[Y_Y]

Against my better judgement I actually logged in with Spotify, only to find that it just didn't work. I'm not really sure what I was expecting anyway.

There used to be a great trade in guitar chords online, but then lots of small sites got taken down and ultimategyitar tried to put a big shitty paywall around years and years of high quality content made by volunteers and often scraped from other sites.

[saevarom]

I actually run a guitar chord website, www.guitarparty.com, that provides chords for songs, but also some additional functionality such as PDF books, transposing songs etc for subscribers. But the content is free although you have to tolerate a few Google ads. We're mostly local to Iceland but there are always some users and subscribers from around the world.

We once attempted to go the legal route globally and make a deal with Harry Fox Agency (the agency that took down OLGA), we had a contract ready but it would have been quite expensive and risky for us. That being said, we pay royalties to our local copyright agency based on usage.

[fenderbluesjr]

Does your site or any other allow a user to click notes on a fretboard and have the app deduce the chord from the positions? I know a lot of chords the names of which I have forgotten, and don't have the theory chops to work it out myself

[cyberbanjo]

Heres one https://jguitar.com/chordname

[Y_Y]

Amazing!

  Search for finger pattern = {5 4 3 4 1 1}: 16 results found.
  A+add9add#9  A Augmented Add 9th Add Sharp 9th
  C#+7add7/A  C#/A Augmented 7th Add Major 7th
  F5addb5addb11addb13/A  F/A 5th Add Flat 5th Add Flat 11th Add Flat 13th
  ...

[rodw]

I can't quite figure out if your response is meant to be sarcastic or not - i.e., if you're "amazed" at the completeness here or maybe mocking the specialized/exotic chords it came up with in this case.

I apologize if this is obvious or well known to you, but for anyone not already familiar with it recognize that much like (and not wholly independent of) musical scales, chords are essentially defined by a predictable "formula".

E.g., every major chord is described by interval pattern 0-4-7: starting at any note, take the root, major-third (4 semi-tones above the root) and perfect-fifth (7 semi-tones above the root) and you have the major chord. For the root note C that yields C-E-G.

Rotate that pattern so that the root note is pitched above the major-third and perfect-fifth (e.g. something like 4-7-12) and you have an "inversion" of the major chord. For the root note C that's E-G-C (known as "C/E") or G-C-E (known as C/G).

Based on these interval patterns it's not hard to generate an exhaustive list of chord "families" (with members like "Major" or "Dom13Aug5" or whatever) - there are at most 4096 (=2**12) of these interval patterns in a single octave, and many of those are relatively uninteresting due to symmetry, degenerate cases or just plain dissonance. (To be fair many common chords span more than one octave.)

A given collection of notes (fret/string combos on a 6-string guitar for example) is usually going to map to some variation of one of those interval patterns, possibly with a stray interval added, dropped or repeated. (E.g., the typical X32010 fingering of C Major on guitar corresponds to C-E-G-C-E rather that "simply" C-E-G.)

So it might seem like mapping an arbitrary fingering to the corresponding chord name requires a lot of information, but it's just matching notes (or pitch classes) to a moderately small number of named interval patterns.

And it might seem like "F5addb5addb11addb13/A" is a ridiculously over-specified chord name, but that's a function of applying a set of conventional "modifiers" to a simpler/better-known/more-common chord. (In this case, `F5addb5addb11addb13` = `F5 + add(b5) + add(b11) + add(b13)`, i.e., F5 (F + C) with a diminished-5th (C), diminished-11th (B) and diminished-13th (C#) added.) You could argue that the pattern matching is trying too hard in this case, but if you're dedicated to assigning a "conventional" chord name to an arbitrary collection of notes, there's algorithmic way to do that.

Again, apologies if this is obvious to you (user Y_Y), I just thought I'd try to de-mystify it a bit for anyone to whom this seems like alchemy.

Music theory has a bunch of semi-arbitrary naming conventions that make it sound really complicated to the uninitiated, but in the abstract the chord names are basically just bit-masks that specify interval offsets from a given root note.

[Y_Y]

Haha yes, I was being intentionally silly. Thanks for the very nice explanation though, I find that it can be really difficult to explain these things to non-musicians and I like the way you've done it.

(By the way, I also deliberately chose something that should be excruciatingly difficult to actually play on a normal guitar.)

[GrantSolar]

I use oolimo (https://www.oolimo.com/guitarchords/analyze) for this as it gives you the notes, intervals, and chord names on the fly with easy inversions

[boringg]

Seriously ultimate guitar just effed over so many people who put time and effort into spreading guitar chords.

That and their site is covered in so much ad content.

[tokamak-teapot]

I have contributed many tabs to guitar archives over the years. Some are available via Ultimate Guitar.

How am I being ‘effed over’? I might be, but I haven’t spotted how.

[olivermarks]

It's classic tragedy of the commons - most of ultimateguitar and other sites have just scraped 'content' off the good old spirit of the early web all the way back to newsgroups then put a paywall and ads all over it.

still beats pre internet though when you'd buy an expensive book of sheet music with first position camp fire chord diagrams and a piano arrangement written out by someone who appeared to have little feel for the actual recorded music.

