It's quite common these days: someone has made a guitar cover of a song, and you'd like to be able to play it. Mimicking the performer can be tedious, and creating the tablature by hand also is, and the sources on the Web sometimes have questionable quality. Instead of banging your head against the wall with one sheet after another and ASCII renderings that seem from a nightmare, what the service Soundslice offers is a complete system to create, correct and synchronize guitar tablatures to YouTube videos, all in a collaborative environment.
You don't need to look for examples of famous musicians who captivated the world with their creations, and yet couldn't read a single note: there are more than you imagine. It's the eternal conflict between instinct and discipline, which can be found even beyond music (how many CEOs dropped out of college, for example?). But practice never hurts, and those learning to play the guitar will eventually seek to cross paths with tablatures. YouTube has become an excellent source of information for self-taught players, and in some cases, the same people who made a cover or uploaded the video also offer a link to the tablatures.
Ideal Environment for Learning Guitar
So you can take the "scenic route", or try an online service called Soundslice. To understand how it works, nothing better than going through the example videos. Soundslice allows you to create and modify guitar tablatures, but at the same time sync them with the audio in the video. Originally the idea behind Soundslice was to work with audio files, but due to copyright issues the safest solution was to attach to YouTube videos.
The annotations generated in Soundslice, in its free version, are public, therefore there is a significant amount of songs to start learning. The free version also allows importing MusicXML files and from Guitar Pro. If you want to have the option to keep your annotations private, you'll need to pay a monthly subscription of five dollars, which also allows you to sync with MP3 and/or videos uploaded to the platform, as well as export your annotations, among other things.
If you are a teacher and you want to teach your students through Soundslice, you can spend twenty dollars per month to create private courses, have control over who sees your annotations and videos, as well as API access, among other things. If you are a developer and you want Soundslice working on your site, you'll need to pay fifty cents per user, with a minimum of one hundred dollars per month.
But to start using Soundslice to its fullest, you only need to create a free account and put it to the test. Most of the options are available, without limit, in the free version. If the service is useful for you to learn to play the guitar and you want or need the advanced options, only then will you have to pay a subscription.
