Examples

I would like to give you 500,000 tabs like those other sites do, but sorry, I have no budget for a legal staff or deal makers to fend off the MPA and their copyright police. There is no revenue to share. I may step on some toes anyway, it’s pretty much impossible not to, contact me if anything here isn’t OK or needs better credit to the creators. This is all my original work or an interpretation that I believe is fair use. Now let’s PLAY!

The links on this page are  complete copies of the app with the example tabs. You can play these on the web or download to use them offline but, they are 2MB each and may not be the latest version of the app (bugs!). So if you want them, it’s better to use their menus to Save the ColorTab text files, then Open those in the current version of the app. You can edit them before or after you do that if you choose. Remember that you can copy and paste any portion of these if there is a section you can use. Paste things in the Scratch Pad to save them as text files.

Tab is not great for chords, but it works and is useful. These chords are found in the Chord Master book I bought. A good reference, Rikky Rooksby gives lots of insight as well as many more advanced chords than these. I’ve been playing for decades and some of these “beginner” forms were new to me. It’s nice to hear them play and again, you can copy and paste them into your own songs.

Rick Beato probably needs no introduction here. With his millions of YouTube subscribers he is an inspiration to many guitar players. I’ve “borrowed” his composition here, hope he doesn’t mind. I bought his pdf’s from the Instagram posts he does and transcribed this one to ColorTab. Change the sound font from Offline to Musyng Kite Overdriven Guitar if you like that.

Ah, music in the Public Domain with a Creative Commons copyright waiver  viewed in free Open Source MuseScore with a Download button. Wouldn’t it be nice if this wasn’t so rare? This is the source for my downstem duration blog post example, just a fragment, I’ll transcribe the whole thing someday. turn off the metronome if it bugs you. Yeah Jethro Tull and many others used this.

Here’s another tune from the public domain. This is in 6/8 time and has dotted quarter down stems to give duration to the low notes while keeping separate timing for the melody. Notice how text such as chord names can be included inline for a compact result.

Here’s Dust in the Wind, with finger picking to learn and lyrics too. On YouTube too.

There is some debate about whether tab is a good way to learn. Like most anything, the answer is maybe. I prefer to use my ears, but sometimes the crowd can give you knowledge that helps. This next example shows some of the pitfalls and has something your ears would not tell you. This page on Ultimate Guitar has the tabs, six different interpretations with the correct answer in the comments (scroll down!).

Don’t miss this example from the videos, with capo tuning, time signature and tempo changes.  https://tinyurl.com/yyjx4hj8