To celebrate, Musicnotes.com is giving away $10,000 in Guitar Guru Sessions. Yes, you heard me right, $10,000 in FREE Guitar Guru Sessions! These sessions will be given out to the first 1,000 customers in $10 increments. In other words, they’re being given out on a “first-come, first-serve” basis, so you’d better act quickly if you want to take advantage of this special offer.

For more details on how to be a part of this Guitar Guru Give-a-way, please visit www.musicnotes.com/guitarguru.

Just some of the new features included in Guitar Guru 3 are:

1. A scalable fretboard and enhanced music notation.
2. The ability to change playback tempo while maintaining the correct pitch.
3. Precision Audio-Syncing that allows audio to be matched to the Session to within 1/10 of a second (PC Only).

We at MXTabs.net have hyped this software in the past, and for good reason. Simply put, we believe that Guitar Guru is one of the best tools around for learning how to play the guitar or bass. So good, in fact, that we notify you of when a corresponding Guitar Guru session is available for one of our tabs (see: MXTabs.net Site Update: Auto-Scroll & Guitar Guru Notification).

So, now that the $10,000 Guitar Guru Giveaway is underway, we say… go out and give it a try! Now! You really have no reason NOT to! :-)

Let us know what you think.

In lieu of payment, Musicnotes and Alfred Music Publishing encourage users who choose to download the song to send donations to the Les Paul Foundation, 236 W. 30th St., Seventh Floor, New York, N.Y. 10001.

This free download is available online at http://www.musicnotes.com/free/ (now through midnight, September 2, 2009).

You can read more about this special offer by visiting Musicnotes.com’s Official Blog, or you can learn more about the many features that make Guitar Guru such a great learning tool here: http://www.musicnotes.com/guitarguru/.

You will also be glad to know that the Guitar Guru software is free to download, and that MXTabs.net notifies you on song search pages if there is a corresponding Guitar Guru session available for one of our guitar or bass tabs. So if you’ve ever considered giving Guitar Guru a try, it would seem that now is the perfect time to do so! After all, the software is free AND for a limited time you may download a free interactive lesson and tab of “Over the Rainbow,” to honor the memory of the great guitar innovator, Les Paul.

That’s why we thought you might be interested in knowing that every month our sister site, Musicnotes.com, offers one FREE Guitar Guru session for download.

What is Guitar Guru? It’s an interactive song-based learning software that acts as your personal guitar instructor, teaching you the proper fingerings, techniques, and strumming patterns for thousands of your favorite guitar & bass guitar songs. Some additional features include voice command, adjustable playback/learning tempo, MIDI or CD-Synched/MP3/WMA-synched audio, and printable guitar tab of your session.

Oh, and did I mention that the Guitar Guru software is also FREE? Well, it is.

So why not head over to the newly redesigned Guitar Guru Sessions store page to download the FREE Guitar Guru software and get your FREE April Guitar Guru session.

And if you like what you see, Musicnotes.com is currently offering an exclusive coupon, the details of which appear below:

Use coupon code GGUSAVE5 to save $5 on your next Guitar Guru purchase of $20 or more. Coupon expires Saturday, April 11th at midnight. One coupon per person.

Enjoy & let us know what you think!

What Is Taboo?

Taboo is purely and simply a drum tablature editor written by a drummer to give drummers out there a more powerful way to work with ASCII drum tablature. It lets you create and edit drum tabs quickly and naturally in an ASCII environment without putting any complicated interface between you and your music. There are one or two other drum tab editors out there, but they seem intent on taking your input and telling you how the tab will look, rather than giving you complete control.

Why Would I Use Taboo?

Consider how you currently write drum tabs (assuming you do, or how you would) – probably with a text editor like Microsoft Word or Notepad. The problem with using these programs for editing drum tablature is that they were designed to effectively handle lines of words, rather than lines of columns of characters. Taboo was designed specifically to create and manipulate ASCII drum tablature, so it’s intuitive to use and provides many powerful commands to modify meaningful regions of text, rather than words and paragraphs. The aim is to offer comprehensive functionality while keeping the controls and interface as simple and clean as possible.

At the end of the day, tabbing can often be a frustrating process. Taboo attemps to dissolve the tedious bits, like pressing letters on your keyboard to add notes, or adding extra -’s to each line to extend a bar, so that you can quickly write 95% of your tab with the mouse and a few keys and get on to the fun part of playing your song.

