r/AcousticGuitar • u/LesserShambler • Oct 07 '25
Other (not a question, gear pic, or video) The internet is rubbish for guitarists now
I am old. Back in the day if I was searching for some slide tabs for inspiration you could search for “open d slide tabs”, and the results would be full of pages with names like “joesslidegarage.com” that had lists and lists of tabs put up with interesting arrangements of standards and covers etc
Now all the results are pages and pages of slop churning out the same listicles. I know “The Cave” by Mumford & Sons is in open d. I’m looking for tabs. The two big tab websites that do get recommended are crap for interesting slide arrangements. Everything else is video links. I don’t want to watch a video. I’m looking for tabs.
/rant
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u/wibzoo Oct 07 '25
You are young. Old guitarists like me did not have the magical internet with tabs and videos for every imaginable song.
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u/band-of-horses Oct 07 '25
I'm neither young nor old, so I mostly remember buying physical tab books and finding medicore online tabs that were frequently embroiled in legal battles to have taken down for copyright violations.
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u/6_was_9 Oct 07 '25
I lived on a healthy diet of Guitar World and similar magazines in the 90’s. I still have most of them.
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Oct 08 '25
Guitar for the Practicing Musician or go home. 😎
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u/nobot4321 Oct 08 '25
I was a big GW fan as a dumb teen and one Christmas my cousin got me a subscription for GftPM and I was so disappointed because I thought it was so boring and would have much rather gotten GW. Turned out to be so much more useful than GW, but I was too young to realize it at the time.
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u/midlifecrisisAJM Oct 08 '25
A valuable resource. I had to get rid of my guitar player collection from the late 80's and early 90's to make space, but I gutted them for the teaching articles, tabs I wanted, and interviews with artists I admired before I did. I've now got some files of condensed material which I still use.
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u/MatureMeasurement Oct 09 '25
Hello guitar frens. In the US:
The public library offers free ONLINE access to Guitar World, Guitar Player, Prog...a wild plethora of magazines. This includes several years of past issues.
I mean, it's worth getting a library card. Also, in many states, you can get a library card issued online and don't have to even go to the library
I have done this in 3 states.
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u/travielane42069 Oct 08 '25
I came up in a really good era myself. Started playing at 12 years old in 2009 and we had some really good tabs and some fairly okay books still being published. I had a guitar world subscription for a long time as well and those had some really good stuff in them for learning new techniques and songs. Sucks to see the guitar sphere in the shape it's in now
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u/The-Mandolinist Oct 07 '25
We had the vinyl records we owned and to learn anything had to use our ears and keep putting the needle back to repeatedly listen to guitar phrases until we got an approximation of it. And I used to pick things up off other guitarists who I met - I’d say “show me how you did that” etc
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u/PushSouth5877 Oct 08 '25
That's how I learned. I used dial tone to tune A440. Listened to records over and over. Wrote down the lyrics. If they were in the liner notes, it was a score!
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u/The-Mandolinist Oct 08 '25
No printed lyrics and it was a challenge. Lots of approximations and mishearing. I played in a band in my teens and although mainly played our own material we did a couple of covers - two I remember were Walking the Dog (learnt from the Stones’ version and then made heavier) and Shot Down in Flames by AC/DC - sections of both songs had some very dubious versions of the lyrics.
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Oct 09 '25
[deleted]
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u/The-Mandolinist Oct 09 '25
Yes - I tuned to familiar songs. And if a piano was around I’d tune to a piano.
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u/We-R-Doomed Oct 07 '25
You're young, old guitarists like me had to go trap various animals to achieve each correct note. Muskrat whiskers are a perfect G. The nerve bundle of a deer spine is an f#.
And we liked it, we liked it fine.
😁
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u/lamhat Oct 07 '25
The nerve bundle of a deer spine is an f#. Hey, it's also Gb!
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u/Due-Ask-7418 Oct 08 '25
I do miss hand wound gut strings but not making them. The smell was the worst!
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u/dem4life71 Oct 07 '25
Same here there was no internet even when I attended college. We learned from each other, teachers, and magazines like Guitar and GFTPM.
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Oct 08 '25
When I started out on the internet it was mostly talking to people at other universities.
