The War on Guitar Tablature: Denying a Musician's Right

This war pertains to both lyric and tablature sites, but I am only reviewing the war on tabs in this article.

To understand this article, you first must understand what tablature truly is. According to Merriam-Webster.com, tablature is an instrumental notation indicating the string, fret, key, or finger to be used instead of the tone to be sounded ". Many sites such as tablature giant mxtabs.net and guitartabs.cc have recently shut down after freely distributing user-generated tablature of higher class musical artists.

Tablature heavily resembles original sheet music in a sense. Regular sheet music with the flats, whole notes, treble cleffes, and so forth are much harder to learn and read for an average person. If you can remember ever playing in school, it took a lot of time and effort usually to learn to read sheet music. Tabs are much easier since all you are shown are six lines that correlate with the six regular guitar strings, and the fret numbers, usually. The basic sense of matching the strings and the fret numbers makes it easy for novice guitar/bass players to learn how to play their favorite songs without having to learn regular sheet music, and learn how to read it. With tablature, you are a simple click away from learning your favorite song. It takes time and effort to also learn a song by ear, which most novice players cannot handle, so tabs help millions of people increase their skill with their instruments.

Of course something had to ruin this wonderful world of free online tablature. Recently the National Music Publishers' Association (NMPA) and the Music Publishers' Association (MPA) have screamed copyright infringement on online tablature websites such as mxtabs.com. In doing this, owners of these massive werbsites have taken down the tablature, a necessary learning tool for many novice players. I don't blame them though, why suffer a heavy lawsuit over something so stupid? The NMPA and the MPA fail to realize how vital these tabs are.