MXTabs.net Tab Editing

As promised, now it’s possible for anyone who has previously submitted a tab to MXTabs.net to login and edit their guitar, bass or drum tabs. If logged in, simply look for the Edit This Tab button on the tab page itself, or look for the Edit This Tab link in the “submitted tabs” area of your MXTabs.net profile page.

Both will bring you to the tab revisions submission page, which is divided into 4 easy steps. The first step allows you to add additional details to your tab if you wish (see Tab Details below!), the second step involves the actual editing of your guitar, bass or drum tab body, and the third step requires you to list the major revisions you’ve made to your tab. Finally, the fourth step asks if you would like to keep the current rating of your tab or clear the rating and start over. This is particularly useful, for instance, if you are just adding a few missing slides to your otherwise 5-Star guitar tab, for you would probably want to keep your current rating. However, if you were completely revamping a tab that had a low rating, maybe you would choose to clear the rating and have members vote on the new version? The choice is yours!

Once you hit the Submit Tab Revisions button, your revised tab will enter a moderation queue – where it will be verified by select members of the MXTabs.net community – and will begin displaying on the site within a few short days.

MXTabs.net Tab Details

As mentioned above, the first step of the Tab Editing process allows you to add additional details to your tab. These optional Tab Details (which now also appear when submitting a tab to MXTabs.net) are mostly instrument-specific and ask you questions such as: Which effects pedals are needed to play your guitar tab? Does your bass tab require a 4-string or 5-string bass? And what drum kit components are used in your drum tab? Some of the other options include the ability to add user tags, indicate what tempo the piece is in, and assign a difficulty rating to your tab. Soon we will begin displaying these tab details on all tab display pages, and we plan on incorporating the data into song searches in the future as well. Pretty cool, no?

Although it’s optional, we hope you will consider editing any tabs you may have already submitted to MXTabs.net to include these extra tab details. Think of it as a good karma exercise – just a few minutes of your time will provide other musicians with a TON of valuable information when learning a new tab, information they won’t find on any other tab site. Who knows, maybe you’ll win the lottery someday in return!

Either way, we hope you enjoy the ability to edit your MXTabs.net guitar, bass & drum tabs. It’s just the next step in our grand scheme to rule the world… er, I mean provide the serious musician with serious tabs. Rock on!

Although there have been several versions of this iPhone app to date, the most recent version is the first to offer free and legal guitar and bass tab downloads from MXTabs.net, and we’re pretty excited about it.

But that is definitely not the only reason you’ll want to give the iTab Songbook and Tuner a try, because included among the many cool features of this iPhone app is a chromatic guitar tuner, the ability to transpose tab chords, the ability to play a song from your iTunes library along with a corresponding tab, and the ability to customize your tab data by specifying the instrument type, number of strings, and tuning of a particular tab.

For more info about this indispensable aid for guitar and bass players, visit the iTab Songbook and Tuner page in the iTunes App Store.

Get Your Free Copy of the iTab Songbook and Tuner iPhone App!

From now until September 23, 2009 MXTabs.net is giving away a limited number of free copies of the iTab Songbook and Tuner. To get your free copy, simply leave a comment below. We will then email you a unique promo code. Enter that code at the iTunes Store Redeem and download away!

It should be noted that Apple has restricted promo codes to be redeemable only in the US iTunes Store. The good news is that an app obtained through a promo code is exactly the same as if you bought it, meaning that you will be able to use it for as long as you want AND upgrade for free when a new version is released.

Again, this offer expires on September 23, 2009 and supplies are limited, so act now to get your free copy of the iTab Songbook and Tuner iPhone App.

Enjoy!

The first, a New Tabs feed, is (you guessed it!) a feed of all newly added song tabs available at MXTabs.net. We thought you might find this useful, especially as we’re currently adding hundreds of new tabs per week. You can also receive a feed of new tabs specific to your instrument. Check them out – New Guitar Tabs, New Bass Tabs, and New Drum Tabs. Pretty sweet, huh?

The second RSS feed we’ve added concerns Limbo, our community tab moderation system that allows MXTabs.net members to vote on which tabs should (or should not) become part of our permanent collection. The Limbo Tabs feed will keep you updated of all tabs currently waiting for your vote in Limbo. Similar to the New Tabs feed, you may also choose to receive a Limbo feed specific to your instrument (Limbo Guitar Tabs feed, Limbo Bass Tabs feed, and Limbo Drum Tabs feed).

So, subscribe away! Along with our existing RSS user feeds – User Activity, Forum Posts, Blog Updates, and Tab Comments – the new RSS song tab feeds mentioned above are a great way to stay plugged in to the MXTabs.net community and our ever-growing collection of guitar, bass & drum tabs.