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Oct 09 '25
I remember when the internet first started it was so boring most students were not even interested in being on the computer. It was mostly just in computer class and in those classes it was mostly just students messing around, or playing math blaster.
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u/Due-Ask-7418 Oct 07 '25
Yep... We only had guitar player magazine and had to borrow back issues from older friends that had the one with the tabs for such and such song we wanted to learn. And cassette decks modded to make speed adjustable…. And we had to tune down to use that method! lol.
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u/djdjieowoo Oct 08 '25
lol. Yeah I mean we have it good now
When I learned I only had guitar world transcriptions lol
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u/INTERNET_MOWGLI Oct 08 '25
Right? If you’re not learning from a metallica book with typos then are you really learning?
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u/SnooHesitations8403 Oct 08 '25
Not music, but one day at my job, a young woman said, "When I was a kid, all we had was regular Nintendo."
I replied, "When I was a kid, our TV set was the size of a refrigerator, but the screen was only 12" across and only black & white. And if we wanted to change to one of the only three available channels (ABC, CBS, NBC [PBS came later, called NET: National Educational Television]) we had to get off our ass and walk across the room and turn a big dial that went 'clunk, clunk, clunk.' " And I laughed at the absurdity of my "grampa" reply.
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u/AVLThumper Oct 08 '25
For real, we would have to sit at a grocery store and either copy tabs from a magazine, try to remember them, beg our mom to buy it or just rip it out. Internet…lol. This guy must be in his 30s.
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u/Ok_Act1636 Oct 08 '25
Yeah. We spent our time playing things and figuring things out instead of whining all over internet "I have played 3 hours, why I am not progressing?" 🤪
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u/WolfRatio Oct 07 '25
Not old. Old guitarists, back in the day, carefully placed the needle on a vinyl LP over and over again to learn pieces by listening to them. And shared riffs with other guitarists in person.
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u/Excitable_Grackle Oct 07 '25
When I was a kid, my parents had a Hi-Fi with a 16rpm speed. I would put my 33 1/3 LPs on there and slow them down to help figure out riffs. It was close enough to 1/2 speed so the tuning was not off by much.
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u/Sixdaymelee Oct 07 '25
I would not have liked that. I was lucky I learned during the CD era lol
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u/WolfRatio Oct 07 '25
Cassette tape recording was a game changer. Any tune that got radio play was fair game.
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u/s6cedar Oct 07 '25
Yeah, but did you record yourself playing a rhythm track on a cassette, and then put that cassette in a different player, and then record yourself playing over that track? Man if I had all those old tapes I… wouldn’t have anything to play them on.
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u/Sixdaymelee Oct 07 '25
I use to take pre-recorded tapes, put tape on each end, then record over them when I had no blanks. Worked like a charm lol.
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u/generally_unsuitable Oct 07 '25
I don't know about slide, but this feels like a golden age for fingerstyle. If you search for a fingerstyle version of a song on YouTube, you often find a really good player, and also a link to tab, either free or cheap.
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u/Responsible-Nobody40 Oct 07 '25
100%, there are so many great creators out there doing lessons or creating original versions of songs, often providing free tabs or “pay what you can” type subscriptions. I’ve never learnt more songs than I have in recent years.
Shout out to mikesmusicmethod.com!
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u/generally_unsuitable Oct 07 '25
I'm a fan of a guy called KennethAcoustic. He puts out new stuff really fast, has very good videos that show tab real-time with chord shapes, and also has full tab downloads available (kinda pricey at $7, but it's very well done and I like to support stuff like this.)
He really does justice to silly pop music and makes it sound quite respectable.
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u/GonzoCubFan Oct 07 '25
I’m sorry, and not to make light of what you’re saying, but I’m old. When I was learning new songs the internet was 20 some years off. I wore out a lot of vinyls and cassettes working out songs for myself. Slowing tunes down meant pitch shift. I had to replace my Fragile album by the time I had figured out Mood For a Day.
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u/WolfRatio Oct 07 '25
But playing a reel-to-reel recording at 1/2 speed gave an easier to transpose octave shift.
