When it comes to creating my tabs I take great pride in making sure they’re right and that they’re as playable and readable as possible. The analysis and the deep-dive are nerdy catnip for me.

Every tab I create, I try to be as accurate to what was played on the record as possible but sometimes the production on the record makes that super hard or even impossible. In those circumstances I have to take an educated guess or apply a “what I might do” approach or simply mirror what I can hear in the rhythm guitar parts.

Where it’s possible to get hold of the original isolated studio track, believe me, I will be using that! Fortunately, in recent times, a treasure trove of them have appeared online.

This is great for me in terms of transcribing but it’s much more than that; as musicians we can become obsessed with a player and their techniques and tricks and these isolated tracks really allow us to appreciate exactly what they did in the studio that day to get that incredible moment.

Putting the right notes in the right places is of vital importance in terms of making a tab playable.

A lot of the online tabs are written by Guitarists, many of whom may be superb on their first instrument but, since they're kind of tabbing the bass out "as a favour", and even if the notes are right, their sense of position and fretting hand transit is often completely un-usable.

Indeed, many of the classic Tab books of old (and many modern tab books and official sheets) are transcribed by guitarists or keyboard players and not wishing to besmirch our musical friends and family, they're often, much like the online versions, not positionally right (and sometimes they're even completely unplayable!)

It does makes sense that keyboard players transcribe a lot; they generally have a more thorough and deeper knowledge of music theory than guitarists and bass players and that allows them to quickly hear the notes, keys, chords, modes, rhythms etc in a piece and get it written down to tight deadlines.

But knowing the notes is half the battle.

If you’ve got all the right notes but you’re marked them down in frankly impossible or contextually implausible places on the Tab then they’re kind of useless to the musicians who want to use them... This is why I take great pains to ensure that you can physically play what's on the page and what you hear.

In a perfect world I'll be transcribing off the master track or Stem. There are quite a lot of these available on the internet these days (thank you YouTube/Guitar Hero) but there are other ways to drill down to the basslines.

I use a couple of different AI tools to "rip" the basslines from recordings. One is very powerful but a blunt instrument and the other has a suite of tools and settings that you can use to improve or play with the end result.

Once I have the isolated bassline I use the SoundStudio app to slow down (without pitchshifting) the track, to chop it into sections and further drill down into specific Riffs. The app also has some very good EQ and noise reduction tools built in that can help to clean things up.

In support of what I can hear I will try to find video on YouTube (or wherever it's available) of the artist playing the song to see if I can eyeball what the bass player is doing with their hands. Sometimes there's no good footage of the original player but there's something that shows a replacement player playing it so I will use that to inform positions, fretting as well as up/downstroking if it's clear enough.

I transcribe in GuitarPro 8 and export to .pdf; once I have the finished file as a .pdf I import it into Affinity Publisher where I combine it with a couple of topsheets (artwork, title card, clickable table of contents) and then append the lyrics to the file. Saving it all as a watermarked and flattened .pdf, I zip the file and make it available. 👍🏽

This is the hard part. Music publishing is a labyrinth of rights holders inside other rights holders and so on and so on down into the dark and murky depths of ancient musical history.

I wanted to create these Tabs and make them availabe for sale as downloads and print on demand but, even after aquiring a list of rightsholders to chase up, it's almost impossible to get any traction in that regard.

They simply have no interest in interacting or working with anyone who's not some kind of major player. They don't even ansewer emails or pick up the phone.

Like you, I love music, I love the Artists whose work has enriched my life and yours and beyond buying their work and seeing them live I wanted a way to celebrate them and give back to them, one musician to another.

To that end, I've decided to make these Tabs available to you for free for PURELY EDUCATIONAL & RESEARCH PURPOSES.

You can donate however much you feel you can or want to and all money received will be put towards the ongoing running costs of this site. For more information, visit the donations page. There's no obligation to give but if you do, someone somewhere will get a hug from a puppy. Really...

In the meantime, may the riff be with you, always.

Here are the latest Artists added to the collection; happy jamming!