First off, our collection of guitar, bass & drum tabs has grown dramatically. Fueled in large part by new licensing agreements (with Universal Music Publishing Group, Domino Publishing, and Notting Hill Music Group just to name a few), MXTabs.net has added over 25,000 tabs to our database in the past year. Yep, you heard me right, over 25,000 new guitar, bass & drum tabs!

As far as usability and new features go, just a few of the more noticeable changes of the past year include the addition of the MXTab Auto-Scroll, notification of when a Guitar Guru session of a particular song is available, and the offering of ringtones of your favorite song tabs. Additionally, our search pages and user profile pages have undergone minor face lifts to help improve your MXTabs.net experience.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the MXTabs.net community itself has continued to grow and become a source of shared knowledge for other musicians. Be it the Taboo Drum Tab Editor, MXTabs Forum Music Competition, or the Legend of MXTabs RPG, our users seem more than happy to help each other out in their pursuit of musical knowledge and good times, which is why we’re here in the first place!

So, to help commemorate our one year anniversary, MXTabs.net would like to give away some free t-shirts, stickers & keychain bottle openers. We regret that we don’t have any Taylor Guitars to give away, such as when we launched, but free MXTabs.net merchandise is still pretty cool, no? To get your free MXTabs.net merchandise, simply leave a comment below and let us know your thoughts on year one of our existence.

Here’s to a successful 1st year, and looking forward to an even more successful 2nd!

Well, now that that’s over and done with…

The brave souls over at Plowing Mud Forever sent us some photos to critique and talk about their band’s image. This band is the perfect example to show what I’m talking about, because in this case — image does matter.

Why? Well, Plowing Mud Forever is a band with a sense of humor — literally. Described as comedic alternative metal, you should check out Plowing Mud Forever on MySpace to hear what I’m talking about.

So…here’s what I think…

From the photos you sent us and from your website, I can tell that you’ve been experimenting with how to portray yourself for a while. The ironic thing is, I didn’t get a “funny hah hah” feel to your music at all. Inventive? Yes. Experimental? Yes. But not campy in a “They Might Be Giants” sort of a way. Therein, my bandmates, lies the challenge. I feel that your music is so far removed from what you portray yourself to be that you’re shooting yourself in the foot. Instead of a comment like, “Oh, yeah. You’re trying that hard to be cool?” it’s “Oh, yeah. You’re trying that hard to look stupid?”

Now, before you chuck your computer across the room and send me hate mail, I want you to know that I don’t think you guys are stupid at all. It’s obvious you are having fun –with your music, with your band — and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. However, if you’re looking for an image to market professionally, then I’d stop trying to reinvent the wheel and bring back the focus on your band as a brand.

For example, I’d take a cue and base some band image ideas off of your name. “Plowing Mud Forever.” I can think of 10,000 different ways to come up with photos involving mud, plows and guitars. Okay, maybe you don’t want to mix mud and guitars together, but there is a lot you can do. From hyping up the experimental side to your photos to adding in special effects, I would make your photos look intentional rather than accidental.

For Your Experimental Band, Intent Does Matter

Really, setting that tone for an image that will attract and retain fans is about hitting a good balance between your music and the fun you’re having. To you, your band’s music may be really off-the-mark, but when I listen to it it’s nothing like I expected it to be. You guys can seriously play and play well. Artistically, if you want to attract more of the female persuasion I’d definitely tone down the camp. Helloooooo! Remember, you guys are in a rock band. You don’t play flute and sing about Oompa Loompas while dancing around in white robes with long-flowing hair and a tambourine spreading glitter everywhere. You rock, and rock hard.

Grainy, black-and-white photos would be the easiest way for you guys to go because it fits the box logo with “Plowing Mud Forever.” A little more complicated and “pretentious” would be images without your band in them at all, like a close-up of a rubber ducky swimming in mud with your logo at center. Either way, I like the superimposed logo on the photos because it definitely associates the pic with your band. If you want to go the “community” route, you could have a photo or a logo contest where fans submit pics to you.

Remember these words, grasshopper — to get experimental to come across well, it’s gotta look intentional, not accidental. “Intentional” as in “you planned it that way” will distinguish your image in a more artistic light.

But what do I know? I just work here. So MXTabs-at-large, I put it to you. What do you think? Love my advice? Hate it? Let’s show Plowing Mud Forever some luv and speak up!

We recently spoke with Jeremy, the founder, and he asked that we post the following comments from him:

“As the former webmaster of MXTabs, I’m thrilled to see that the site has been relaunched and that the tabs are once again accessible to musicians. I’m confident that under Musicnotes’ capable stewardship MXTabs will once again become a place where guitarists, bassists, and drummers can enhance their knowledge of their instrument and learn how to play the latest songs. Long live MXTabs!”

