Welcome to Dead Note Tabs!

This website has been a long time in the making. You could say it all started in 2005 when I discovered Guitar Pro and started using it to transcribe music. You could also say it started in 2006 when I uploaded my first tab to Ultimate Guitar.

I think the site actually started somewhere in 2020. I was stuck at home during the pandemic with way too much free time on my hands. I had started transcribing some old favourite albums of mine that nobody else on the internet had seemed to do before. I began uploading my work to UG like I always did, but as I worked on more and more I realised, this is almost work for me. UG doesn't pay me, and they directly profit off of the work that I do, so why give them free labour? I was also starting to work on corrections of existing tabs but was getting rejections due to dumb site rules.

The idea started there - start my own site where I have total control on what goes up. Not only do I not have to abide by anyone else's arbitrary rules, I could have confidence that what I was uploading was as accurate as possible. Going through older tabs I've downloaded over the years, I couldn't believe what people thought was accurate to upload. Tabs with wrong tempos, wrong timing, wrong notes, wacky time signatures, wrong tunings, I was seeing it all.

I know that I can't guarantee what I do is 100% accurate, but everything I worked on was pored over as much as I could. I separated songs into mono tracks to be able to distinguish between guitar parts. I used AI to split songs to try and isolate guitar parts when things got a little muddy. I slowed down songs to 30% of their original speed to catch every note in a run. I put one bar or sometimes one beat on repeat for minutes at a time so I could pick out all the individual notes in a strange sounding chord. This was all very serious to me.

When I first had the idea for the site, I had maybe 5-6 completed albums, which definitely wasn't going to be enough to start a site with. I put in the work though, and I'm excited to be launching the site with 60+ albums. It's been a long time coming, and I'm proud to finally be able to give you - Dead Note Tabs

I want to thank pretendevour from UG for being a sounding board on the site. I also want to thank Ron of HLF MSR for coming up with the site logo. I had no idea what I wanted the logo to look like, only the vibe and he absolutely nailed it.