Hello!
I’m wondering if things have changed. I started learning guitar in 2010 or so, and back then at school we all had Guitar Pro or something similar and we used to learn by listening to the track and to the guitar pro tab in turns.
I’ve been seeing a lot of videos about computer virtual amps recently and realised the world of guitar has changed and I’ve been disconnected from it for a long time. Is the tab/guitar pro method still the popular one? How do you learn?
Since then, I’ve moved on to 100% by ear because there were no tabs for my artists anyway. But I’m just wondering what the world of guitar learning is like now?
In my day I went to Guitar Center and purchased the tab book. They were official publications and usually distributed for each album. They were magazine-sized, heavier weight pages, nicely printed and organized, and included the lyrics alongside the tabs which was great. Then I’d go home and hit play with the guitar in my hands.
It was the 90s, so it’s not like I didn’t have Google for searching. Those would give you random sites with ASCII text tabs and did the job as well.
“Official” is pretty loose here. Record labels (or even bands directly) may have given license to market as such, but they certainly weren’t vetted for accuracy by the actual musicians. Art of Guitar on YouTube will periodically go and visit some of those old tab books to show how awful some of them are. Was still really nice to have them at time, as plenty of people weren’t online yet to check Olga.