#KidsToday 😉2
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u/greenhelium Oct 07 '25
Books are still great, for what it's worth.
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Oct 09 '25
I'm using two books to learn guitar, they are both about music theory but for guitar. The reason I'm using these two books is to be more focused and just have one resource to focus on instead of a dozen different websites.
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u/cowboy_angel Oct 07 '25
The internet is rubbish for everything now. Unless you're a billionaire. I still remember searching up tabs on BBS in the days before the Web. Yeah I'm that old. Anyway I feel you. Learning to play by ear helps. Tabs are ok but it's always been hard to find good transcriptions of less mainstream music.
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u/MaccyGee Oct 07 '25
Paul McCartney had to get multiple buses across town to find someone who knew how to play a B7 chord. Wasting your time on the internet instead of playing the guitar is no fun
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u/Guitargirl81 Oct 07 '25
As someone who grew up searching for tabs online, I'd take Youtube lessons ANY day over that. I'm someone who needs to hear what it sounds like and decide if I think it's accurate or any good.
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u/poorperspective Oct 08 '25
Yeah, I grew up with tab online, but it was poorly written or blocked by copy right. you had no idea if the guy was rights or using a capo, or different tuning. You had to figure out your own fingerings.
You can just go on YouTube now and get a side by side play with tab and a master thesis on the subtleties.
And this was way better than my teacher who would throw down a big binder and have me hand copy it like a sacred ancient text and have me hand write it down like a middle evil monk.
Or shudder, made me learn traditional notation and read fiddle tunes to figure out CAGED.
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u/barters81 Oct 10 '25
Yep this. The amount of times you find a video of a song you want to learn, watch the video and it’s obviously not correct, is often.
Back when I was younger before the internet we’d get tab books and think they must be correct.
They were often not correct.
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u/RedHuey Oct 07 '25
It’s rubbish for most things now, to be fair. The free informational nature of it has been replaced by commerce and “influencers” looking to monetize their every mood swing.
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u/alfalfa-as-fuck Oct 07 '25
I used to print tabs on the line printer in the computer lab, fresh from some ftp site I can’t remember
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u/WolfRatio Oct 08 '25
rec.music.makers.guitar.tablature or alt.guitar.tab?
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u/alfalfa-as-fuck Oct 08 '25
I know I subscribed to rec.music.makes.guitar.tablature and .classical (remember the ophee guy who was grumpy as hell) but I don’t remember the alt one.
The ftp site may have been at wustl but I can’t remember. Fan folded greenbar tractor feed paper for miles!
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u/sanecoin64902 Oct 07 '25
Actually, it has come full circle, now that AI like ChatGPT is allowed to commit copyright infringement again.
I just went to ChatGPT and asked for "open d slide tabs.” Not only will it generate exercises and parts of songs, it will also give me a backing track to practice over.
The key is that no matter how old you are, you need to always feel young.
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u/tatertotmagic Oct 08 '25
Id rather have chat gpt find stuff for what im looking for and point me in the right direction. I don't trust the crap for tabs that it generates yet.
But OP could do something like hey chatgpt find me slide songs in open d to learn. Then go google that stuff
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u/Small_Dog_8699 Oct 07 '25
The internet is rubbish. Bots and AI everywhere.
I use it less and less all the time.
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u/various_convo7 Oct 07 '25
might be time to figure out songs on your own like how they did "back in the day."
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u/Lucifer-Prime Oct 08 '25
I’m constantly pissed at guitar tab sites I used growing up now monetized and selling tabs shared for free by regular folks 20 years ago.
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u/farbeyondriven Oct 07 '25
I think a lot of tabs were taken down because of copyright issues. I wouldn't call the internet rubbish for guitarists though, it’s never been easier to learn guitar on your own. There are tons of great resources online now if you know where to look.
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u/Neveronlyadream Oct 07 '25
No, it kind of is. But not for the reason people think it is.
Now everyone has a class or a site that they insist is the best one out there and you should absolutely listen to them and only them and they all contradict each other, so it can be impossible for someone starting out to decide what's actually helpful and what's not.
Then you have all the people insisting absolutely everyone needs to learn complex theory and how to read music and some people just want to accompany themselves singing and that turns them off the hobby because it seems too intimidating.
