So my daughter has been learning the drums and we tried out Drumeo. Their lessons are all right, but the collection of 1500 songs they have is awesome! Just like the songs here you have the sheet music, you can slow things down, and a cursor tracks your spot during playback. What they do better though is that 1) it’s synced with the actual song’s playback, so you’re not just playing drums in a void, and 2) you can remove drums from the soundtrack so you can “play in the band”.
Is there anything like this available for bass? Or, even better, something like it that includes both bass and drum parts so my daughter and I can try playing together on a track? (We can do this now, of course, but it takes work to find compatible arrangements, and in the end we’ll still always be doubling one or both instruments.)
Tomplay has both Bass and Drum tracks - in fact for most instruments. Not originals but licenced backing tracks by “professional musicians”. I use Tomplay for drums, guitar, bass, piano and recorder so I get good value for the yearly subscription! You can slow down the playback and improvise your own drumming/playing if you like. I’ve tried Drumeo but decided to stick with Tomplay. Tomplay also has different skill levels starting at Beginner up to Advanced. The vocals on some tracks are not so good so I turn them off and just use the instrumental track. Tomplay - Interactive Sheet Music with Backing Tracks | Tomplay
I use Moises to split songs into their component parts so that I can firstly hear hear the bass line, then secondly remove it so I can then play the bass part, with the remaining elements in place.
I also download the individual components and push them into GarageBand for covers.
It’s not a play along that gives you the full notation / tabs, but Moises does tell you the chord, so with a bit of googling for bass tabs themselves, listening and experimenting, I can then get to an appropriation of the original bass line.
I’ve been using Songsterr. Has tab for Bass, Guitar, and Drums for a lot of songs. Other instruments as well, but pretty much always in Tab form, so I wouldn’t use it for other instruments. Has midi instrumentation or will sink with YouTube audio. You can mute or solo midi instruments. You can adjust playback speed. $10/month for all options. I believe free gets you midi-only and fewer or no control options.
Ultimate Guitar has an absurd number of tabs, but most of them are user generated and of variable quality. All midi instruments. Their official tabs are usually really good but require a subscription. They generally run a discount sale for like $10/year.
I like Tomplay’s approach of using covers (even if some of the vocals are indeed substandard), but for some reason they have completely separate entries for each instrument! For example, they have Billie Jean for bass (where you can turn off the bass, but the rest of the instruments are lumped together), and they also have it for drums (ditto, but drums instead of bass). Would it really be that hard to have a single entry with one track per instrument?!
Songsterr looks promising and I like that you can use YouTube videos — when they happen to have the combination of instruments you want — or MIDI if necessary. Their song collection feels a bit haphazard, though, with a half dozen versions (or more!) of each song. Is it all user-contributed?
Ultimate Guitar seems to have a good collection, even if only counting the official tabs. I’ll need to do their 7 day trial when I have a bit more time. Dunno about MIDI only, though — vocals are kinda important to us to make playing along enjoyable.
Anyway, thanks for the pointers, I’ll just need to figure out which one works best for us!
I’ve got Ultimate Guitar Pro and Songster. Honestly, I can’t remember the last time I used UG Pro (fully intend on not renewing that one but I paid for a year). As a paying subscriber to Songster, you get access to some neat features, one of which being requesting song tabs which then are generated by “AI.” These are pretty hit and miss. From my experience, the kick drum gets mixed in to the basslines, and the “AI” provides some pretty interesting and inefficient tabs. For someone sitting at home playing, as long as you know the song you’re playing, it does a good enough job to get you on your way towards figuring it the rest of the way out. For songs in Songster missing instrument tracks, you can go into edit mode and have that same AI add it in. You can also mute or isolate tracks. I’ll give them credit, they’re trying and are way ahead of UGPro in features and UI. It isn’t perfect but it’s quick, easy to use and giving me a helping hand while I learn to figure out how to learn songs on my own. There’s enough value there imo for the $10 a month.
Guitar Pro tabs seems to be getting a bit of a kicking but I’ve found it great so far. If you get the pro when on offer it good value for learning songs. You have backing tracks that you can isolate instruments & blend volumes, slow down tracks etc. Try the pro on trial as there are loads of songs
Yeah, UG is definitely polarizing from what I’ve read. I’ll have to give it a try, though, since last night I looked up a bunch of songs we’d like to play and Songsterr had very few of them whereas UG claims to have official tabs for all!
I have a subscription to both. I’m with @howard I think Songsterr is a better interface and the option to play along with the song or the synth version on Songsterr vs just the crappy midi version on UG seals the deal.
Here’s one of the big differences though. If you give us who subscribe to Songster a few of those songs, there’s a really good chance that Songster will magically have them within 24 hours.
Just got it submitted. I’d say give it overnight and check in the morning (based on US time). If yo want to check out one I just requested over the weekend, look up Words of the Dying by Controlled Bleeding.
I have looked at free version of songsterr but paid version is about 10 x more than the deal I got on with UGpro.
As a relative newbie I’m finding it really useful in learning songs & playing along with drum tracks (even though midi)
If see good deal for Songsterr I’ll give it a go, thanks
Well hey, the magic happened as advertised — The Door is now up on Songsterr! This is a very different experience from Drumeo, where song requests go into a black hole… I wonder how they do it so quickly? Their FAQ says that all tabs are user-contributed, though they also imply that you can auto-generate a tab with AI.
BTW @HighlandBass, AFAIK Songsterr only does tabs. From their FAQ: “Adding traditional music notation might be something we’ll consider working on in the future.”
So it’s been a week but I thought I’d summarize what I’ve figured out since and the approach I settled on.
First, I did try out Ultimate Guitar. It turns out that the official tabs are supposed to have full backing tracks — the lack of vocals is a bug that they promised to fix soon. I believe this claim since I think they’re sourcing the backing track from Guitar Backing Tracks - Instrumental MP3 without Guitar (or perhaps it’s even the same people running that site). I sampled a few and these fully stem-separated covers seem to be generally higher quality than Tomplay’s. Ultimately, though, there’s a deal killer: you can’t tweak (or download) the official tabs, so while they may be high quality you’re stuck with whatever arrangement they made. That immediately takes it out of contention for me.
Second, Songsterr is pretty good, though the quality of the tabs varies widely and it’s often hard to figure out which is the “best” one. They have a really good built-in tab editor and let you save personal edits without submitting them for public use. The one feature that’s missing (which is very specific to my needs) is that you’re unable to display multiple instruments’ scores together, or synchronize playback on separate tablets. Obviously, this only matters if you have two or more people playing together — if you’re playing solo then Songsterr is great.
What I finally settled on is Go PlayAlong (https://goplayalong.com/). This is a specialized app that lets you import tabs and backing tracks, sync them up (mostly automated), and play them. It can show multiple instrument parts together on one screen (with extensive layout options to make things fit) or even sync up any number of devices to play together!
So my plan is to 1) source tabs from wherever (Songsterr, UG non-official, etc.), 2) edit them in Songsterr (as GPA has no editing facilities) and download as Guitar Pro files, 3) grab the backing track either by ripping from YouTube, buying a cover from Guitar Karaoke, or splitting with Moises, then 4) put it all together in GPA (with manual sync if necessary) and play our hearts out! We’ll see how it goes but so far so good; I’m doing maybe 30 minutes of prep time per song or so, which seems like a reasonable investment for something I’ll spend weeks practicing.
Thanks again everyone for pointing me in the right direction — and happy to answer any questions in turn.
- Songsterr even free beats it IMO.
