Right, I love these, those stupid tab books ruined my early guitar years. I thought I just wasn't good enough at the time, but they were actually tabbing impossible to play shit half the time. As a teenager I thought those "official" tab books were 100 percent correct, straight from the band to the paper.
One thing the younger guys don’t know when critiquing these tabs, is how hard it was to actually hear these parts back in the day. With cassettes and vinyls you couldn’t really rewind the tape/vinyl that much. It was hard to find the right spot and the cassettes and vinyls broke down if you looped a part too many times. Also the sound systems and headphones were more primitive.
@@g.bontempi691 Yeah, I'm not trying to defend them. Just trying to paint the picture of how it was back then. I think the notators wrote the notes in standard notation, and whoever translated them to typed tabs messed up the fingerings.
Hard for hacks, i had a friend who could transcribe anything easily.. of course he went on to be famous.. they still assholes no matter how u look at it .. its just a con these book cost a lot.. I was scammed many a time…it’s not even the money it’s the fact that it discourages u ..
Who hired these hacks to make these books? And who hired the guys who hired the hacks? Like, the publishing industry you wouldn't think would be easy to get into, but apparently it's run by completely incompetent idiots.
So many companies in so many industries are run this way it's actually crazy. When you think about starting a business remember that most of your competition is kinda bad. Just don't become bad competition yourself lol.
It's guys who don't play guitar (probably piano) who likely write these books. They don't know the actually know the player limitations, which is unacceptable because I'm not even a full professional, and the first things I (and others) did after learning theory, is the limitations of the instruments we write for.
Chris Poland is a bad boy. His legato was so sick on those couple albums (and he was ripping lines that smoothly on a ton of smack, somehow). This attempt at a transcription probably turned a whole generation of players off from learning Megadeth songs lol
Sometimes I wonder if the guys transcribing the tabs didn't like metal. Knowing that a young guitarist aspiring to play these intricate guitar solos and riffs, are going to read tab because they don't know the theory. Laughing the whole time.
I was just thinking that, imagine playing this whole album at a show, but making the announcement that your playing all the songs from the "tab book" which is completely wrong! That would be great!!
Thank you. Peace sells is one of the greatest metal/thrash songs ever. I was 14 or 15 when it came out,I'm now 50yrs old. It still has the same impact it did the first time I heard it.
Two of my favourite tab books is Kiko Loureiro’s open source and no gravity, I’ve only got one or two songs into each, but after seeing all these videos of incorrect transcribing, I trust the Kiko ones because I know Kiko himself worked closely with Levi clay on those song books
When you said that 2 to eight stretch you were NOT wrong, first saw that part on the community post you made before releasing this video and I had my guitar in hand at the time so I tried it and holy shit my nerves made it very clear that they did not like that
Yep, everyone goes on about Rust in Peace but I got bored of that one Where So far is still a regular listen... And I bought it when it came out 33 years ago! 🤘😃
Oh man I remember wanting that tab book so bad from my local music store but 13 year old me didn't have the $24.95 to make it happen. 25 years later I realize it was a blessing.
Mike, you should add a spin off to this series, entitled “where are they now?” Where you interview the people responsible for these awful official tab books. Ask them what they used to to come to their conclusions, were they up against an impossible deadline, just what happened?!
A lot of the impossible fingering looks like the auto-tab conversion you get in some notation software. You start with the classic notation and the software just converts the pitches into TAB. Then you'd usually correct that manually - or you end of with these stretches :D
Looking back its pretty clear that a lot of these tab books were transcribed by people that either did not listen to this type of music or actually play guitar. Chris is a great guitar player. That first Damn the Machine LP is a real gem.
No I think it is just a metal thing,Because I have the Doors,Led Zeppelin, and the Beatles , and those are pretty much on point, but with these old metal albums, it’s almost like they didn’t even try
Shout out for the Mellon Collie T-Shirt. One of the greatest albums ever and the soundtrack to my 16th year on the planet back in 95-96. And the Atari joystick is class.
I'm glad you're doing these videos because I remember really well trying to play along with the GnR tab book back in the early 90's. I would think, either I suck, or these are wrong. Because some of them just didn't sound right or were too hard to play.
LMAO, can't believe you can't do that 10/12/3 chord stretch!!! 😂 I remember in one the guitar mags (long long ago), they showed some dude with a long finger extension spanning 8-10 frets!!! Hindsight is 20/20, but would have been cool to have someone in the studios with these rockstars filming/documenting how they play the songs. Would benefit the masses and maybe themselves when they revisit old material!
@@ReizokoRyu i also have a bunch of old guitar magazines and let me tell you Guitar world had THE WORST TABS of all time. On top of just straight up getting the notes and chords and timing wrong all the time, they cheaped out and used rhythm slashes
I bought this book as a teen. Megadeth were my favorite band in my early teens, I’ve seen them love more than any other band; with that being said, I have never learned a Megadeth song, and I blame this book. I tried learning a song, sounded so wrong that it turned me off completely from learning anything else. Haha. I have it in a box in the garage.
