similar web app a few years ago. I think it competes quite well with this one. It has syntax highlighting :) https://tabviewer.app/
relevant: https://github.com/tablature-viewer/tablature-viewer.github....
WRT the sibling comment, and your "click for the repo" comment, unless we're now honoring the "license":"ISC" in package.json as formally legal, there is no license in your repo
I added an explicit LICENSE file with the ISC text now. It's mentioned in the README that we use UG for searching tabs currently.
Love it. Is it open source? The only thing missing imo is a chord viewer.
Clicking the readme takes you to the repo
Shameless self-promotion for my site Soundslice: https://www.soundslice.com/
Tabs plus sheet music, synced with original source recordings, with the web's best learning/practice features.
Example: https://www.soundslice.com/slices/txqfc/
It's a "BYOM" (bring your own music) situation as opposed to a library like Ultimate Guitar. But it's reasonably easy to import stuff. You can import a Guitar Pro file from Ultimate Guitar, Songsterr or wherever — our MusicXML and GP importers are excellent, seasoned by nearly a decade's worth of development and edge cases.
We've also recently launched a PDF/photo scanner, using machine learning to extract the musical semantics (in case you have some music on paper or in PDF). https://www.soundslice.com/sheet-music-scanner/
We've also got a full-featured notation/tab editor, and lots of musicians use it for transcribing source recordings. https://www.soundslice.com/transcribe/
Also relevant: we've never had ads, we've never taken funding and we've been profitable for years. Sustainable, product-driven and musician-first.
That thing requires registration.
Hi Dudester230602! Yeah, if you want to create your own music in there, you'll need an account.
If you don't want to create an account, you can browse the public stuff that's been posted: https://www.soundslice.com/community/
We don't do any Instagram-like "Please register to continue viewing this" nonsense.
It's excellent, thank you
I've seen this software used on a couple different video lesson platforms (I am currently subscribed to Open Studio). It works really well. Occasional browser funniness, but otherwise a really solid tool for learning music. Great work!
Ultimate Guitar has gotten worse over the years. I noticed they're featuring TikTok-like videos on their home page now which gave me a laugh. I switched to Songsterr a while back and it's amazing. I highly recommend it for anyone looking for tabs.
Something UG added a couple (?) of years ago was support for standard notation. Songster is strictly tabs. For me, that is a deal breaker.
Have you tried TuxGuitar?
No, I haven't. When I create transcriptions I use musescore.
I hate what ultimate guitar has become. Before it evolved into the current ad-laden, walled-garden rat trap that it is now, it basically was just a search engine for tabs. What amazes me is that so many hobbyists made Guitar Pro tabs in their spare time and uploaded them for free to the internet. Then UG came along and indexed them. For a time, that was good. Now UG operates like it owns that content. It's been so heavily SEO'd that you basically cannot search Google anymore without getting railroaded there. You need to search elsewhere.
Their UI sucks. I resorted to hoarding the .gpX files locally and using TuxGuitar. But TuxGuitar sucks too...
Regardless, thanks for doing this. This space could use some disruption. I don't want to support a site that used to be a simple search engine and mutated into a commercial walled-garden that exploits the creative works of thousands of people who originally did it for free. (oh wait...)
hint, check out the history/revisions button at the top right on songsterr
also, i just learned elsewhere on the thread that musescore is FOSS and loads all formats of guitar pro files!
Thanks for the reference. I think at this point I kind of want to just build my own UI to playback GP files. I looked into the guts of TuxGuitar and was pretty put off by how much code there is. It's kind of a hot mess. Really I want to use it to riff more in a jamming mode, more than a sit-down seriously study a piece of music. It needs to be useable from a standing/jamming position and have simplified controls like stop, start, tempo up, down, flip these tracks on and off, repeat this riff or section (but without a hard stop, just loop around, staying in time). TuxGuitar is clearly designed for people to make tabs, and not so much for playing along.
Nitpick suggestion: Maybe link to Poetry for those of us not deeply in Python land? It was non-trivial for me to figure out that it’s some sort of package manager for Python. It’s also totally un-googleable so that didn’t help :-)
This right here. I was interested right up until I got to “You need poetry.”, at which point I closed the browser window. I have plenty to do without trying track down some rando developer’s dependencies.
Just FYI, for those who aren't neck deep in python land all the time, python is going through a bit of a packaging, environment, and dependency management explosion at the moment.
Lots of competing ideas and implementations are being thrown around, though probably not as bad as when javascript went through the same process. There is definitely a large benefit to seeing how things like rust have handled this space.
Anyway, poetry is part of this explosion, but is one of the relatively better known and widely distributed options, so much so that for anyone on-the-inside it probably seems obvious.
This is fantastic.
There must be some variation of Zawinski's Law that explains the flaming dumpster that apps/sites like UG turn into. I feel like MuseScore is going in that direction too.
I was hoping by now we would have solved the problem of a decentralized repository of user-generated content without need for monetization.
I was hoping by now we would have solved the problem of a decentralized repository of user-generated content
IMSLP is monetized but far from terrible. The problem with sites like UG and MS is that they're essentially hosting bootleg content, which is only okay for as long as you can fly under the radar. IMSLP is the wholly above-board approach.
The popular word these days is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
This is awesome! So much cleaner and easier to navigate compared to to UG, it isn't even funny. So much easier to navigate and focus on what's important. Thanks for sharing!
I added it to my Awesome Privacy Front-ends[1] list, hope that's okay!
[1] https://git.sr.ht/~jamesponddotco/awesome-privacy-front-ends
Why does Wikipedia need one? The alternative project doesn't seem to explain this. (In fact, none of them do, but I can probably guess what's bad about most of them if I don't already know).
Among other things, it implements a whole new interface[1] that removes the "nagging" from Wikipedia. It also removes all tracking. The interface was a lot cleaner and was completely JavaScript-free until a few months ago, which is why I added it to the list.
While I personally don't mind the default Wikipedia website and actually prefer it, I can see why some people would want something more "modern".
[1] Which I dislike, but I digress.
Much needed, UG has become unusable.
These days I’m a fan of Songsterr. Even handed them my credit card - I love that you can play along with the actual tracks, backing tracks (YouTube) or midi. I find myself learning more songs than the UG way.
If you have Guitar Pro, you can download the gp files from Songsterr and open them directly in GP. I like this because I can then have the same features (apart from the Youtube bit) with all of GP's added goodies.
I love/hate Guitar Pro. It’s indispensable but unstable.
Oh hallelujah, I've got a lifetime sub due to buying their app back in the day and was grandfathered in, so I can escape some of the marketing, but their crazy, pants-on-head UI makes guitar harder a lot of the time.
I did the same! I'm so happy I did!
This is just stealing content.
All of the content is provided by the community, if not directly submitted, ripped from message boards, Usenet, and other websites.
Please don’t think that UG is paying anybody to transcribe (or repair/moderate, desperately needed) the guitar tabs.
I will be using this for sure. How did you get all their data? API or did you scrape?
Yeah, it's scraping.
See: https://github.com/kmille/freetar/blob/main/freetar/ug.py
I remember OLGA, the On-Line Guitar Archive. In the 1990’s when I was learning to play guitar in my teens, OLGA hosted enough user-generated text-based tabs for me to learn every song I’d ever heard/wanted to play, for free.
The core of UltimateGuitar is the content from OLGA, which is why this particular enshittification is so ludicrous.
This is absolutely awesome. I've been learning guitar since ~15 months now and I strongly dislike the ads and popups in all (most?) of the guitar sites, and this is a perfect simple interface that does the job and doesn't waste time. Great idea and great execution.
PS @kmille I was missing sorting the table, so I took some code off of SO and made a pull request. It isn't using jQuery so it might break some code conventions you have, but I'll be glad to have the sorting feature if you can merge and deploy the new code! Again thanks for ideating and making this.
https://www.songsterr.com/ is an alternative site with a much better UI
It's still got nearly half the page covered in ads, on mobile.
Love it. Thank you. Ultimate guitar is nothing just scamming bullshit.
It really is: anytime uBlock Origin blocks >50% of the resources on a page (including to Russian servers), it's objectively bullshit.
Oh wow. This reminds me a lot of the OLGA.net (On Line Guitar Archive) back in the day before the Harry Fox Agency shut it down. Thanks for this.
What changed? Why aren't publishers going after current music sites?
I’m a fan of chordify[0], much recommended!