The MXTabs site is really not going to change much under Musicnotes. The way we see it, the musician community designed exactly what it was they wanted when the site was first running in its unlicensed format (before it shut down and we acquired it). The users still create all the content for the site, and they can rate review and now moderate whether a tab even goes to the site in the first place.

Really the only difference is that we have to go through a licensing approval process before tabs can go to the site. If a publisher has opted not to license their content, then we respect their decision as the intellectual property holder and do not allow those tabs to go to the site. Of course we will be continually working on adding additional publishers, so once a publisher does sign on who has opted out in the past, then we will add any tabs licensed by them, as unlicensed tabs stay in a sort of perpetual authorization queue.

The only other change is that we’ve completely redesigned the site and are implementing much more of a social network / community functionality into the way the system works. Since tab sites are somewhat similar to sites like YouTube, where users share content they have created, we felt it was important to build in much more of a social aspect so they can more easily share this information with each other. We’re currently in the midst of designing the official launch version of the site, so what is up for the public to see right now is actually our alpha version. We’ve learned quite a bit from a combination of user, advertiser and internal feedback during the alpha phase of MXTabs, and we’re confident that the launch version of the site will be the best tab experience online.

While implementing the community features of MXTabs we did not, however, want to simply slap up “friends” and “comments” and other basic community type options that you expect on a social network. Instead we looked at the features that users have come to expect and really put a lot of thought into how they would best be implemented on a social network built around a specific kind of content and user base. So while we have many of the usual systems, they do operate in some slightly different ways than what you might have seen elsewhere.

One of the biggest differences with the MXTabs community view vs. the approach of many other tab web sites is the way in which tabs go to the site in the first place. On the old MXTabs, as is the case with most other currently existing sites, a tab is submitted and a kind of god-like moderator (or team of moderators) ultimately decides whether it should go to the site or not. On the new version, we have put this decision fully in the hands of the sites users with a system we call “limbo.” Once a tab has been approved through a licensing channel, it goes to our site in “limbo” which means that it is available, but not officially part of the MXTabs catalog. Users can view the tabs that are in limbo and vote as to whether they want to approve or deny the tab from being part of the official catalog. This way the community decides what is good enough for MXTabs.

Regarding the relaunch and its comparability to Napster’s relaunch, it’s somewhat similar but not completely. When Napster re-launched they took the platform that had worked in the past and then took a top-down approach as to what content was available for download, in what version, etc. For MXTabs we are not forcing “official” versions of tabs on users. Instead they continue to create the content that goes up on the site, and there is no limit as to who can sign on. If you write a song yourself and you want it on MXTabs, you can submit it and license and you’ll be able to take part in the advertising revenue share.

As far as our competitors go, we’re pretty alone in the market right now. Our biggest competitors obviously are the sites that are continuing to operate unlicensed, as they will continue to be able to have more music up than us while we continue to license. The difference is that we are legal, so we don’t need to worry about lawsuits – but beyond that we share all advertising revenue with the songwriters and copyright holders, whereas the unlicensed sites use other peoples’ intellectual property fully for their own gain and profit. In our opinion our solution is a win for the musician community, the songwriting community, and hopefully ourselves as well.

The only other direct competition we have is Guitar World’s tab site, but they are taking a somewhat different approach than we are. They have been focusing on offering a combination of official versions you can buy, along with user submitted content. Their catalog does seem to be quite a bit smaller than ours is currently though. We expect to have somewhere around 50,000 tabs available at launch, where I believe their catalog is much less. You would have to check with them on that to be certain though.

In related competition there is the new Guitar Instructor site from Hal Leonard, which is focusing on offering official tab downloads for a price. Their approach is again different from ours though in that we are focusing on allowing the users to create and share knowledge from a social aspect, whereas theirs is much more top-down oriented. Our sister company, Musicnotes.com also offers official tab downloads (and a very cool product called Guitar Guru), but we feel these are two different markets and while we intend to have some small interaction between the two, we do not want to try to force a change in the way a musician wants to access their tabs. Some want to buy official versions, others want to create and share their own in a free trading platform. We think both are great.

As we mentioned previously, we have four new people cranking through all of the data they can – and it’s getting thousands of new songs up weekly.

Our programmers are busy finalizing the “community” features that we think will be the glue that ties everything in the site together to make the new MX the best tab experience online.

But beyond all of this, we’re also taking stock of the site as it currently looks and making a few changes. We’ve heard your feedback, we’ve heard feedback from advertisers, we’ve heard feedback from song publishers and songwriters, and we’ve had enough time to give ourselves some feedback as well. Over the next few weeks you will see some changes to MX, that we think are going to be for the better.

For example:
- Hate the ad at the top of the site forcing you to scroll down to even access the menu? Fixed.
- Think the gigantic ad in the middle of the page is an eyesore? Fixed.
- Seeing too much silver? Fixed.

There’s more… but we thought it might be good to let you know that we are paying attention. If you have more feedback, leave a comment.