Online Guitar Tablature

If you're one of those people of a certain age who began learning to play the guitar as a young teenager back in the early eighties, and relied on listening to records (yes, the vinyl kind) and very bad, unintelligible (and highly expensive) musical notation books, the emergence of sites like: http://www.ultimate-guitar.com/ were the Stairway to Heaven and the Highway to Hell for apprentice and advanced Riffmeisters young and old.
(Sorry, couldn't resist the pun and the melodrama. God bless you Tommy Vance, may you rock in peace - RIP).

But to be a trifle more serious for a minute, I remember that I would have killed for a free tab transcription of Schools out by Alice Cooper, the opening bluesy riff to You Shook me all night long, the fiddly folky bits in Led Zep, those strange minor 7th chords that inhabit the more psychadelic ramblings of Pink Floyd and the Beatles.

Yeah, sure, you can work them out yourself, if you've got loads of time and something called a musical ear, unfortunately I didn't. My 'transcriptions' sounded similiar but there was always something missing: a little note, bridging chord, a hammer-on, an open string not left ringing...concentration, talent, intelligence...

I used to spend vast amounts of money on The Beatles Complete, The Rolling Stones Anthology, and end up with telephone book thick doorstoppers full of chord box ridden spreadsheets where, even when I followed the instruction exactly, I realised the transposers were as bad as me - imagine Julian loyd-Webber 'interpreting' Voodoo Chile?

Now I can get 30 plus transcriptions of one song, specialized transcriptions of the opening riff, the solo, acoustic interpretations, and all will be rated for accuracy and interest - and its all for free!

Its a beautiful example of sharing your creativity and passion for an instrument and giving it to others for free: putting it out there in the world and saying, "Here you are, see what you can do with this?"

I'm still working on the fiddly bits in this one though: