I can’t even begin to calculate how many times I’ve found a tab online, in a magazine, or even in a published book where I found at least some wrong notes. I know many guitarists have found this to be the case. In some cases, the notes or chords are clearly wrong, and it can leave you wondering how in the world did the author even think that was correct. Long ago, I learned to accept all tabs with a grain of salt, unless I saw an official endorsement by the actual recording artist. You have to accept that the people uploading these transcriptions are not experts and are going by what they believe to be right. Even the “experts” get it wrong on occasion. “This is my first tab and it is 100% correct” is a common opening statement I see on many online transcriptions, yet I tend to find something wrong in probably 80% of these within one minute. Both the cause and solution to this problem is that everyone has a voice on the internet and wants to use it. So my suggestion is that the artists themselves take the opportunity to create “authentic” transcriptions. With the decline in use of standard notation by guitarists and even the guitar magazines now, it takes nothing to create tablature for a song. With the “pro” version software, you can even add transcriptions for all instruments involved.
So why don’t more artists, especially independents, take advantage of this opportunity? Well I’m sure the first barrier is time. Independent artists already have so much to focus on regarding their careers that creating a transcription of their album or even a single song can seem less important. After all, the big name successful artists have someone else handle the transcription and are typically uninvolved beyond the licensing rights to transcribe their songs and print the transcriptions. For them, the extra effort isn’t worth it. They are already getting money for the transcriptions whether they write them or not. For the independent artist though, creating the transcriptions and selling them on their website or as a self-published book on Amazon opens up a new revenue stream. You could even include it with a purchase of the album!
Depending on the complexity of a song, you may have to create a complete tablature transcription for the whole song, just part of it, or may be able to get away with simple chord and rhythm charts. You could create just the guitar transcription or put in the effort to create transcriptions for each instrument. It’s up to you how far you want to take it, but remember the more you do the more it can sell. Some artists post their song lyrics on their website so that fans can learn the correct lyrics and sing along. Why not take a similar approach to help the musicians out there that would like to play your songs?There are tons of apps out there that allow you to create the necessary files. You can then save the final result in multiple formats to ensure that the customer can use them. That last part will take almost no extra effort so why not go the extra mile with it. In the end the choice is yours if you want to try this or not. I know how thrilled I would have been as a kid to get a guitar transcription done by the guitarist themselves included with the album purchase.