Who made these horrible tabs? I'd really love to see the process. Why it always sounds like if a beginner tried to learn a song by ear, put it on paper and someone without any knowledge about the stuff just published it....
thanks for bringing this to light.. i grew up in the 80s and i also looked at the tabs as gospel.. i am 47 now, and i realize how bad some of the tabs were and inaccurate- i have many of the old mags still.. i feel vindicated in a way now becuase i can say, i couldnt play these things back in the days not only becuase of lack of experience but becuase the tabs were messed up. :P
I honestly feel bad most players during the 80s 90s and 00s had to grow up with shit like this. This is an injustice to rising guitar players. Every guitar player out there that self-taught with no instructor, I applaud u!! How do u do that???
It was harder, but I think it was easier to focus, since we had no internet or computers. You would play for hours without any distractions. I think that’s pretty rare these days. Also, since you could only see other players live, and you rarely saw other young guitarists on stage, you thought you were the greatest young player ever. These days you can find small children who are great players here on RU-vid. I think that would’ve been discouraging.
You seem to be going through all the tab books I bought, and still have! No wonder I lost faith in my own ability, we were so naive back then. I was so new to guitar and just assumed as these were 'official' they would be correct.
someone somewhere, just like any other creator, stumbled across that beat and knew that they found something magical and it appealed highly to musicians and grew from there
Wish we’d had this content creator in the mid 90s! Would have saved so much time and frustration! I actually remember emailing with Dave as a young fan in like 8th grade asking whether the tab was correct. He was surprisingly gracious in his response (though I’m sure it was just some Megadeth employee) saying he’d never really looked at the tabs and didn’t know. Guess I can give these songs another try 30 yrs later 😂
Much like yourself, I spent a lot of time trying and failing back in the day with the idea that "it must be true, 'cause the book says so". But even back then I sort of had an incling that they were kind of screwing around sometimes, because I read an interview with a band in a guitar magazine (I think it was Radiohead, but I'm not sure as it's 20+ years ago :p), where the guitar player told how the people transcribing their album actually contacted him to explain certain chordshapes he used, because they couldn't get their heads around it and couldn't get it quite right.
Two things, first that guitar is amazing!! Next, when I was 14, in ‘94-‘95, my best friend had those mega/Metallica books, when I first started I tried learning by borrowing them.. I couldn’t make anything sound right. This took 2 years from my playing. I thought that some could, some could not. Eventually I learned by ear… and used these books as wall decorations… These books, the newbie gear starter pack of the time, the awful 10w with 6” speaker… cost nearly $600 books and all, stole 2 years from me. Thinking I just couldn’t do it. Nothing sounded right. Two years later, a friend helped me with a setup, another friend loaned me a digitech processor, and my ear garnered me a sound I could deal with. This lead to 4 years of playing with headphones that changed my life. I bought my 8 year old a mini strat, fixed it up, a boss katana mk2 50w, and he is more capable than I was 3 years in… The 16 year old me, playing that fixed up guitar, digitech processor, cranked headphones, playing the scorpions: the zoo whitesnake: crying in the rain I finally felt it. Then I started trying what was to me crazy hard stuff Megadeth and Metallica. Come to find out megadeth was infinitely more difficult. To me Poland stuff was harder to learn by ear than Friedman’s. Today I own 8 guitars, 5 heads, a rack full of gear, like 20 pedals. Those stupid books, and the garbage newbie gear nearly derailed me.
I love these vids. Quick question, where do you order these old tab books? I have some old ones (actually good ones) that are beat up and would like to replace them. Thanks.
I think the lesson here is to use these tab books as a some what jumping off point/collectible, and use your ears to adjust anything weird you come across.
Nice MCIS shirt. Speaking of, any plans to do an SP tab book review? I remember looking through some of them back in the day (probably SD/MCIS) & going "wtf" just at the sheer layout- like, some places where they'd have 4-6 guitar parts written, but then other parts where huge chunks just seemed to be missing? Or am I just remembering wrong? XD
Finally! A tab book I don't own! How about the Van Halen 1,1984 and 5150 books next? Or the Ozzy Osbourne ,Blizzard of Oz, and the Diary Of a Madman books?
I've been waiting years for someone to figure out Chris Polands lead sound on this album. Every note has a little swell, sorta like an envelaope filter or slight wah to it.
3/10/12 has to be an error. I can't imagine the person tabbing this, as incompetent as they might have been, fundamentally didn't understand how a guitar works. There's no way anyone who's ever seen a guitar, let alone held one, would write that on purpose.
yeah, it's ridiculous, you need a basic understanding of tabs to know that's impossible, and I assume someone who writes tab for a living knows how they work
I bought a guitar magazine in the 90s that included transcriptions for the entire vocal parts along with the guitar transcriptions. And this was for songs from bands like Slayer, Sepultura, and Napalm Death! I have no idea why they thought that was necessary!