Enjoy!

Inspired by the “My Tab Folder” within the My Account area of MXTabs.net, the MXTabs.net Facebook App for Song Tabs allows you to share what guitar, bass & drum tabs 1) you are learning, 2) you want to learn, and 3) you have learned.

Once you have the MXTabs.net Facebook App for Song Tabs installed, you can use Facebook Connect to interact with your friends on MXTabs.net, while also sharing your “Tab Folder” on Facebook through your Wall and friends’ News Feeds, including an option to automatically post to your activity feed. Be sure to check out the full help section within the app for more info.

When you add the app to your Facebook profile, you may add it to either your Wall & Info Tab or your Boxes Tab – the choice is all yours. Once you’ve done so, all of your Facebook friends will be able to view your MXTabs.net profile, check on your learning progress, find tabs that they might want to learn themselves, or even offer some tips on how to play a particularly difficult passage.

We hope you enjoy this new way to interact with MXTabs.net and share your love of guitar & drum playing. Please let us know what you think. Your feedback invaluable.

1. On MXTabs.net user profile pages we’ve added a scroll bar to The Stall and Bandmates sections. For many of our users, this area was simply becoming too large and unruly for easy use. Simple fix for a simple problem.
2. MXTabs.net search pages have undergone a minor face lift. We’ve removed the large ad that appeared at the top of the page and moved the Top Available Tabs and Tabs Waiting For Your Vote to the bottom of the page. The goal here was to allow users to more readily view their search results without having to scroll down first. Similarly, we’ve started displaying 40 song titles per page, rather than 20, thus reducing the amount of time needed to find the song you’re looking for.
3. We’ve partnered with thumbplay.com to offer relevant ringtones to our users in the US. You’ll now see a “ringtone button” in the black header directly above any tab with a corresponding ringtone available, as in this Stairway To Heaven Guitar Tab by Led Zeppelin.
4. Finally, on the programming front we’ve optimized and compressed many of the external JavaScript and style sheets on the site. End result: a speedier version of MXTabs.net!

We’ll have more site updates for you soon. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy the changes we’ve recently made. Let us know what you think of them, and by all means, feel free to make new suggestions. After all, this is your tab site!

The first enhancement, the MXTab Scroll, is available on all guitar, bass & drum tabs on our site, and allows you to keep your hands off your computer keyboard and on your guitar while the site automatically scrolls the tab for you. Choose from six different speeds, and let ‘er rip! You can find this feature on the top, right hand corner of all tab display pages. Give it a try with this Guitar Tab of Love Story by Taylor Swift.

We partnered with our sister site, Musicnotes.com, to bring you our second new feature: notification of when a Guitar Guru session of a particular song is available. While Musicnotes.com does charge for Guitar Guru sessions, the software is free to download and we thought our users might enjoy yet one more way to learn their favorite tabs. Some of the cool features you’ll get with your Guitar Guru purchase are detailed, note-by-note instructions, real-time finger positions, adjustable playback tempo, voice command, MIDI or CD-synched/MP3/WMA-synched audio, and a printable guitar tab. The Guitar Guru logo will appear on any MXTabs.net song search page if there is a corresponding Guitar Guru session of that tab, as is the case with this Guitar Tab of Wake Me Up When September Ends by Green Day.

We have a LOT of other plans in the works and will share them with you when they’re ready. In the meantime, we’d love to hear some feedback about the two new features mentioned above.

Yesterday we deployed several small, but valuable updates that we hope will make voting on guitar, bass & drum tabs within MXTabs.net Limbo even easier than it was before.

(If you’re new to our site and are wondering, “What the h*#! is Limbo?,” then I’ll fill you in: it’s a community-based tab moderation system that allows MXTabs.net users to vote whether to “Accept” or “Deny” a submitted song tab, thus ensuring that only the highest quality tabs are added to our database. To learn more, please read our earlier post, MXTabs.net Song Tab Submissions and Limbo, or check out MXTabs.net Limbo and begin voting right away!)

But now, back to the updates. First off, if you’re on the homepage (and logged in) you will notice that the “Tabs Waiting For Your Vote” feed now displays only tabs that you have yet to vote on, whereas before it simply displayed a random sampling of Limbo tabs. And in Limbo itself we’ve added a red check mark to the left of all tabs that you have already voted on. Both of these updates are meant to give members a more quick and useful “snapshot” of their Limbo activity, so that they can get to the fun part… viewing & voting on new song tabs!

We have LOTS of exciting things planned for the near future, so stay tuned for more site updates. Until then, happy practicing.

