Published My First Tab on Ultimate Guitar

Ultimate Guitar is a 20+ year old website with over 1 million songs and over 10 million registered users. It provides a forum for guitarists, bassists, and ukulele-ists to upload, learn, post, and share music in a searchable, easy to read format.

Guitar is one of those instruments that does not require learning how to read sheet music on the staff. For this reason the majority of the written music on the site is not in standard music notation; rather; it is written in the form of chords which are placed above lyrics, or using tabs, where a grid represents the guitar neck and numbers on the lines indicate where the player places their fingers.

I have been using Ultimate Guitar since I started playing the guitar in 2007. It wasn't until this year that I finally posted one of my own tabs though!

When I started learning guitar I was going through a religious phase. Praise and Worship music is the modern version of the Gospel genre, and central to services in the evangelical world. The songs are often very catchy and easy to learn. Ultimate Guitar and other sites have thousands of Praise and Worship songs available. Even though I am no longer religious, I still enjoy playing the songs. Many I have memorized and will probably never forget. One of these songs is called "Better is One Day" by Matt Redman. The lyrics are based on one of the Psalms. It is a pretty song that I have known how to play for years. I wanted to post the song on my YouTube channel for a Mexican YouTuber named Isa Villalobos. While practicing it I realized that I could play most of the melody. When I looked it up on Ultimate Guitar I saw many versions of the chords but no tab for the entire song. I challenged myself to learn the tab, write it down, and post it to the website. I made a tablature grid on graphing paper to write out the whole song. It was very easy to post a song using the format on the Ultimate Guitar site. All I had to do was login, select Create Tab, copy the template, then save it. Once it was approved my tab was available for the whole world to view!

A good friend of mine made a few suggested edits on the site which turned out to be spot on. So I accepted the edits and viola! Now anyone who wants to play the melody for Better is One Day and not just the chords can use my tab.