Following music publisher's crackdown on the free Online Guitar Archive's popular repository for guitar tablatures (charts that explain how to play songs), more sites offering officially-licensed, fully-cleared, "legit" tab sites have started popping up.
MusicNotes planned to launch a less comprehensive version of MXTabs back in March, and now Guitar World has packaged the backlog of tabs created for its magazine into a detailed scrolling Flash interface that contains tempo and other information usually missing from tabs. Their new service will also offer user-generated ASCII tabs to songs for which Guitar World has paid the licensing.
Unlike traditional guitar tab sites, which were free to use, Guitar World Tabs
will restrict access in a few ways -- as one would expect, since it pays to post the tabs. You can access whatever user-generated ASCII notations show up on Guitar World for free, as well as a slice ofsongs in Guitar Worlds' more evolved format, which display after youwatch a short ad.
Or, you can pay $0.59 to $0.99 to download selections from GuitarWorlds' library that will play in a Flash player for 30 daysbefore they expire, ad-free.
At the high end of the range, you can pay between $1 and $2.50 forany of the Flash tabs in Guitar World's library. This version can becopied, printed, and shared to some degree. "Guitar World will examinethe feasibility of pay-per-downloadsubscriptions to launch at a later date."
The online guitarist community was stung when the publishers shut down OLGA,
and many are likely to blanche at the idea of paying for guitar tabsonline. But at least this replacement offers a higher-quality product --
for the songs that Guitar World has generated its own tabs for, anyway. But by its copyright-cleared nature, it can never be as comprehensive as the "illegit" sites it's replacing.