Reading ASCII Drum Tabs

The original motivation for tablature was to transcribe guitar and bass guitar sheet music to a simple format. However, while guitar tabs remain the most prominent, drummers have since started writing their own tabs, mainly because of the simplicity they afford.

This here is a brief introduction to the most fundamental skills of interpreting a drum tab, and by the end you should be well on your way to grooving in John Bonham’s legendary footsteps to the timeless classic Stairway To Heaven by Led Zeppelin!

Reading a Drum Tab: The Basics

The main difference between guitar and drum tabs is that while a line of guitar tab is made to resemble the neck of a guitar (with each line corresponding to a string), drum tab is more like simplified sheet music, where each line represents a different drum (or cymbal, or whatever).

Guitar tabs generally don’t worry too much about how long their bars are, or how many hyphens (-) are between each note – figuring our the rhythm of the song is left as an exercise to the reader. However, drummers are concerned primarily with rhythm, so each character in a drum tab represents an exact unit of time. The most common drum tab format is for each character to represent a 16th note (semiquaver), so a bar of 4/4 would be comprised of 16 characters.

But what do the characters mean? While there are many ways to play a single string on a guitar, there are relatively few ways to play a single drum. Let’s briefly make the very naive assumption that there is only one way to play each drum. In this case, each character in a drum tab represents an instruction to either play or not play the drum. For actual drums, a note (instruction to play) is represented by an ‘o’ while a note on a cymbal is an ‘x’. These characters come from the conventional drum sheet music notation, where drum notes have normal, round heads and cymbal notes have an ‘x’ for a head.

With this knowledge, we can interpret the first two bars of groove (starting at 4:19) in one these Drum Tabs of Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin, with the count included below to illustrate the integration of the rhythm in the tab:

CC|x---------------|----------------|
HH|--x-x-x-x-x-x-x-|x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-|
SD|----o-------o---|----o-------o---|
BD|o-------o-------|o-------o-o---o-|
--|1e+a2e+a3e+a4e+a|1e+a2e+a3e+a4e+a|

The easiest way to read drum tab is to simply think of it as drum sheet music without stems coming from the notes, where every note is the length of a semiquaver and a hyphen represents a rest. As tabs lack the staff of sheet music, the 2-letter labels on the left describe which drum the line refers to. There are many, many variations our there and everyone will have their own preference, but the XX| format seems the most consistent.

The above pattern is one of the simplest to play, and one of the first any drummer will pick up. You simply play the snare on the 2 and 4 count, the bass drum on the 1 and 3 (with a couple of extra notes at the end), and a hi-hat on every 8th note, except the first (which is a crash).

Reading a Drum Tab: The Subtleties

Remember that assumption we made that each drum can only be played in one way? That’s rubbish, forget it. Despite a drum set’s lack of pitch, each and every drum and cymbal possesses a range of expressions, and there is at least 5 different ways to hit each one. You will very likely encounter these non-standard ways of hitting drums in any song you try to play, so they require their own character representations for the drum tab to be accurate.

The common symbols for drums:
o = normal hit
g = ghost note (played very softly)
O = accented hit (often omitted under the assumption that o is loud and g is soft, leaving specifics up to the reader)
f = flam (played with both hands almost simultaneously)
d = double, or diddle (2 notes played in rapid succession, each half as long as a single unit of tab)
z = buzz roll (let the stick bounce on the head)
x = cross stick (palm on the drum head, stick hitting the rim)

And for the cymbals:
x = normal hit
X = accented hit (played harder with the shoulder of the stick for hi-hats and crashes)
b = bell (sometimes X is simply used for the ride)
o = open hi-hats (play as the left foot is lifted)
# = close hi-hats (by lowering the left foot

A few of these symbols (the very common X, g, and f) are used in the following 12 bars (6:49-7:17, note the repeat meaning “play 5 times”) to add more texture to the music than the previous example:

--/----------------x5---------------\
HH|X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-|X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-|X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-|--------------#-|
SD|----o-------o---|--o--o-go--o-gog|----o-------o---|f--f--f--f--oooo|
BD|o-o----oo-o----o|o--o--o--o--o---|o-o----oo-o----o|-oo-oo-oo-oo----|
--|1e+a2e+a3e+a4e+a|1e+a2e+a3e+a4e+a|1e+a2e+a3e+a4e+a|1e+a2e+a3e+a4e+a|


In addition to various characters, there are many situations where special markup is required (e.g. tuplets, repeats, time signature changes), all of which have different implementations depending on who you ask. For more details and discussion of these issues, take a gander at the MXTabs.net Community’s attempt to develop a standard drum tab notation,

Hopefully this post has given you the insight to get out there and try out a few MXTabs.net drum tabs. If you’ve got any questions or opinions and drum tab, post away over at Tab Central!

To join our MXTabs.net Street team, all you have to do is login to MXTabs.net and go to your My Account page. Once you’re there, you have the option of opening the “Street Team” tab, and then select whatever code you’d like to use to post a badge on your blog, personal website, MySpace page, etc. Each visitor you refer through your badge earns you points.

Besides linking to MXTabs.net, you can also share a favorite song tab or any other MXTabs.net page, like your MXTabs.net profile. Look for the “Refer this Page” link at the top-right of every page after you log in to find the link you want to post. Make sure you’re logged in to MXTabs.net when you refer a page, because every visitor that comes through those referrals also earns you points.

Top MXTabs.net Street Team Members will periodically receive prizes as a “thank you” for all of their help. We are reviewing the referrals from our existing MXTabs.net Street Team, so keep your strings in tune while we tabulate our Top 10 list of members!

So what are you waiting for? Join the MXTabs.net Street Team to support free, legal song tab and win free prizes!!!

How to Read a Guitar Tab

Tablature, or tab for short, is a method of notating music that is played on guitar or bass guitar. Unlike standard guitar sheet music or different types of guitar tab, the tab that we use on MXTabs.net utilizes ASCII characters and numbers. These characters graphically represent the strings and frets of a guitar, making it a quick, simple way to learn your favorite songs.

If you’re a beginning guitarist, this short introduction should get you up and running, and with a bit of practice you can be playing the Star Spangled Banned by Jimi Hendrix in no time at all.

Reading a Guitar Tab: The Basics

The first thing to know when reading guitar tab on our site is that each horizontal line you see represents a specific guitar string. The lowest-pitched guitar string (or, if you prefer, the thickest string) will always be the bottom-most horizontal line. Conversely, the highest-pitched guitar string (or, thinnest string) will always be the top-most horizontal line. So, here is what a blank guitar tab looks like (note the string names to the right… this tab is in standard tuning):

e—————————————————————-
B—————————————————————-
G—————————————————————-
D—————————————————————-
A—————————————————————-
E—————————————————————-

Pretty straightforward, right? Now, to actually begin learning a guitar tab, simply look at the numbers written on the horizontal lines. These numbers tell you where to fret a specific string with your left hand. For instance, check out the opening measure of this Guitar Tab of the Star Spangled Banned by Jimi Hendrix:

e-----------------0~-|
B-0------------0-----|
G----1-----1---------|
D-------2------------|
A--------------------|
E--------------------|

Here, to play the first note, strike the open B-string, because the “O” indicates that you strike, but don’t fret, that string. To play the second pitch, strike the G-string while pressing a finger on the 1st fret. And the third pitch? That’s right, strike the D-string while pressing a finger on the 2nd fret. Follow that up with the two additional open notes on the B and e-strings and you have the opening measure of the Star Spangled Banner!

If the numbers on the horizontal lines are arranged vertically, it simply means to strum the indicated notes at the same time which creates a chord. The following example illustrates what a guitar tab would look like if a particular song required playing a C Major chord 3 times in a row.

e--0--0--0---------------------
B--1--1--1---------------------
G--0--0--0---------------------
D--2--2--2---------------------
A--3--3--3---------------------
E------------------------------

And that, my friends, is really all you need to get started learning your favorite guitar tabs. That and a little practice anyway. But guitar tab can also describe some of the more subtle techniques used by guitarists when playing. These are discussed below.

Reading a Guitar Tab: Advanced Symbols

Most good guitar tabs should have a legend, or key, describing the various subtle techniques used throughout the piece. Although there can be slight variations (which is why you should always review the legend before learning a new tab), there are certain advanced symbols that one might consider “universal.” Some of the more common ones are these:

h – hammer on
p – pull off
b – bend string up
r – release bend
/ – slide up
- slide down
v – vibrato (sometimes written as ~)
t – right hand tap
x – play ‘note’ with heavy damping

If we look at measures 2 and 3 of the MXTabs.net Guitar Tab of the Star Spangled Banned by Jimi Hendrix, we can see what many of these guitar techniques look like when represented as a guitar tab. (Listen to a recording of Jimi wailing away on this to get the full effect!)

e--4--2--0--------------|---------------------------|
B-----------------------|--0--0--9bv~-7--5h7p5--/4~-|
G-----------1--/3--4bv~-|---------------------------|
D-----------------------|---------------------------|
A-----------------------|---------------------------|
E-----------------------|---------------------------|

I hope this little introduction on How to Read a Guitar Tab has given you all of the necessary tools to begin learning your favorite MXTabs.net guitar tabs. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask in the comments below or visit our forums.

And welcome to MXTabs!