I wonder if someone can use this to slowly download everything to have an offline archive - which then could be shared somewhere else.
I added a PR[0] to a CLI project doing exactly this for all your saved tabs. Could probably be extended for all tabs on the site as well.
[0]: https://github.com/Pilfer/ultimate-guitar-scraper/pull/2
Hey! I made project like this, but I reverse engineered the API from the Ultimate Guitar android application. I used BurpSuite and Frida to look at all the HTTPS requests that the app made and went on from there
....please tell us more!
Two things:
1. This is really excellent. I looked up some tab that I had added to the site, and it does a great job presenting it. Most importantly, it does it in a very printable format.
2. If you a classical guitarist, or interested in classical guitar, you should check out https://www.classtab.org/ which is a gem of the internet.
Also: https://www.delcamp.net/
This is great. The original has become pretty hostile to users over the years, which is especially unacceptable since users have contributed most of the content that defines the site.
Nice, love it.
Yesss awesome! UG's UI has just gotten progressively worse over the years. It's one of those sites you wish had just paused at a certain point and just stopped with what they had.
Their app is even more annoying.
I cannot thank you enough. This was so needed! I'm gonna use it, hoping it's not gonna get killed.
Just… Thank You! It's blazing fast, (even too) clean, and without that mess that UG became in the last decade.
Something similar for piano learners would be welcome
If you can’t avoid mobile, use an alternative browser with built in blocking like Duck Duck Go or Firefox Focus or Brave. It works great for me, since my phone can rest easily on my digital piano sheet music stand.
Just avoid Chrome, since Google’s business model is all about you seeing the autoplay and full screen ads from UG.
Sssh… peaceful. Thanks!
It’s kind of worth remembering that Ultimate Guitar used to have lots of the tabs removed because of copyright claims, so to some extent the advertising hellscape it is because they have to pay licensing to the record labels
This is awesome. May I please make one request which would make my life so easy - can you wrap the chords in square brackets? Tools like MySongbook will highlight the chords that way
Love this, thanks!
One question - is pagination broken or not implemented? eg. searching for a band with a large discography like Built to Spill / Okkervil River only returns a small selection of tabs. It actually doesn't seem to be the first page even, more of a random selection.
Ultimate guitar is my last resort because the bloat. I also go to lacuerda.net but it forces me to enable cookies (not cool).
I am sure I am going to try Freetar.
I wonder if you could also add a way to show open and movable fingerings for chords on hover?
Needs more ads... jk... it's actually so good that I'm afraid it will be killed.
Love the return to text based chords/tabs (without all the other crap on top). That is all that is needed really. This guitar/tab space is ripe for disruption if you ask me.
Wow, what a perfect website
I bought a year of pro and returned it 24 hours later at a loss (I had signed up using a non refundable promo code)
The app straight up doesn’t work: playlists don’t actually load the next song when you expect, it takes way too long to load a sheet, and then you have to navigate to “chords” on each song in the playlist, which introduces MORE loading. They could save so much time by not loading shit I straight up don’t need. Oh, and you can’t manually sync songs for offline use, that’s the cherry on top, you are at the whim of their syncing schedule after you favorite a song.
I wrote a CLI for it: https://codeberg.org/ltworf/ultimateultimateguitar
Thanks for building this! Bookmarked.
I notice that searching by artist can be inconsistent; for example, if I want the song "Sinners Defeat" by Mors Principium Est, I can find it if I search by title[1] but it doesn't appear in results by artist[2], while on UG I get that song plus a few more[3] (text tab only).
Very handy--the search is fast and looks like a search ought to look. Nice work!
1. https://freetar.androidloves.me/search?search_term=sinners+d...
2. https://freetar.androidloves.me/search?search_term=mors+prin...
3. https://www.ultimate-guitar.com/search.php?title=mors+princi...
I love this, I wish all websites looked like this. UG's website is horrific flaming garbage. My only feedback is that I often picked songs to play based on the most popular/trending tabs, and I'd love to see that here too.
Ooh, this is a godsend. UG is so full of dark patterns and nags it's almost unusable. It's a travesty and whoever runs such scam on community provided content should do some serious soul searching.
Transposing chords doesn't seem to be implemented (or should the plus/minus buttons do that)?