In the guitar and banjo classes that I teach, students often ask where they can find music on the Internet - which web sites to look at, and where to start.
This edition of Cyberfolk explores some of the ways to locate that song that you just have to learn how to play!
A word of caution, however - always take what you find on the internet with a grain of salt. Not all lyrics and chords are correct so don't believe everything you see. If you can, compare several versions and play through them yourself to see if you agree with the arrangement.
Let's do an example. I would like to find the lyrics and chords to the song that Louis Armstrong recorded that I think may be called "Wonderful World".
Before I go to any specific guitar tablature
or lyric sites, I try searching for the song title using a search site
like Google at http://www.google.com.
In the search box, I'll type in the title of the song, in quotes, just
like this:
"wonderful world".
The quotes ensure that you are searching for the entire phrase, not just
the individual words "world" and "wonderful"
Google will return LOTS of hits, most of which are not the song we want.
We have just discovered that the term Wonderful World is a very common
phrase on the Internet!
So let's narrow down the search, by adding some more specifics. I know
that the song contains the phrase "i think to myself". Let's
include this in the search by typing the following in the search box: "wonderful
world" + "i think to myself" The + means that you are searching
for sites that contain both of the phrases.
This returns lots of references to our song! After looking at some of the
sites, we find that most of them contain only lyrics, but we want the chords,
too. I have found that by adding the word "tab" to the search
that you will find both lyrics and chords. So lets search one more time
by typing the following in the Google search box: "wonderful world"
+ "i think to myself" +tab
Now we have several choices of sites with both the words and chords to
"Wonderful World" by David Weiss and Bob Thiele. You can even
try adding a +midi to the search to see if you can find any midi files
that will play the melody for you, or try adding +banjo or +mandolin to find
tablature for a particular instrument.
If you know the composer of the song you're looking for, check to see if they have a web page with
an address like www.composers_name.com. Often you will find song lyrics and sometimes chords
there.
If you want to find the composer of a song, or if you not exactly sure of the name of
a song, try looking at http://www.allmusic.com. Here you
can search on several different criteria, and you will be able to locate the song, its composer,
who has recorded it and the names of all the recordings it has been on.
If you just want to browse for some tunes to play you might try browsing some of the following lyric and tablature sites:
About.com at http://guitar.about.com/cs/guitartab/
The Guitar Tab Universe at http://www.guitartabs.cc/home.php
Harmony Central at http://www.harmony-central.com/Guitar/tab.html
Olga at http://www.olga.net/
Kristin Hall's Songbook at http://xenia.media.mit.edu/~kristin/songbook/Songbook.html
Spike's music Collection at http://spikesmusic.spike-jamie.com/
Folk song lyrics at http://www.lyrics.com.au/directory/Folk_song_lyrics/
Beatles Tablature at http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Lounge/7109/
Frogman Music at http://frogmanmusic.com/tradsongs/tradsongs.htm
Ukulele Beatle Fun at http://beatlesite.info/index.html
A good list of even more tab sites can be found at: http://www.guitarnotes.com/links/music/
Many tab sites are commercial, and will launch
lots of pop up adds. When this gets too annoying, try using a different
web browser. The free Mozilla browser at http://www.mozilla.org
has a preference setting under Preferences-->Advanced-->Scripts+Plugins
where you can turn off the option to open unrequested windows. This means
no more pop-up adds!
Or visit http://toolbar.google.com
and install the Google Toolbar into your current web browser. It will give
you a button that disables popups!
Happy Searching!
If you have any favorite sites or topics you'd like to see mentioned in Cyberfolk, please let us know. Write to me care of Common Times, or email me at chris.mcintosh@usa.net. See you in Cyberspace!
Check out Cyberfolk Online! http://www.dls.net/~chrismac/cyberfolk
By Chris McIntosh Copyright © 2004 Chris McIntosh All Rights Reserved.