Guitar Tab Sites Shut Down by George Ziemann -- August 14, 2006 Greed must do funny things to your head. It certainly screws with your logic, as music publishers are trying to prove this week by having sites with guitar tabs shut down. Click here to see an example (with take-down letter goodness). In case you don't know, guitar tabs are basically little drawings of the top five frets on a guitar that show you where to put your fingers to play a chord. What the publishers are upset about is that people are using these things to figure out how to play a song without buying the sheet music, preferably in a book with 70 other songs you really don't give a shit about, all for the low price of $29.95. Plus tax and shipping. And you know what? If you're just starting out, it is probably worth it. You might accidentally discover that you like a couple of them. But after the initial beginner's learning curve, there comes a realization that there are only twelve notes (if you count the sharps and flats) and you generally only use seven of them in any one song. Then you might notice that there are a great many songs with exactly the same chord progression. For instance, if you can play the following chords, E, A and B, in that order, congratulations, you now know "Louie, Louie" and about 12,000 other songs. This is apparently supposed to be a secret, like the recipe for Coca-Cola or something, but it's just the old 1-4-5 combination. G-C-D. A-D-E. D-G-A. Now you can play the entire catalog of several prominent acts. You didn't even have to learn F yet. That's good, because when you're just starting out on guitar, F is really hard to do. If you learn a song without buying the sheet music for it, you have somehow stolen from the songwriter, or at least so say the publishers. If you so much as tell someone else how to play it, you're off to copyright prison or something. So let's say they're successful in stopping this piracy, which is robbing them of tens of dollars daily, and erase those pesky unauthorized crib notes from the net. Fewer people know how to play the songs, fewer people hear the song being played, the song is played less often. One day the performance royalty checks stop arriving because no one is playing their songs anymore. After all, isn't that the goal of every songwriter?