In the eighties, I learned a lot by using the Pink Floyd, Police and rush anthology guitar tab books. Even if they were not always spot on. The only one, I have left apparently is Pink Floyd The wall, all the songs. And it isn't tabbed, it is all in notation, with chords. I can read notes, or am in the process of getting better at it. But I took those books to a guitar teacher in the eighties, to learn from. And he was alright with it, because he was a senior that was in the school jazz band, and the school band leader/teacher asked him to teach me. And because those bands and the music they did was progressive, the technique I needed, some of it was in there.
This series is eye opening... I learned everything from tab and always wondered why I couldn't make it sound like the album.... Had no idea that official tab would be wrong.. I even remember downloading tabs for books i got rid of and seeing they were so different that I just didn't try them cause i thought they were wrong... i mean maybe they were but probably not as wrong as some of the books i used.
10:52 In fairness to the book, that's not what that means. It's a diamond, not a normal whole note. The diamond indicates that its not really a pitched note, but rather a more low-mid range unpitched note. The same way x notes are used in vocals to indicate shouts that aren't "sung" or pitched, the diamond is just a whole note version of those x notes. (Though sometimes you will see strange bubble letter looking x notes instead, like a lot of music notation, it's not always consistent with *all* which one to use) though, in the spirit of shitting on the book, I'll add that they forgot to add a "fall" to that part.
Lol the 3/12/10 stretch was my favorite. There has to be some sort of autotune note software they used to print these. I have a hard time believing a human wrote this.
Guitar Magazine For The Practicing Musician had stuff tabbed out wrong too. Even though I believe they perfected how tablature was utilized and gave instruction on the musical theories behind every song. But my issues got ruined when my dad's basement flooded.
You should check out the Extreme - Pornografitti book, specifically 'lil Jack Horny'. I learned it and it took me years to realise that the book incorrectly had all the strings detuned a full step and tried using tapped harmonics fire the intro rather than drop D and natural harmonics!
9:59 I actually felt the same since first Chris' lead. I felt that they changed it to Marty like style. What was year of original release for this tab book?
How do tab books that are published more recently compare to the oldies? I recently bought four Exodus books they're incredible, but they were tabbed by Kragen Lum. Have other tab books improved as well?
@The-Art-of-Guitar, you see what I was talking about, how the transcribers divided up parts that are played on one guitar into two guitars? “Bad Omen,” in that book is HORRIBLE. It is similar to the “Peace Sells...” transcription. It divides up the notes and the percussive chops into two guitars. Back when I bought it, we didn’t have Internet and easy access to videos of live performances. The times time I saw Megadeth live, I was never close enough to the stage to study Dave’s fingerings (which is something I do when watching guitarists at most concerts I attend), so I tried to use that book as a “baseline” to figure out the notes, but came up with my own fingerings, because that book is whack! I swear, I don’t know how some of those transcribers (& publishers) got away with publishing such crap. It just made things more difficult for young guitarists to learn songs.
The beautiful moment when you have this song (or any other song from this album) nailed in 440hz and start showing it off to a friend. Then he plays the song in the backround with the hz original tuning and you both almost puke lol
the 3-12-10 chord at 6:30 only reinforced my suspicion that all those old tabs were transposed maybe via software from sheet music to tab :) Guitar Pro could trip you up like that in funny ways as well.
I just don't get how any of these books got published (and still do!). It's mad. If someone wanted to make a tab book of my songs I'd be all over it to ensure accuracy. I gladly grew up learning guitar with the internet (started in 1997), sure, you had to separate the wheat from the chaff, if something sounded wrong you found another tab, and another, etc. I remember getting a Metallica tab book as a gift, in those days, and thought, "sweet! OfFiCiAl tAb, oOoOOoO!", I subsequently went back to trawling the net. Lost revenue for publishers, really, I'd by 'em if I knew I could trust 'em.
I've gone out a few times wearing a new shirt with the sticker still on it. You should sell stickers with Art Of Guitar on them so we can wear them on our shirts!
Thanks for this. I’ve been playing guitar for over 30 years and bought many of these tab books back in the day. I used to get so frustrated because I often couldn’t get the songs to sound right. Later on I realised that I often over complicated my playing. I’d watch somebody else play a piece and it would sound better yet their playing seemed simplified. I blame my own naivety and reliance on these tab books for this. I’d be interested to know what you think of the Ozzy Osborn Randy Rhodes Tribute tab book if you’ve looked at that one.
If its not too hard it would pretty cool if you recorded the whole song with the wrong parts and then compare it to the original at the end so it can be heard its entirety and in context. I love this stuff!
