Guitar/chord sites Fall 2003

I did a bit of searching for Christmas songs with chords on the Internet.  Most of the “hits” were for sites where you can purchase music, but there were a few sites where you can print out an individual’s interpretation of the guitar chords.  I have listed a few that I discovered below, with notes about the quantity and quality of songs, ease of use, and whether they clog your screen with ads or bomb you with pop-ups.  Hyperlinks are given to the main page and also the Christmas song index, if any.

Most say for personal use only.

Some are plain text, others dressed up.

Some put the chords above the lyrics, others on the side.

All are subject to misspellings.

Some have multiple versions of the same song (submitted by different visitors), so their song totals may be inflated.  Of course, if the site focuses on music types you don’t want, the total is not of value anyway.

Try a few different ones as people may have recorded in different keys.  My brief excursion into the Web was not enough to get an idea of whether some sites filter out transcriptions with chords unknown to beginners.

 

The Guitar Guy

http://www.theguitarguy.com

A single collection of lyrics and chords.  Songs are mostly from the 1930s to 1970s, which pick up many of the “modern” Christmas songs.  A few unusual ones are marked by numbers.  Chords above the lyrics.

His home page says

The songs in this collection are songs that I (as a fan) consider classics -- most of them are, indeed, old classics. They are also songs that are rarely found elsewhere on the internet, which is why I transcribed them in the first place. And as of June 2003, to no one's surprise more than my own, there are now 900 of them here.

There are no ads of any kind on his site, which I appreciate.  He says you can suggest songs you want posted and he may add them.

He also has a chord chart at

http://www.theguitarguy.com/chord.htm

 

On-Line Guitar Archive (OLGA)

http://www.olga.net

Boasts over 28000 files as of December 2003.  The songs are either tab (*.btab) or chord (*.crd) files that you have to download individually, which makes browsing slower.

Plain text, many don’t have all the words, just the first words in the line.  These are sent in by different contributors, which may have chords above the lyrics or at the end of the line, as well as other comments by the submitter.  There are guides to reading tab format:

http://www.olga.net/faq/tabbing.php

and a chord generator at

http://www.olga.net/programs/web/chordgen/guitar.php

 

In the above search for “Silent Night”, there is no obvious way to choose (turns out the 2nd was chords above, the third was chords to the right, the fourth was a tab file).

 

Harmony Central

http://www.harmony-central.com/

Commercial site with reviews and sales of musical instruments.

There are many links for free guitar music (some non-functional) listed on the page

http://www.harmony-central.com/Guitar/tab.html

Link to On-Line Guitar Archive (OLGA).  The OLGA page says “Please note that you are NOT supporting OLGA if you use Harmony Central. They merely link to the files at olga.net”

Sometimes you get server messages about not being able to access the pages.  However, there is a Christmas song index not in the OLGA site itself.  It also tells you whether it is a chord or tab file.

http://www.harmony-central.com/Guitar/OLGA/all/misc_christmas.html

 

Christian Music Web

http://www.christianmusicweb.com/song_archives.html

Some color ads here.  Mostly text files with chords above lyrics; some attribute the submitter.  Not a good index, but you can search by title at

http://www.christianmusicweb.com/songs/All_Songs_Here/

or by performer at

http://www.christianmusicweb.com/songs/

 

About.com

About.com is a commercial portal that happens to have a guitar page

http://guitar.about.com/

and a Christmas song index at

http://guitar.about.com/library/blchristmassongmenu.htm

For each song you get a page asking whether you want to see lyrics or chords, so there is more clicking, and some pop-up ads. The songs I saw had chords over lyrics and some had a chord listing at the bottom.

Chordie

http://chordie.com/

There is a Christmas song (mostly secular) index at

http://chordie.com/song.php/songartist/Holiday

Ads are in the frame.  You get prompted for formatted or unformatted.  A few tries at formatted did not result in anything.

Text format, ones I saw had chords listed to the right of the lines.  Seem to be linked to different locations where the info was stored; lots of clicks to get in and out, but not the server problems like OLGA.

Has ads, chord generator below

http://www.tabheaven.com/chordgenerator.php

Started getting pop-ups after opening this.  Would use one of the other ones.

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