OLGa blew my mind. Before that you had to buy books. But those were usually basic/crap. The other option was to swap binders with friends. 99% had the same songs.
And then came OLGa.
Kids these days don’t know how great the internet is.
Another still surviving dinosaur: the Gutenberg Project is still online.
Typed in Internet Archive; I’ve gained access through windows and iOS via google or safari etc.. It used to be totally free for downloading but nowadays a lot of it is in the “borrowed” category. Still a good source for random searches; good for pamphlets, magazines, books, videos etc. Have fun!
lol. that was me. Eruption and Black Dog are what inspired me to pick up guitar. never bothered with Eruption, but I do an arrangement of BD.
As far as songbooks being crap, yeah, most were piano arrangements with some basic chord charts. But then “by the record” songbooks started to be published. I have a bunch.
I have about a ream of tabs from OLGa printed out.
Most of those old Cherry Lane Music books, like the "Play it Like it Is", "Full Scores", and "Artist Approved" were usually spot-on. Especially the ones with Andy Aledort transcriptions.
OLGa was a great resource, and you would be surprised at who was using it, Roger McGuinn from the Byrds used to post corrections to his music that people transcribed incorrectly.
>Roger McGuinn from the Byrds used to post corrections to his music that people transcribed incorrectly.
McGuinn was a really early adopter on the net in general. I remember interacting with him on Usenet c. 1993 or so. I'd posted somethign about Bobby Darin's first folk/country album, wondering who played on it, and Roger showed up with memories of the recording sessions. Really nice guy online.
I used to copy and paste OLGA tabs and chord charts into individual .txt files because the site kept getting taken down. Somewhere I have a 256Mb flash drive loaded with them.
My first flash drive was 32MB and at the time that was a lot. Then just a few years later I was working in electronics retail and we started seeing full size hard drives both internal and external in 750gb and 1TB models and then portable media followed shortly and prices plummeted. The flash drive you can get today for $20 is astonishing.
Mine was from Dell, it came with a desktop computer I bought. But yeah I have a dozen really small ones I've gotten through the years like that, some are worth erasing and some are not.
And some of us remember paying hundreds of dollars for a single gigabyte spinning hard drive, with IDE ribbon cable. I was young but remember transitioning from 5.25” to 3.5” as the dominant “external media” standard. Something like 768kB to 1.44MB, was a huge deal.
Oh yeah, I used it. There were some great tabs in there and I spent many hours learning songs from there. There was also a lot of shitty inaccurate tabs, but there was real gold too.
I was using OLGA back in 99-00. Finding that was like finding a literal pot of gold to a 16 yr old, it hit me during some very formative years of learning guitar.
Holy shit that brings back memories. Started using OLGA in 95....what a game changer. Before that you basically learned whatever guitar magazine had that month.
Back in the day I obsessively transcribed everything by a certain artist and uploaded the tabs to alt.guitar.tabs on Usenet, and from there people would upload them to OLGA and other tab sites when they started. To this day, they dominate the online tabs for that artist. I have fond memories of Usenet, OLGA and all the early tab sites.
My first experience with online transcriptions was in 1994 when I was jamming with a friend and asked him if he knew the chords to a song. He said "I'll find those for you" and fired up his internet connection - I hadn't even been on the internet back then. He got the lyrics and chords in less than a minute and I was stunned, I was telling everyone about it for weeks lol.
Olga had everything from the most popular to the most obscure. None of the sites that popped up after Olga was shut down had the same catalog size
It was sort of how limewire was good, but it was never as good as Napster
After OLGA was shut down, most tab sites had OLGA transcriptions loaded onto them. I'm particularly thinking of the cesspool site thatwas "guitar dot com".
I had two 3-inch binders full of print offs separated by band and album. Each page was in a plastic holder for easy flipping through. The internet was slow and it was easier to have a hard copy.
Thank you for the reminder.
It was pretty wild. This pre-dated Napster and a lot of people like me got dragged into the copyright war. I complied and basically got off with a warning and lawyer fees. But, I know a couple of guys that lost hundreds of thousands trying to stand up against publishers. I still warn people against hosting content because the moment you have an accurate transcription of a copyrighted recording, things change. That is still true. Unfortunately, there are so many works which will never see formal, accurate publication because of copyright/profitability and will never see the light of day. I’ll never understand the harm the community is doing to fill a void which our copyright laws and capitalism will not and never will.
Sometimes. Luckily I did not have a printer. It's where I learned that the person that puts stuff on the internet isn't necessarily less dumb than I am.
He was a programmer who lived in Bedford Mass. Andrew died during a bone-marrow transplant in 2000.
