27 lipca 2006
Great, Now I'll Never Know Those Chords for "Venus in Furs."
Those of us that are not that good at playing guitar like to poke around on the various guitar tablature sites to pick up some ideas about how to play, or fake, some of our favorite songs.
The quality of some of these "tabs" is questionable, heck, calling some them tablature can even be questionable too. Tab sites are also notorious for being larded up with pop-ups, even viruses and spyware.
So, you find a couple of decent tab sites, you stick with them.
Over the past few months, the Music Publishers Association has threatened legal action against some of the better known tab sites. They probably have a point. Take My Song Book, the site with the most comprehensive tablature (mostly because they are actually recognizeable as tablature by your guitar teacher). My Song Book's tabs are actually files in a program called Guitar Pro, which allows a user to not only read the tablatures, but translates into a regular musical staff, and will even play the song. Yeah, this one probably crosses a few legal lines.
Other tab sites, such as Guitar Tab Universe and OLGA, have user generated text files that are for the most part incomplete and at best only give clues as to how the song actually gets played. I wouldn't be entirely happy if I worked hard on a song and some numby posted the chords on the internet a few hours after I released the album. However, given how derivative so much of our music is ("Without the internet, I never would have guessed a I-IV-V7 progression!"), it seems a bit disingenuous for publishers to accuse a music geek of creative theft.
The arguments of the sites are that they are just like a guitar teacher who tabs out a song for a student. They are even trying to drum up grass roots support for their cause. The fact that they are essentially "publishing" though is the big difference for the MPA's lawyers. Unless, maybe, the MPA will go after the teachers too...
Hasta la proxima. Do zobaczenia.
The quality of some of these "tabs" is questionable, heck, calling some them tablature can even be questionable too. Tab sites are also notorious for being larded up with pop-ups, even viruses and spyware.
So, you find a couple of decent tab sites, you stick with them.
Over the past few months, the Music Publishers Association has threatened legal action against some of the better known tab sites. They probably have a point. Take My Song Book, the site with the most comprehensive tablature (mostly because they are actually recognizeable as tablature by your guitar teacher). My Song Book's tabs are actually files in a program called Guitar Pro, which allows a user to not only read the tablatures, but translates into a regular musical staff, and will even play the song. Yeah, this one probably crosses a few legal lines.
Other tab sites, such as Guitar Tab Universe and OLGA, have user generated text files that are for the most part incomplete and at best only give clues as to how the song actually gets played. I wouldn't be entirely happy if I worked hard on a song and some numby posted the chords on the internet a few hours after I released the album. However, given how derivative so much of our music is ("Without the internet, I never would have guessed a I-IV-V7 progression!"), it seems a bit disingenuous for publishers to accuse a music geek of creative theft.
The arguments of the sites are that they are just like a guitar teacher who tabs out a song for a student. They are even trying to drum up grass roots support for their cause. The fact that they are essentially "publishing" though is the big difference for the MPA's lawyers. Unless, maybe, the MPA will go after the teachers too...
Hasta la proxima. Do zobaczenia.
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