It's plucky!

April 27, 2004 4:33 PM

Chordie: Did OLGA leave you in the lurch? Or when she came back, did it just never feel the same? Do text-based song transcriptions make you rub your eyes and stumble over missing lyrics? [after the bridge, there is more inside]
posted by mwhybark (12 comments total)

Chordie is a meta-site that scrapes a wide variety of other music sites for song transcriptions, reformats them for legibility and ease of play (note the handy guitar chard fingering chartas well as the in-song chord placement and typeface), and is under active development. Members can create a songbook, and generate PDFs on the fly for local digital squirrelling.

While the site does not include any flavor of the DigiTrad song base, it does appear to include the ghosts of OLGA past and some of altcountrytab.com, although I couldn't tell if that is the direct source for the material.

What sources do you favor to scrounge your back-porch chanteys from?
posted by mwhybark at 4:34 PM on April 27, 2004

Cool, but it can't compensate for the masses of absolutely crap tabbings that are out there. e-tabs seems to be the best in terms of updates and tab rankings.

I like the chord charts that it puts on the side of the page. It didn't extract all of them, but it's a start.
posted by krunk at 4:47 PM on April 27, 2004

I used to be an altcountrytab.com man, but then they went and changed it. It doesn't have nearly the amount of tabs it did before.

Another cool site, if you're into acoustic fingerstyle, is TabPigs.
posted by eastlakestandard at 4:52 PM on April 27, 2004

Wow. The formatted tabs are *very* nice.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 5:16 PM on April 27, 2004

When I had the time I used to nut the songs out myself. Then I got busy and about that time came that internet thing with its OLGA and I was set... yes there are crapulent tabs out there but they pointed me in the right direction, saving me time. Plus you don't really want to spend time learning the intro to Bon Jovi's Dead or Alive.

I'd forgotten about them- I have thousands of text documents somewhere at home and since my computer is in the shop for a few weeks now might just be the time to make my fingers bleed a bit.

Oh, and the most popular songs are heartening. All the greats- Stairway to Heaven, American Pie, Yesterday, Hotel California, Stand by Me, House of the Rising Sun.

I'm fifteen again!
posted by bdave at 5:22 PM on April 27, 2004

Chordie's not anything I haven't seen before.

I dig guitartabs.cc, and Firefox (click on music and scroll down to "Guitar Tab Universe" for the moz/fox search plugin)
posted by eyeballkid at 5:37 PM on April 27, 2004

I like that it will transpose the songs into the key of your choice. Thanks, all, for the good tab links—I guess I'll have to stop googling and wading through muck and evil javascript when I want some quick chords...
posted by Zurishaddai at 6:10 PM on April 27, 2004

Too many great links to bookmark all at once. Thanks for them all.
posted by etc. at 6:25 PM on April 27, 2004

Chordie's not anything I haven't seen before.

Scratch that. For some reason, when I was trying it out the first time, I wasn't getting the chords on the right side. Now I am, and I'm pretty impressed!
posted by eyeballkid at 6:29 PM on April 27, 2004

Thanks.
posted by signal at 8:38 PM on April 27, 2004

For some reason, when I was trying it out the first time, I wasn't getting the chords on the right side.

Yeah, the formatted version is pretty nice -- but it appears they don't show the right transposition for the chords. That is, sometimes you have to play your E down low, sometimes it needs to be up high, yet I didn't notice a distinction. Also, they're built-in E7 is screwy. You're supposed to drop the middle tone down a step. Maybe it was just the song I picked.

Oh, and the Firefox search plugin is k-rad. Thanks for pointing it out.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 1:04 PM on April 28, 2004

Google is my tab search engine of choice. I tried a couple of test cases on all the links in this thread. Keola Beamer only showed up in Google and e-tabs. The complete Husker Du tabs only showed up in Google -- everyone else had only partial results.
posted by fuzz at 4:25 PM on April 28, 2004