Wednesday, October 6, 2010

BP5_Songsterr

http://www.songsterr.com

Songsterr is a website dedicated to guitar music and notation.  TAB is a unique music notation system developed solely for guitar and bass guitar.  There are hundreds of TAB sites online.  Songsterr is unique because of it’s interactivity and breadth of TAB for popular guitar songs available.   As a music teacher who has a few sections of guitar, this site has been a great engagement tool for my students who want to learn the latest guitar songs and classics of the past.  Thanks to Guitar Hero and Rock Band many popular musicians of old are still popular today.


As I demonstrate Songsterr in the Screenflow above, the features that make Songsterr so great are the mixing capabilities, printing function, and half speed capability.  It’s neat to have the ability to hear all the parts to a particular song along with the part that you are working on.  You can then mute that part and play along with the rest of tracks.  Also as the tracks play you can choose to play the metronome to help you stay steady, a built in tuner and a scrubber tool so you can see where you are suppose to be in the song!

Features about this website which makes it a great Web2.0 Tool is the fact that you can leave comments and feedback about the TAB that you are you playing.  You can flag TABS for incorrectness or other things, you can submit corrections to TABS and you can submit your own TABS.  In order to fix or submit tabs you do need to purchase additional software called Guitar Pro.  Some cons that I’ve noticed about the site is that to get all the features such as the mixing capabilities and printing, you need to pay for a subscription.  The TABS are not always correct.  The TAB doesn’t teach you about technique. (Although that’s my job as a teacher :-) ) It would be nice to be able to have more control on the tempo.  Not just half speed and full speed.  The sounds are MIDI based and not super realistic.

I need to give Annie Woodle thanks for introducing this site to me.  It’s really been great and I’ve been able to implement it into the program that I teach.

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