Want to learn how to play the guitar or bass but you are terrified of sheet music? The good news is that you don't need to read sheet music to start your lessons. The frets on your stringed instruments guide where to place your fingers.

Before the internet, you'd only had your ear or the official sheet music at your disposal. Fortunately, there are now several excellent guitar tabs and bass tab sites that hold the key to thousands of songs.

1. Ultimate Guitar

Ultimate Guitar is one of the most comprehensive guitar resources available today. Alongside guitar tabs, there are sections for news, reviews, and lessons. There's also a thriving community accessible on Ultimate Guitar's forum.

The site has been operational since 1998 and has since amassed 10 million registered users and 1.1 million guitar and bass tabs. Frequently updated charts like Fresh Tabs and Top 100 make it easy to find something new to play if you are looking for inspiration. Alongside tabs, the site offers a large selection of guitar chords as well, placing it among the best websites to find guitar chords for songs.

Importantly, unlike some guitar tab sites, all tabs are officially licensed. In the past, musicians could sell their own tab books or sheet music. These days, the content is freely available online, potentially depriving artists of income.

By licensing the tabs, Ultimate Guitar supports your favorite musicians. This setup does mean that, occasionally, you won't be able to find a tab that you're after. However, the company has also released an Android app, so you can conveniently access tabs on your smartphone.

Also, should you want some extra support and guidance, Ultimate Guitar Pro offers an interactive way to use guitar and bass tabs. The service allows you to play along with a synthesized version of the track, and you learn to read music by toggling between tabs and sheet music.

2. 911Tabs

911Tabs has existed since 2004 and is now an essential destination for guitarists and bassists around the world. However, unlike Ultimate Guitar, 911Tabs doesn't host tabs itself, thereby excluding themselves from copyright licensing and disputes.

Instead, the site is a meta-search engine---a search provider that aggregates results from other sources. The creators of the website even refer to it as "like Google, but smaller and more accurate" for tabs only.

The minimal home page is comprised of a single search box. Enter your favorite artist or song into the search bar, and 911Tabs will return a comprehensive list of every tab available online. There is even a "Users who played this also played..." suggestion box to the right of the results page.

You can also rate the tabs you access, which helps the most accurate tabs appear prominently in the search results. As it's a gateway to other websites, 911Tabs doesn't actually host the tabs.

When you select your chosen tab, the host website loads inside 911Tabs, so their banner and menu are still accessible for further searches. To date, 911Tabs has indexed over four million tabs, so you will surely find what you were looking for.

3. Jellynote

Many of the best guitar tab sites use text-based tabs to help you play along with your chosen track. Jellynote is different. The site launched in 2015. Since then, the French company designed the site to be more interactive than standard guitar tab websites.

So you won't find any text-based tabs. Instead, the entire site is based around a service that's not dissimilar to Ultimate Guitar Pro. Search for a song, and Jellynote will load a set of augmented sheet music. These come with MIDI instrumentation, so you can hear how the music should sound.

The company has also developed apps for Android and iOS. However, to support these features, most content on Jellynote is not free. Each song comes with a time-limited free sample, but to get full access to the library of songs, you'll need to take out a $7.99 per month subscription. If you prefer to use your smartphone, consider one of the best free apps to help you learn to play the guitar as well.

Plus, you can adjust the tempo, allowing you to learn at your own pace. If there's a section you want to conquer, you can even loop specific timeframes. If a song includes more than one instrument, you can view these all on a single page, and then mute those you don't need. There's also an option to toggle between sheet music and guitar tablature.

4. Songsterr

If you're after free guitar tabs that are more interactive, then check out Songsterr. The site takes some of the best elements from the premium offerings above while keeping the simplicity of standard guitar tabs, so there are no barriers to using the service.

The website is clean, uncluttered, and modern so that you can focus on the task at hand without distractions. Your chosen song's MIDI recreations are based on the site's library of more than 500,000 free to access guitar tabs.

Interestingly, instead of hosting multiple versions of the same song, Songsterr allows users to edit the tab if they spot an error or improvement. In this sense, Songsterr is the Wikipedia of tab websites. Despite this setup, the company still has to obtain licenses to display each tab.

Consequently, the site offers a premium subscription service called Songsterr Plus. The paid plan takes are of artist royalties so that the tabs don't infringe copyrights. For $9.90 per month, you can access all tabs, use the Songsterr Android and iOS apps, remove ads, and adjust the interactive elements.

5. YouTube

Although YouTube is one of the world's most popular video streaming sites, it's also home to a wide range of educational and instructional content. As a result, it is an excellent resource for finding free guitar tabs and bass tabs. Channels like Tab Sheet Music have a wide selection of tabs, ranging from popular music to video game and movie soundtracks.

Producing a video is more time consuming than transcribing a tab, so you won't be able to find everything on YouTube. However, it's a great place to practice your skills, especially for some of the most popular songs.

Also, you can watch another guitarist perform the song while also playing along to the tab. YouTube also allows you to control the playback speed of each video. So, if you need a little more time to catch a crucial detail, you can slow down or pause the video.

The Best Guitar Tab Sites

Tabs are perfect when you start playing the guitar or learn bass. They don't require in-depth knowledge of sheet music or music theory, and the numbers directly correlate with the frets on your instrument. For this reason, they are sometimes referred to as a beginner's tool.

However, you don't need to leave tabs behind. Many of your favorite artists aren't proficient in music theory either, preferring to play based on feeling and a general understanding of their instrument instead.

That said, if you want some experience of the fundamentals, check out the best sites to learn the basics of music theory.