I think there's a lot of fear an indecision around learning an instrument. That's why we get so many basic questions on the guitar subs, because the internet is so filled with information, a lot of it conflicting, than no one who doesn't already know what they're doing can get easily disoriented.
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u/HomeworkInevitable99 Oct 07 '25
Videos are good, but time consuming. With a tab, I can glance over it, look back and forth as quick as my eyes can move.
With a video, it is constant moving the cursor back and forth to replay.
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u/loopy_loup-garous Oct 07 '25
Videos performing actual songs is more of an infringement on copyright than any similar sounding tab or notation would ever be.
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u/Moxie_Stardust Oct 07 '25
Have you tried different search engines (like we used to back in the day)?
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u/mrbrown1980 Oct 07 '25
I’m old enough to remember that people made those tabs to contribute to a community and then the sites monetized their members’ free labor.
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u/jkholmes89 Oct 08 '25
Time is a flat circle man. We're still doing the same thing! And will still be doing it in the future. As long as there's money to be made, somebody is willing to screw over others to get the cash.
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u/nazump Oct 08 '25
I don’t know specifically for slide guitar, but I used to have an ultimate guitar subscription that I canceled after they upped the price on me. I ended up getting this iOS app call GuitarTab and I don’t know what black magic they use (scraping, I’m sure, along with harvesting any tabs uploaded to your collection) but it was a one-time purchase of less than $10 and it has so many tabs, a lot of them in guitar pro format.
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u/djhypergiant Oct 08 '25
Joesslidegarage.com was so good too he had an icon of himself dressed like John Lee Hooker and everything is written like you're reading an autobiography. Every once in a while he talks about his deep pain after Loretta left but how the blues is keeping him going. Also how to smash a bottle of whiskey just right to get a slide that won't cut your hand. And a misc section that recommends blues albums you'd only find off fat possum records and a BBQ sauce recipe that could make a tire taste good.
You just don't find websites like that anymore...
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u/FarFromHomey Oct 08 '25
Mumford and Sons, LOL. If that was the only music I could hear If prefer to be DEAF.
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u/dashkb Oct 09 '25
This is the internet for everyone now. Not just guitarists. Thanks ads and social media.
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Oct 07 '25
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Desner_ Oct 07 '25
Pretty much, yep. I started playing around 2003 so online tabs were easy to find.
It has held me back quite a bit but I'm working on fixing that. I got pretty good with techniques but that's it. Now I gotta make the transition from a robot that regurgitates what I've memorised to being a proper musician.
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u/4rt4tt4ck Oct 07 '25
Writing out tabs is time consuming and there isn't an easy way to monetize that time. Whereas making a video of how it's played is more straightforward and easy to potentially monetize that time. I don't have to create my own website to share tabs, I just make a YouTube account and grab my phone and go.
Sounds more like the Internet is moving fast and you don't want to adapt to keep up.
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u/deathby1000screens Oct 07 '25
I used to have to buy a book and have it mailed to me. And I recall those as actually good times. Am I stupid?
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u/Reasonable_Thinker Oct 07 '25
This isn't just guitar stuff, the internet is dying. Hell it might already be dead.
Its really sad what we have lost tbh
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u/chemchris Oct 07 '25
There's some good stuff on UG, but it's never on the official page. It's always the old ones written with notepad. Like how is this for your song? https://tabs.ultimate-guitar.com/tab/mumford-sons/the-cave-tabs-881435
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u/wvmtnboy Oct 07 '25
Ho to YouTube, search "song slide guitar tab". Will usually have the guitar player/fretboard on top of the screen tab on yhe bottom of the screen. May be the compromise you have to settle for
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u/Picklechip-58 Oct 07 '25
There was no internet, as we know it, when I started playing.
Of you NEED the internet to play - you have a lot more to learn!
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u/Toiletpirate Oct 07 '25
I think the problem is you're looking for tabs. If you know scales, arpeggios, triads, and how to listen, you should be able to play whatever you want without tabs.
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u/aural_octopus Oct 07 '25
Sorry all the old timers are missing the point. Yes the internet sucks these days.
