The Best Free Guitar Tools

joshua
Sep 1, 2008
Updated • Aug 3, 2010
Software
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I’m going to go slightly off-topic today and share some of my recent finds with you, I hope some of you will find them helpful!

Guitar Tabs are an incredibly easy way to learn guitar. In fact an incredible number of famous and popular musicians have never used sheet music in their life, either using guitar tablature or playing by ear.

Here are the tools which I have found to be the best for teaching yourself guitar:

 

PowerTab Editor
A given. If you don’t want to shell out for GuitarPro tablature software then this freeware application does the job just fine. Unfortunately it’s abandon-ware although the fact it still remains the best free guitar software over 3 or 4 years after the final version was released says something about its quality. Works fine on Vista.

PowerTab Librarian
A application which organises your tabs based on meta-data, like media players do for music files. A useful resource if the tabs you use have been tagged correctly and are in the PowerTab file format.

 

Ultimate Guitar
911 Tabs provides a far more comprehensive database of tabs scoured from the entire Internet, yet inevitably 80% of these are crap and Ultimate Guitar Tabs generally provides the best guitar tablature on the Internet. Also has a lot of other great resources such as news, tutorials, music reviews and forums.

TabPlayer
If you were already familiar with PowerTab (and I’m sure you where) then perhaps you’d be interested in trying out TabPlayer. It looks like a great application and its still under development. TabPlayer is for .txt tab files which make up the majority of online tabs. You can “view, write, edit, print, search for and even play” your tab files.

 

Songsterr
An online tablature player, it can be handy but I generally prefer to work on my desktop offline. Sometimes its great just to load up and have browse through as it’s a really simple way to find some new songs to play.

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Comments

  1. lowongan kerja dan karir said on July 8, 2011 at 11:43 pm
    Reply

    Thank you for writing this informative article. You have made sense of this topic with your original and quality content. It’s smart, engaging and interesting. Articles like this are genuinely appreciated by people like me.

  2. Joshua said on September 2, 2008 at 8:38 am
    Reply

    Pablo… it’s not old.. I posted it yesterday! Haha yeah I did have a look at tux guitar, but unfortunetly atm it doesn’t do anything Powertab or TabPlay dont already do better.

    Angelo, hah, I wouldn’t say ‘playing’ is the right term for what i do. =P Just gotta get myself motivated. Yea, UG is definetly the best guitar place to go!

  3. Angelo R. said on September 2, 2008 at 5:16 am
    Reply

    Wow, I never knew that you played the guitar Joshua.. thats pretty awesome. I’ve been an avid guitar player myself for a few years now. As for tab’s Ultimate Guitar is by far my favourite site. While on linux I don’t use a desktop tab program, so I used the text-based guitar tabs at UG. When in windows I use proprietary software called Guitar Pro.

    @Pablo – tuxguitar is linux only isn’t it?

  4. Pablo said on September 1, 2008 at 5:09 pm
    Reply

    Hi joshua.
    I know this is an old post, but I just read it :)
    You can also try this software
    http://www.tuxguitar.com.ar/
    Cheers.
    P.

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