Post #1442442

2026-04-16 08:09 UTC

I’ve got quite a lot of guitar sheet music/tab books. I learned the songs from them basically fine. But now I’m teaching and really digging into the details, I’m finding quite regular mistakes. They range from transcriptions which are plain wrong, with notes not on the recording, to technical errors eg. incorrect bar durations. Two errors in the first 11 bars of Nothing Else Matters in the official Cherry Lane book alone! I wonder if they added mistakes on purpose to detect theft? #guitar

Replies (4)

@therockfiles@mastodon.social 2026-04-16 08:21

@danfairs Same here, using TAB for students means checking out the music yourself after all… but that’s okay. In the early days we had to transcribe all music ourselves from scratch. I mean the scratches from the record player. Now we just have to repair the flaws in the TABs. 🎸

Open ##1452861
@shift_reset@mastodon.scot 2026-04-16 08:47

@danfairs It's not impossible, we know map companies do this but there is also lots of places where mistakes could crop in... and I suspect that the editing staff of these books don't play them to check for correctness (which I know happens in "pop" maths)

Open ##1452862
@SteveClough@metalhead.club 2026-04-16 10:34

@danfairs I know I tended to look at multiple tabs for a song, and use them to work out the precise chords (normally). So it may just be poor transcriptions.

Open ##1452864
@fflavio@mastodon.social 2026-04-16 10:59

@danfairs My old guitar teacher, John Duarte, who published a lot of his own and other people's music, once aid to me that it often was on purpose to, as you say, detect copyright theft.

Open ##1452865