What Can Taboo Do?

Before we start, it should be mentioned (for clarity) that the program keeps a few lists of all the available drums and the notes for each one that you can use in your tab. This lets you scroll through the available options with a simple click of the mouse. These lists are completely customizable, so you can add uncommon notes and drums if you need them or remove the ones that aren’t present in your song.

You can check out the documentation for a full, detailed list of available commands, but here’s a brief summary:

Simple clicks perform basic edit operations. Left clicking on a note will change the symbol of the note by scrolling one step through the list of available notes. You’ll be using this most often to turn a – into an o or x. Right clicking on the other hand will clear any note to a -. Clicking the drum label with the left/right mouse button will scroll forwards/backwards through the available drums.

Modifier key combos (Ctrl, Shift and Alt) allow you to perform more complex operations with the same level of simplicity. A single click from the left mouse button can create empty lines of tab and line breaks. A simple right click can reset entire bars or lines to -’s or delete lines of tab.

Most songs are quite similar throughout, so you’ll often be wanting to copy and paste chucks of tablature that you’ve already written. Taboo lets you cut or copy just about any arbitrary rectangle of text with 2 clicks, and provides a range of single-click paste methods to suit almost any situation, such as overwriting, inserting inline, or inserting below.

Any patterns you find yourself pasting often can be saved as templates to a kind of persistent clipboard – you can restore any of these templates to be pasted with a single click.

Most of these more fundamental operations have been implemented, but the most exciting area is the non-essential commands that are right at your fingertips for your convenience. Pull down the Edit menu and you’ll be able to remove every empty line in the tab with a single click or add/remove the lines of count below every staff. Speaking of the count, you can also instruct the program to add a line of count below every new staff you create, and update it automatically whenever you change the length of a line.

Taboo is still relatively early in development, so these commands have some great potential for growth. There are also a number of major features planned for the near future, such as Live Input (playing the keyboard like a drum kit to create a tab), Live Output (audio playback), and eventually direct conversion to sheet music notation.

Wow! Where Can I Get Taboo?

The fact that Taboo is still in active development and something of a niche product means it doesn’t quite warrant its own website yet. However, all the progress so far has been recorded in the Taboo Thread on the MXTabs.net Forum, and that’s where you can get your Free Download of Taboo: An ASCII Drum Tab Editor. It’s also where you can leave any questions and comments. There’s a strong chance anything you bring up will find a way into the next version!

And finally, a big thank you to all the users out there who’ve shown their support by downloading Taboo and especially leaving their constructive feedback. Your demand is making this happen, and there will always be further development so long as there is interest. Grab Taboo now, and keep in touch!

Well, we do. And no, silly, I’m not talking about the kind of wallpaper that you use to decorate the interior walls of your home with.

Why would MXTabs.net design and give that away for free?! (And why would you want that hanging in your dining room anyway?!) No, I’m talking about the other kind of wallpaper – the kind for your computer… duh!

Good, now that we have that cleared up, go ahead and check out our selection of Free Guitar Wallpapers. To select one as your background image, simply right-click on an image and save the target as your image file.

I’m a man of simple taste, so I use the MXTabs.net 07.01.08 Teaser Wallpaper on my work desktop to commemorate the official launch of MXTabs.net on July 1, 2008.

Of course, maybe you’re partial to the MXTabs.net Skull and Grunge Wallpaper or the MXTabs.net Guitar on Fire Wallpaper. Whichever you like best, feel free to download away. After all, you won’t find Free Guitar Wallpaper this cool anywhere else.

Anyway, this week we do have some new wallpaper to download… and in my opinion it’s pretty bad-ass.

Get your MX Wallpaper action here, at our new downloads area!

http://www.mxtabs.net/content/downloads/

You can download the widescreen versions at the links below.  (Right-click to Save).

Skull and Grunge: 1280×800

Skull and Grunge: 1920×1200

The other versions are available here.

Starting now (and ending who knows when), Friday is MXTabs Wallpaper Download Day (if you have something better to call it, feel free).  Follow the links below to download wallpaper for your desktop, featuring MXTabs and a badass skull.

Note: Widescreen versions coming early next week.

Download Here (Right-Click to Save)

Skull and Grunge: 800×600 pixels

Skull and Grunge: 1280×960 pixels

Skull and Grunge: 1600×1200 pixels