Loudlon's Tab Corner!

Father Time and the Reaper, eh? No sweat. I'll kick their asses so hard they'll burp farts for a month.

New sub: The Man Who Sold the World, by Nirvana

bill – I'll be tabbing your Roachford request next. Time permitting, I hope to have it done no later than Sunday.

Only to Be with You, by Roachford (requested by bill trnc)

That's “Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody (ver 7) bass tab”. Yes, there are 6 previous versions. One has a 5-star rating, two have 4.5 stars, three are 4 star. Just based on a quick look at the tabs and the tabbers, I'd pick Lon's version to use, based on how cleanly it's laid out and by his reputation, but it's the 7th version here.

I can see having a few different versions if they are modified for different skilled players (and noted as such), but unless John Deacon rerecorded the bass line for each Greatest Hits album this song is on, there's really only one version of this bass line.

We could really use some kind of feedback mechanism to mark duplicate tabs that can be removed. Maybe a way for regular users to mark a tab as replaced by a better version. Not a rating, but a “there's a better option” indicator. Tabs that get a few of these notes are then reviewed by moderators and deleted.

If I'm trying to learn a song from the tabs here, I'm going to figure out which ones don't work well very quickly. That keeps it from being a “job” for someone to comb through the duplicates, but as time goes by the extraneous ones will get removed.

New sub – Rhinoceros, by Smashing Pumpkins. Sorry to whoever requested it – I forget who it was, and it's long, long overdue.

About multiple tab versions:. Every rating comes down to one thing, and that's how good an ear the rater has. I've seen a lot of 5-star tabs here that are way off. Similarly, I've seen a lot of less-than-5-star tabs here that are actually spot on. The only explanation is that whoever rated the tab doesn't have all that good an ear.

I'll use Bohemain Rhapsody as an example. I tabbed it because whoever it was who requested it last year (another apology for my only getting around to finishing it last night and having forgot who it was that requested it lol) obviously felt the existing 5-star tab wasn't accurate. After seeing the song on the request list, I played along with the song, following that tab, and agreed that it was juuuuuust a bit off in spots, hence why I decided to take the request. So I located John Deacon's original bass master track, played it and the song at the same time listening closely for any discrepencies, and found none. So I knew it was the real thing, and I based my tab on that original bass master track. So it stands to reason it should be 100% accurate, right?

However – to use another of my own tabs as an example – I also based my tab for Nirvana's In Bloom note-for-note on the genuine bass master track, and even embedded that track with my tab for comparison, yet still someone rated it less than 5-stars because, bass track provided or not, the tab sounded off to that person.

So before we can start whittling down and weeding out lower rated/non-5-star tabs, we need to determine first if the tab was rated less than five stars because it's wrong, or if it was rated less than five stars because the rater can't hear worth a shit LOL

The hiccup is that there are so many tabs in the database that it would take a platoon of master bassists months to go through each and every one of them to determine accuracy. And I don't know about you guys, but while I enjoy tabbing, I still have a life that needs seeing to LOL

The problem being either the tabber or the rater not having a good enough ear to tab/hear the song accurately. Not that I'm shifting any blame. I've flubbed my share of songs LOL

New sub: Rocket, by Smashing Pumpkins