I'm trying to tab some songs with not much luck, what kind of tips can you give me to help me out?

Do you use any equipment to tab out songs?

Just regular tabs or powertabs?, for regular ones I just use wordpad or notepad, just copy and paste the tab template in the "submit a tab" page and boof, your away.

Regular tabbing. I know that, I was just wondering if anyone can give me some beginner advice on tabbing.

Do you slow down your songs? if so, what do you use to do this?

I listen to the songs extensively until I can hum it perfectly (or at least "perfectly" according to my ears) then I match up my guitar playing with both the hummed version and the actual version.

For songs that may suffer from bad production, for example Black Seeds Of Vengeance (Nile) and Liege Of Inveracity (Suffocation), I listened to the song through headphones - usually when I'm on the bus with my mp3 player. The fact that the speakers are in your ear cuts out any background noise and helps focus the sounds directly on to your eardrum. I can often penetrate deeper into the mix by doing this and once you hear something that you couldn't before, it becomes apparant the next time you play it on your hi-fi.

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Very interesting. Cheers John, I'll get started and try to tab out some Blue Cheer.

Cool cool, cheers for the advice. I set up my old laptop on top of the Blue Voodoo, and I'm starting "Blue Cheer-The Hunter" now. Excellent.

I use a stereo with a karyoke function which lets me listen to the songs without the singing, it helps greatly.

i had a special pair of broken headphones, which had been fucked so badly that unless you held it at a certain angle, only the guitar came through (and drums very faintly) this made it unbelievably easy to tab the kill and other such hard to hear bands. it would have made hate eternal a dream. but i bought some new ones and, forgetting the purpose, i cut the other ones to pieces with a pair of scissors.
the next day when i realised what i had done, i nearly cut myself to pieces with scissors.

but anyway, i listen with headphones, as john said they block out background noise and you have to concentrate very heavily on the guitar work. start out with something easy, my first tab was "hesitation wounds" by atomizer. easy as pie. anyway, let's hope to see your tabbing efforts in the future

Practice practice practice!

Doublecheck everything.

Have patience.

Headphones are good if it's a very complex song too!

Always make sure your guitar is in tune, thats a bitch if you tab a song out of tune.

I use Instab to write tabs - It's tidier than templates in notepad, and automatically has diclaimers and stuff.

Write the riffs in Instab, save it as a .TAB file. Then you have to open the .TAB file in notepad and add things like song structure, label the riffs etc., then save as a .txt and you're done.

http://www.harmony-central.com/Soft.../instab-10.html

edit: instab will also ensure you have the correct amount of characters per line.

Cool cheers. I've connected all my music/amp my laptop, so I can play specific channels of music and do anything I want with it to help me out.
Cheers

how does that work? does it EQ out the vocals or what

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Yep, cuts the vocals out completely, the most promiment track is the guitar, then drums, then bass, apart from backing vocals, they come through with the guitar. It does make it easy depending on the recording. I actually tried to do a track off "amongst the catacombs of nephren-ka", but i'll be fucked (even with the karyoke) if I can understand what is goin on aye, still sounds to messy or just to low for me to pick out.

My friend gave me this music game for XBox(can't remember the name) but it allows you to change the level of the bass, guitar, drums and vocals. So if you wanted to just hear the guitar you would turn all of the others down.

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I can't really give you advice on how to tab, but I can tell you how I like to do things. First off, I always sit at my computer with my legs crossed, this way I can put my keyboard on my leg and my guitar in my lap. Why? I never tab without my guitar present, that's why. I don't tab from memory, ever. I always need to play whatever I'm doing first. It's this simple- I play a riff, then I write it down.

As for preparation, there are several ways you can go about that. Sometimes I walk around outside for an hour or two listening to something on my Diskman. This helps me become intimately familiar with whatever songs I plan on tabbing. A lot of songs go in, most of them don't get tabbed due to lack of time, finding out it's already accurately tabbed, etc. The most important thing I do while learning a song is to discern it's patterns. I start with discerning the patterns of the song's structure. Next, I get more specific and discern the patterns of the individual riffs, figures, fills, and what have you.

I don't always do this, though. Sometimes I already know a song pretty well before I tab it. Sometimes I don't bother to start learning a song until the moment I decide to tab it, I do this with easier songs because they aren't worth putting hours of listening into. Needless to say, I wouldn't go into a Suffocation song I've never heard before and just decide out of the blue to tab it before getting familiar with it.

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