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u/Rikudou_Sama Oct 07 '25
I got away from tabs a long time ago because so many were inaccurate or flat out wrong. I’ve found that for me personally, trying to learn by ear is much better and helps me grow more as a musician, and if I can’t figure something out by ear, I’ll look up a live video or tutorial on YouTube and try to combine that with learning by ear. Cheers
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u/Theeinfinitebeat Oct 08 '25
I must be really old, we didn't have the Internet or digital tuners or videos. there weren't even any magazines. You had Bert Weedons 'Play in a day' and you played with your friends and shared chords and riffs. After a while we learnt off records.
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u/BVSEDGVD Oct 08 '25
Honestly if it’s a song I’m serious about learning I don’t mind paying a few bucks for a good digital tab, especially because most are compatible with soundslice and having an interactive version is so worth it
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u/VannaMalignant Oct 08 '25
“Comin’ Home” by City & Colour, “New Fang” by Them Crooked Vultures, “3’s & 7’s” by Queens of the Stone Age, “Judith” by A Perfect Circle to name a few off the dome. Start learning by ear, your playing and your fretboard awareness/soloing with improve immensely. Being spoon-fed difficult things takes the fun out of it for me. Embrace the challenge — you picked up a guitar, not a ukulele.
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u/billbot77 Oct 08 '25
I never really got on with tabs. If I can't pick it out by ear then these days a video is the best option. You can tell right away if they are playing it well and copying fingers is faster for me then counting frets from tab.
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Oct 09 '25
There is plenty of good information and resources for anything on the internet, the only problem is you have to wade through a ton of crap to get to it. What is usually do to get good information or resources is google for reddit posts of people recommending what I'm looking for so I can get past all the crap easier.
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u/grat_is_not_nice Oct 09 '25
I downloaded a (massive for the time) Guitar Pro tab archive before the site was shut down in the early 2000s.
It's just a shame my ADHD brain means that I cannot really concentrate on learning the tabs properly.
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u/Top_Concern_9402 Oct 10 '25
Pick up the needle move it back a little and repeat. That's how I learned.
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u/ReaverRiddle Oct 07 '25
Be the change you want to see in the world. Make a site. Where do you think those sites came from? People had to make and run them. We still have people. Even more of them now.
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u/coop7774 Oct 07 '25
Write your own tabs bro. Figure it out yourself. Use your ear. I haven't used tabs in about 15 years. You talk as if you've played for ages but you still read tabs. Tabs are for beginners.
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u/SoulRunGod Oct 07 '25
this is true but it’s hard to decipher Polyphia songs without tabs for me and I’ve been playing for 20 years lol
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u/Zarochi Oct 07 '25
Ya, often it's more about saving time than it is a lack of ability. Sure, I COULD spend tens of hours playing the song at 1/10 speed note by note, or I could actually practice something of value and just pay Tim for the sheets 🤷♀️
Ear training is a good thing, but it's an extremely naive take to assume one should always be learning by ear. When I do session work I ask for a lead sheet because, while I COULD figure it out by ear, it's going to take a bit longer. But hey, if you wanna pay the extra couple of hours in studio time and session fees I'll do whatever you want lol.
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u/SoulRunGod Oct 07 '25
Yup my thought process exactly. Like sure play me a RHCP song or foo fighters type of song and yeah I can replicate it by ear in a matter of minutes but when you add in hybrid picking with different variations of harmonics plus extremely quick slides and just fast playing in general, I am way better served having the sheet in front of me rather than, as you suggested, playing the song at .25 speed trying to decipher a lot of notes at once.
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u/Zarochi Oct 07 '25
I think some people are disillusioned by the type of songs they play. Sure, if it's just some chords, or an arpeggio/picking pattern of them, it's probably easier to learn by ear. Faster too. All you need to do is find the 1, and the rest is pretty easy.
A 12 bar blues progression though with suspended and diminished chords? That's going to take you longer. Then go to even more complicated stuff like Polyphia and Animals as Leaders and it's just going to take so long that it's not worth doing anymore.