Without inversions, suspended chords, added base notes etc most chord naming isn't much use, tabbed out diagrams for guitar and keyboard are really helpful along with all the wonderful youtube content from jamesjames, late night lessons etc

[scarecrowbob]

I learned to play guitar back in the 90s when the OLGA was still a thing.

UG sucks for precisely the reasons you mention.

I suppose the trade-off is that now all the great folks who were making nice tab content are on YT, but still, if you'r business model is making money off aggregating a bunch of content people created in the early 00s because the love of it, then that's hyper lame.

I still use UG if I am in a hurry and want a quick idea of other folks' take on the structure of a song, but I'm thankful I outgrew the need for other folks' transcriptions.

[phasersout]

I disagree.. I learned guitar in the late 80s and getting tabs back then meant to get on the train, drive an hour into the city pay like 20 to 30 bucks for - one album worth of tabs - lets say "Appetite for Destruction" and drive home another hour... and then a lot of this "official tabs" were complete rubbish...

So Ultimate Guitar is a steal really. I got a lifetime subscription a couple of years ago but I would also sign up for a monthly plan gladly.

[soylentcola]

Heh...a guy I knew in college got a meeting with admin when he thought it would be cool to host an OLGA mirror on his university web storage around 1995 or 1996.

[rtsil]

OLGA was the Eldorado for my teen self. Its demise was a disaster.

I still have a full copy of its archives somewhere collecting dust in my old hard drives.

[heuermh]

I do too, let me know if you know/think of a good place to host these. UG must be one of the most user hostile resources I've ever attempted to use.

[vitorbaptistaa]

As an alternative, I use cifraclub.com.br for many years, and enjoy the interface and the overall quality of the chords (not affiliated with them).

It's not in English, but you should be able to figure out where's the search bar and use it without much effort.

[dsizzle]

One of my first tastes of the web was finding tabs on ftp servers!

[jamespwilliams]

If anyone knows of a free and open-source guitar tab sharing site, I'd be interested.

I wrote some tabs recently and ended up just putting them on my personal website. Hopefully people will search via Google and find them.

[rodw]

I don't know of any "open-source" tab sharing sites (i.e., sites specifically dedicated to CC or other permissively-/share-alike-licensed transcriptions) but for what it's worth there are a large number of "free" (as in beer) guitar tab repositories, or at least a large number of places that include freely-available, user-contributed content within a broader freemium or ad-supported service.

Beyond the usual web-based suspects (some of which have been named elsewhere in this thread) there are also a number of other tab sharing "communities", including some relevant subreddits that might be the easiest way to spread the word if you're not comfortable uploading to a more directly for-profit service (not that Reddit isn't for-profit too, but guitar tabs certainly aren't their business model and you'd largely be linking to files stored elsewhere rather than uploading them directly).

But a lot of people seem to do what you did also. I suspect it's not super-effective as a distribution model, but if you dig a little it's not hard to find smaller/specialized tab collections on personal websites or general-purpose file hosting services like Google Drive/Dropbox or even at places like Github.

I don't think Google's `filetype:` operator respects guitar-tab-related extensions like `gpx` or `gp5` or `tab` or whatever but using the `inurl:` operator (or just including the tab-specific file extension) combined with the song title or artist name is a good way to find some of these less-centrally located tabs.

Also there are several massive collections available via torrent and on some of those more gray-hat-ish anonymous/one-off file-sharing services. Arguably these may have a more questionable provenance but I suspect the plurality if not the majority of the guitar tabs you'll find shared anywhere online could be traced back to old-school usenet or the first generation of tab-sharing websites that grew out those communities. Ultimate-Guitar for example self-reports as having "chords and tabs to over 1,100,000 songs", and likes to highlight their "official" (licensed) transcriptions (and to be fair they are nothing to sneeze at), but it's probably no coincidence that they don't seem to report the ratio of "official" to "community-provided" transcriptions.

EDIT: Just out of curiosity I checked the file-count reported at the bottom of UG's search page when filtered by file type, I see:

* 18,688 "official" tabs (AFAIK these are the only actually licensed transcriptions)

* 212,408 "Guitar Pro" (.gpx/.gp5/.gp4/.gp3) files; user-generated and many of which probably weren't originally uploaded to UG

* 1,115,129 plain-text transcriptions (801,597 "chords", 313,532 "tabs") that almost certainly date back to Usenet-era communities

The ~20K of licensed/official transcriptions are impressive (both individually and collectively) but represents less than 2% of the overall song catalog (and much less than 2% by file count).

[Y_Y]

I don't know if it's the case any more, but I found that in the past many of the "official" tabs were actually just the highest rated Guitar Pro tab converted to use the web player and dressed up to look fancy. With a little bit of effort you could get the same result just by looking for the highest-rated gp5 and using that locally.

[jaywalk]

Looking at the JavaScript of the site, it looks like all it does it scrape the search results from ultimate-guitar.com for the songs in your playlist.