Friday, November 20, 2009

Songsterr Online Guitar Tabs



Songsterr ( http://www.songsterr.com/ ) is a website offering the extraordinary online experience of hearing, playing, practicing, and learning guitar, bass, and singing. Songsterr provides a realistic guitar sound and gives you a full control over the playback - you can play at half speed, as well as repeatedly looping through sections until you can play them correctly.

When I first used it, it was allowing me to use the full set of functions including half-speed, looping, and printing. However after a week or so this free trial has cut out, and I can only use the player. I am not sure how this has happened, as I never signed up for a free trail. Maybe they enabled a free trial automatically by referencing my IP address each time I logged on. All I know is that it was significantly better being able to access this full functionality.

Here is a list of the functions, (which I no longer have), as they are only active for payed accounts (current charge is $9.90 U.S. per month):

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The other strange thing about Songsterr is that it has an amazingly large library of Tabs, yet there does not seem to be very much information about it on the Internet. Maybe it is relatively new, or perhaps because we have to pay for most of its useful functions, it is not all that popular ?

The Songsterr Player provides drums, bass, all guitar parts (Note that lyrics and Vocals are not displayed, unless you go into the Mixer function and click them on).

Songsterr is actually many Tabs rolled into one.
To isolate the Tab we want, we use "the mixer", where we can choose which Tab we wish to view.

Eg. Here is what the mixer setup for the Oasis song "Wonderwall" :


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In the mixer we can choose to mute various instruments, we can also select which tab we want to display. In the pay version we can also adjust instrument volumes.

Here are example mixer
selections from Songsterr's tab of Oasis "Wonderwall":

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So we could in fact use Songsterr for learning Guitar or Bass or just for practicing Singing, and learning the vocals for lots of songs.

The only thing in the player I would like, is to have the options for the lyrics to display with any tab, because I usually keep track of where I am in a song by singing or listening to the words.


Here is a YouTube 4minutes 30 seconds video on how to use Songsterr:



Here is a 30 second YouTube video that demonstrates the Songsterr Half Speed function:



And finally a 2 minute YouTUbe video that shows Sonsterr playing Stairway to Heaven, and a few other songs:



I am still deciding whether or not to get pay Songsterr for a month, overlapping with some holidays, and do some intensive song learning. The alternative is to have a printed free tab from somewhere like 911 Tabs, and just use the Songsterr player to help learn the song off the 911 printed tab.

Nonetheless, Songsterr is certainly a very impressive use of Adobe Flash to make an extremely flexible and fully functional online tab player.

Enjoy,
Big Passy Wasabi

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