The saga of online tablature continues with Musicnotes.com new site: MXTabs.net. The New York Times had an article in yesterday’s paper mentioning that Musicnotes has reached an agreement with the Harry Fox agency to publish music in tab format on MXTabs in exchange for a portion of ad revenue.

The MXTabs website describes their new service:

“users are encouraged to create, edit, rate and review their own guitar tablature interpretations of their favorite songs.”

Now this is all fine and dandy, but we’re talking about tablature made up a hyphens and numbers:

—3—3—0—5—3—0—

These are really bare-bones transcriptions that started back in the early 90’s. They have no rhythmic notation and are often without lyrics.

I’m a big fan of Musicnotes.com. I use their services often and I participate in their affiliation program (see sidebar). I think they do a great thing by offering sheetmusic online, but this is a low-ball approach to online tabs. Powertabs.net has been putting out scores with tablature, standard notation, midi file and community inteativity for a while now. This push back to the hyphen, hyphen, number format is not development, and feels kinda trashy for such an established music notation site.

Without another resource for smaller or more obscure artist tablature, I’m sure I will use MXTabs and recommend it to students due to it’s relation to MusicNotes.com and their revenue sharing for artists. But can’t we come up with a better system?

—0—2—0—3—