While not physical gear, I’m lumping this up here as there didn’t seem to be any other area that made more sense. Other software could be classified as part of your gear kit, so this makes sense to me. Most of the time when I search for tabs, songsterr is the first result for me. I have come across others as well. Even the courses use a different one. It seems all of the free versions of these are limited in one way or another. Of the folks in here, are there any that you have “upgraded” to their premium version, and what prompted you to pick one over another?
Most of the times I look for the song in customs forge, download a psarc and convert it to guitarpro / tuxguitar(free) where I can export the PDFs from.
Songsterr I still haven’t been convinced enough to go there.
I have had a “premium” songsterr account and may revisit it I used the print option and saved to a bah’zillion songs (well hundreds) to PDF form while I could.
Just installed tuxguitar as I mostly use Linux and haven’t really started using it yet…
The best tab site for me has been youtube. Searching “ bass tab” usually gets me 2 or 3 versions of most songs. It doesn’t help if you need to print it but I’m not great with reading while I play anyway…
Depending on the songs. Last week I spent some time uploading my gp8 songs to Songsterr when I have enough I’ll create a thread to those songs.
There are more accurate and better than the Ai generated tabs for sure.
Songsterr was the best before adding the AI tab feature. Not so sure now.
Yes, because now they are “Al”-generated.
You and I like some obscure stuff. The AI feature gives me the opportunity to queue up an Xmal Deutschland (for example) song and have half a shot at getting something I can work with. I appreciate it for that.
I’m 99% sure that the Songsterr tabs for one of the songs I’m working was done by AI.
There is no other explanation for this ridiculous rhythm notation…
Or this…
100% sure.
No rookie would be able to notate that insanity, no experienced transcriber would be so cruel.
Yeah - AI is great at hearing pitches and turning them into tabs, but they haven’t solved its non-musicality yet.
It doesn’t know where the rhythm is supposed to start - doesn’t understand music that starts mid-measure so well.
You could try by linking a youtube video for that song to the AI yourself, and see what it creates.
That’s the current problem with this and the other machine transcriptions like the Rocksmith ones - sometimes the notation it generates is either nonsense or done in a way that is technically kind of close but not the way any human would do it, ever.
Honestly Songsterr is pretty excellent these days. It’s really come a long way and improved a lot.
Incorporating YouTube videos to play along to instead the awful cheesy midi music was a game changer. You can even play along at slower tempos, which is such a huge help. I’ve been learning songs I could’ve never tackled before, but since I can slow them down (60% speed for the hard ones), they’re totally doable now.
AND I use the free version.
Sure, the tabs aren’t perfect, but honestly the only way I’ve found to get a perfect transcription is to do it yourself. But the songs I’ve done all get the main groves right. The fills are often right too, they just often won’t have all of them, especially songs with lots of fills and variations of the groove, which seems to be all the songs I want to learn.
I’ve been using it a lot lately, and the transcriptions have gotten a lot better than they used to be. A better selection of music now too. I highly recommend checking it out. It’s totally free too, so no risk.
I haven’t encountered any tabs written by AI. I don’t doubt they’re out there though. Luckily you can rate tabs, so always start with the highest rated tab for a given song and go from there.
Maybe there are more AI tabs in certain genres? May depend if the folks at Songsterr are doing those, or if users are uploading them. I have no idea.

I haven’t encountered any tabs written by AI.
Many Songsterr tabs end up at customsforge, the crowd driven tabs site for Rocksmith and Tonellib Jam. They are synched to music too…
@JamesPrestonUK might be able to say more about that!?

I haven’t encountered any tabs written by AI. I don’t doubt they’re out there though.
Songsterr added the feature in the last year or so; I’m hoping it doesn’t torpedo the quality of the site. I still think Songsterr is about the best option for free tabs.

Sure, the tabs aren’t perfect, but honestly the only way I’ve found to get a perfect transcription is to do it yourself.
This is a point that comes up again and again, and makes me think.
To me, this can only mean two things:
Either that the “correctness of tab” is quite subjective, and the only thing that makes the own transcription perfect is the own view.
Or people that can do perfect tabs are less willing to share them than people that are struggling to create good tab.
The usage of AI is quite recent, so the number of AI generated tab is very small right now.
I’ve seen a number of tracks on Customsforge which the creator has proudly said have been created using AI (Moises). I tried Moises a few months ago and whilst it is a very impressive tool, it isn’t quite good enough yet. I found that it missed many notes out and often got notes wrong. The human ear is still the best tool at the moment in my humble opinion.

The human ear is still the best tool at the moment in my humble opinion.
100% agreed!
What is your process to create Rocksmith tracks?
Do you transcribe everything yourself or do you take “inspiration” from other tabs, correct them and synch them manually to the background track?
For BassBuzzers - James is a living legend on CustomsForge, with 2603 tabs to his name!
These are his top downloaded songs
I started out using tabs from Ultimate Guitar thinking that because they were on a website, they must be 100% correct. Wrong! Often verses were copied and pasted without the creator taking the time to pick out any subtle changes etc. Sometimes I felt that they had included a bassline from a completely different song. It didn’t take long to realise that I might as well create everything from scratch, which with a few exceptions is what I’ve done ever since. If I can find a tab which either the bassist themselves has created or one which someone I know is very good has created, I’ll use that (and credit accordingly). Once I have a decent tab, I create a GP5 file from it then use the various tools needed to turn it into a Rocksmith .psarc file.
I wrote a blog page some years ago on the custom creation process. It’s a little out of date now because the versions of the software used has changed and the part where the .psarc file is created now uses a different application. I’ll get around to updating it one day but it’ll give you an idea of what’s involved: Creating a custom from a Guitar Pro file – James’ Bass Blog