If you like to play a little guitar in between reading Make Use Of and surfing the internet then I am sure you’ve often wished for a few free tools to help you learn your guitar playing online. Unfortunately most decent guitar software and tools are either commercial or shareware.
Well luckily there is always a free alternative. This list is short, but provides you with all the essential tools and resources to learn and improve your guitar playing.
Guitar Tabs
Don’t feel bad if you can’t read music notation, 90% of guitarists can’t either regardless of fame or success. Using guitar tabs will provide you with everything you need to know to play any piece of guitar music.
Power Tab Editor
Power Tab Editor is a completely free music notation creator. Tabs can also be played back using MIDI. Not only can you create your own music, but you learn songs by downloading Power Tab files created by other people.
There are a huge number of online tab websites, but in my experience only two are necessary:
A user submission system, tabs are submitted then voted and commented on accordingly.Ultimate Guitar Chords is always my first source for tabs as the quality and quantity here is much greater then any other site.
If I cannot find a song I am looking for here then I will resort to 911 Tabs.
This is a search engine that indexes all available guitar tabs online. The reason that this isn’t my first choice when searching for tabs is that the website can be very slow and frustrating. Although a user rating and reporting system exists it is barely used so a huge proportion of indexed tabs are either dead links, duplicated content or just crap tabs.
As you download a number of tabs then you may start having trouble locating the songs you want on your own computer. Luckily the creators of Power Tab Editor thought of this and have also created Pt Librarian.
Pt Librarian will sit in your taskbar and after scanning your tab files meta data organize your collection much like music library software.
Guitar Scales V2
This is a fantastic application created using Adobe AIR. This application provides you with more scales then you will ever need, tuning options, strings and even number of frets. There isn’t much more I can say about this, its simple, attractive and incredibly useful.
What do you use to practice guitar? Do you have any favourite freeware applications? Let us know in the comments!
(By) Laurence John finds himself way over his head on the Internet. Too many places, too much people. But that’s okay, being a Uni student he already has too much time on his hands. He has begun his blog: Not Waving But Drowning …..
