Ever since I got my first (acoustic) guitar in my early teens, I've primarily strummed or picked away at three tunes I learnt in a guitar course at the Gisborne community centre. Greensleeves, some classical piece played with two fingers on the bottom (physically) three strings and The House of the Rising Sun.
Since then I've added a 12 bar blues riff to my repertoire and have picked up Guitar for dummies and a bunch of other books purporting to teach me how to go further - but at the moment my dreams of rockstardom are sadly unfulfilled.
So I thought I'd try something new - learning songs that I actually like. (Not that I dislike the others but you know what I mean).
Now if you wander about the web (and play guitar), you may be aware that there are sites where other guitar players have patiently sat down with their favourite songs and kind of reverse engineered them, figuring out chords and riffs and such and writing them down in a special notation called tablature.
Tablature is cool because it's music for people who can't read notes. This is what it looks like. (Click to enlarge)
As you can see, it represents the six strings on the guitar and the numbers show you the frets that you need to hold down. So theoretically, if you play according to the tablature, it should sound just like the song.
You can also find songs that just have the chords on these sites, which is closer to where I am but it's nice to know that when I'm ready, I can start learning the riffs as well.
Ok, great right? A community resource for guitarists, people sharing their knowledge and skills to help other people learn new things. No-one is sharing files created by someone else, people are regularly inspired to go out and buy new music so they have something to play along to and they play to more people who are likely to discover music that they haven't heard before (and presumably go out and buy that as well).
Everybody wins and nobody spoils the party.
Well nearly nobody.
In recent years, publishers of sheet music have been flexing their corporate muscle and issuing "take-down letters" under the US DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) to the websites hosting these guitar tabs and chords. One of the most well-known of these, the Online Guitar Archive is still down although they do have a copy of their takedown letter up on the site for your perusal.
Apparently cutting into the sales of sheet music is far more important than having millions of people learn a constructive and creative skill. Let's not get into how accurate the tablature pages are, whether someone has thrown in their own flourishes and particularly how the artists feel about having people learn how to play their songs and buy their music, these are obviously trivialities compared to the needs of the sheet music industry .
Obviously, this isn't the first time that this kind of behaviour has been seen from the music business. I read that with the introduction of radio, manufacturers of piano rolls had a fit about the free distribution of their intellectual property and often banned the stations from playing their artists. This, not surprisingly, didn't last long, as musicians aren't morons.
Fortunately, the internet being what it is, the moment the sheet music publishers shut down one site, ten more spring into it's place, so it's a bit of a non-issue in some ways but it's still interesting to see the depths to which big business needs to control everything, even the music.
(I don't have any particular favourite guitar tab sites, I generally just google whatever I'm looking for but you might like to check this site out - this guy has most impressively put together a list of his 500 favourite guitar riffs, with accompanying YouTube videos and tablatures - http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2278011