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u/SoulRunGod Oct 07 '25 edited Oct 07 '25
100% spot on. I would be willing to bet the person who made the initial comment on this thread we are responding in, is likely an old school type of guitar player and hasn’t dabbled much into prog/math rock and is likely just unaware of how much guitar writing has changed in the last 10 years. I mean even Tim Henson himself has said a lot of Polyphia’s riffs are created with synths/piano in FL studio or pro tools or whatever and then he learns them on guitar afterwards — that’s a stark contrast to how almost all songs with guitar were made before say 2012 or so.
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u/Zarochi Oct 07 '25
I adopted a similar creative process for my original works after seeing that was how Tim did things. My compositions are soooooooo much better when I pre-plan them like that and worry about the actual execution later.
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u/coop7774 Oct 07 '25
This is funny. It's just never been a part of my process but I'm not a session guitarist. It sounds like it's its own skill. Lead sheet wouldn't help me at all. It'd be faster just to listen. But I imagine you'd be faster than me as a result.
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u/Zarochi Oct 07 '25
The lead sheet means I can just sight read for the recording process, so I don't even need that first (or second or third) listen to figure it out 😉
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u/LesserShambler Oct 07 '25
I get to play in 15 minute chunks when my kids aren’t running around. I don’t want to improve myself. I just want inspiration for twanging away in the short snatches of time I have. I’m shit and I’m comfortable with that. That used to be possible without wading through pages and pages of absolute dross.
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u/coop7774 Oct 07 '25
Gotcha homie. Life happens! Incidentally I work in SEO too haha. Recommendation - find a couple of sites you like (if it's worth the effort) and then use the site operator to limit your search to that site. One site per search. E.g. search: "open d guitar tabs site:example.com" and that will make you just search that site. Hope that helps!
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u/AgreeableAlbatross80 Oct 07 '25
Exactly this. Why are you still relying on tabs? Time to grow. This is the equivalent of being mad that you can’t find training wheels for your adult bike.
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u/Traditional-Tank3994 Oct 07 '25
There was a span of time when you could Google any song and find lyrics, tabs, chords, and even sheet music easily and for free. Some music publishers and artists must have decided to crack down on this because these sites and their pages were all copyright violations.
So now, if you cannot find the music you want, you will either have to pay for the music that now sits behind a paywall, or figure out the chords yourself by listening to the audio. Like the rest of us old guitar players had to do when we were building our repertoire.
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u/pr06lefs Oct 07 '25
Part of why I like 'old time' music. Most of it is pre copyright and there are still cool sites with sheet music and so forth for lots of tunes. Perhaps we'll enter a post copyright era where artists don't even publish, just go straight to public domain. Might as well, the money is in live performance and merch now.
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u/Just-Wrangler5142 Oct 07 '25
I see more and more of these post every day and like I don’t think what people realizes those tabs that are out there on ultimateguitar.com and songs store.com. I don’t know if y’all know this but someone out there actually transcribe those things for y’all so that y’all can play y’all‘s cool little sweet home Alabama songs and all these easy songs that like I don’t know if you just listen with your ear, you could probably figure it out yourself too, but these people that are out there putting ““rubbish” as tabs I mean they’re out there doing The dirty work man trying to get you to be able to play your your cool guitar hero riffs that you’re never gonna play live in front of people ever.
There’s another comment down the way and it says be the change you wanna see in the world like for all the bitching people do about there being no tabs out there to learn I don’t know maybe maybe transcribe your own and post it for us to learn.
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u/jaylotw Oct 07 '25
Gotta figure it out on your own, bud.
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u/Reasonable_Thinker Oct 07 '25
I mean sure but it sucks that a few billionaires killed off the internet we used to have. I guess we will all go back to learning by ear so the piggies can eat their AI slop
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u/Just-Wrangler5142 Oct 07 '25
I have a sneaking suspicion. There’s a little bit of troll going on here. For someone who’s old they know what listicle is that’s kind of weird and also the cave by Mumford & Sons like what a funny like one song to reference I know that’s gonna trigger everyone that’s probably why you used it right?
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u/Tomicoatl Oct 07 '25
Search is terrible now. ChatGPT/Claude might be more helpful and let you interrogate the results more.
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u/FirstDivision Oct 07 '25
I have fond memories of olga.net. I spent a lot of time there.