ASCII Guitar TAB is So Passe: Songsterr
The Constable on August 20th, 2008
If you’ve been following this kind of thing, then it’s no news to you that over the past few years guitar tab websites have been facing a major crackdown by the music publishing industry. Quite a few of these sites shut down, and a few just kind of went silent. Others, like Russia-based Ultimate-Guitar.com ignored the threats and continued with business as usual.
In the meantime, the music industry has made their own attempts to cater this audience, including a drop in prices for downloadable guitar tab at guitarinstructor.com (run by music publishing heavyweights, Hal Leonard Corporation), a new tab community with legal tabs run by Guitar World Magazine, and a relaunch of MXTabs.net by online sheet music and tab retailer, Musicnotes.com.
The thing is, this is the Internet - and progress will continue regardless of lawsuits or morality arguments. This is where Songsterr comes in. Like Ultimate-Guitar.com, Songsterr is also based in Russia (copyright laws be damned), and therefore has pretty much anything a budding guitarist would want to learn.
Unlike traditional free tab sites, which generally have ASCII tab or sometimes Guitar Pro files, Songsterr is a pretty fully-featured flash-based learning application that not only displays tabs for songs, but also plays the tab back with high-quality audio and a location indicator so the guitarist knows where the song currently is in the notation.
With songs ranging from artists such as AC/DC, The Beatles, David Gray and many others, it’s obvious this site is operating out of the “legal” realm here in the United States. But, since it’s in Russia, this is one that will likely not be going away.
What remains to be seen is if they will be opening up the source in any way so that users can submit their own creations, or if it will be limited to song lessons that have been created by the site’s staff. If it’s the latter, it’s going to take quite some time for them to reach a real critical mass that turns them into a go-to destination.
And as for the business plan… hell if I know. Maybe they just love to teach.
ADDENDUM: Wanted to thank techcrunch for pointing this site out to me in the first place.