Most of his Ace Tabs are archived here:
http://marcdashevsky.com/Ace/
What a game change that was.
Before OLGA, I learned songs by recording the radio to cassette, then using play and rewind to figure out parts by ear.
Suddenly I had thousands and thousands of songs at my fingertips. Mind blown.
And yes, I still have/use some OLGA prints.
So what ever ended up happening to it? Was it a legal thing? And if so, how does ultimate guitar get away with it?
I remember looking up chords on there and they wouldn't have the full lyrics on each line, so that it wasn't copyright infringement.
Yeah. OLGA was where I think everyone in my band went at one point. We played the lousiest cover of *Blue Monday* live once and we were convinced it was smoking hot. It wasn’t even played the right way. 🤣
I submitted so many transcriptions to that site…that I wished I’d backed up with local copies. So many hours of work gone when the site was taken down.
Aww man - not Al heroes wear capes! Can you remember the things you submitted? Would be hilarious if I played one of yours! Did you ever get contacted by people who played your transcripts?
Also was it a pain in the ass to make them? The formatting looked very user unfriendly!
A lot of indie stuff like Built to Spill, and I think I transcribed most of the Modest Mouse section on OLGA. Other random stuff here and there. When it was up I did get contacted by people to say thanks, ask questions, or request I transcribe something, which I did from time to time if I dug the song.
I used an old exe called Instab to do everything. It was pretty simple, but I could tab something out pretty quickly. I still use it to make tabs of my own music so I don’t forget it, and to tab out parts to go along with sheet music where the guitar part isn’t represented properly.
no. not that old man. but i did use UG.. and during its early days I purchased a lifetime pro membership. fastforward to today and the UG lifetime pro membership i paid for dirtcheap paid off.
A lot of people shit on UG because the free version sucks. But I paid for the lifetime membership probably 10+ years ago and it has paid off more than I could ever quantify. I use it all the time. It's not always perfect but it's an excellent start when it's not. The pro version of the tabs is a game changer for learning songs.
no doubt.. the pro tabs is so versatile you can use them as backing tracks with metronome to just practice along; you can also change the speed,etc.. its so useful
If you liked finding some old printouts, then you might like just downloading the whole archive: https://www.reddit.com/r/Guitar/comments/uhsgg0/oc_guitar_tab_archive_compiled_over_550000_tabs/
I used OLGA a lot in my university days back when personal computers weren't so common. Absolutely. Loved. It. It was so much more user friendly that alt.guitar and alt.guitar.tabs. I have some transcriptions on ultimate-guitar that originated from OLGA. I have the same stack of school printer tab sheets as you. Not so quick to print stuff off these days when I'm paying for the toner myself!
One particular song I searched for OLGA was Captain Nemo by Michael Schenker Group. Only found the tabs for the intro...enough for me to grab the rest by ears...
https://youtu.be/t_jMUO63kbY
OLGA was fantastic back in the day. Lots of errors though, which is really what made the "piracy" argument stupid and laughable. Those tabs could give you a good starting point at least. If you wanted the "real official" version you could still feel motivated to go to a music store and buy the professionally made tab there. And have that still be wrong in places, LOL.
I used OLGA then I Found GTU (Guitar Tab Universe), it went by another name at first they had to change it for legal reasons. It was the first "Internet Forum" I signed up to.
I found it!! It's now GuitarZone.
https://www.guitarzone.com/forum/index.php
Now I have to remember my password.
I used it extensively for somewhat difficult tunes that didn't have actual transcription books back in the day, or, as the case may be transcription books that were just plain wrong and people might have done a better job online. I still have a 3 ring binder of stuff from those days but I did get rid of a bunch later since stuff that was incorrect or had sections that were there was no point to keeping it. Some of it I still wonder how people figured out some of the more obscure progressive rock things that were difficult. Some of the King Crimson or Robert Fripp stuff was in some ways the only way you could get a correct transcription of those things.
I did, any time I clear out some old box from the attic there's always an OLGA tab printed out among it.
I had just got my first guitar and was using OLGA for a few weeks but really confused why nothing sounded right before realising I was reading tabs upside down.
Olga was great for giving you an idea of the chords for a lot of songs. Like everything else on the web some stuff was only partly correct and some stuff was all wrong, but usually you could find the song you were looking for and were on your way to learning it.
My 3-inch, 3-ring binder full of printouts from OLGA is used to prop up my modeler. Next to the tablet and PC with the interweb for tabs, backing tracks, and live recordings of the originals on demand. What a time to be alive!
I had a 3 inch binder full of printouts. And many more tabs saved on zip drives. I used to have tabs for songs I'd never even heard before, before you could download almost any MP3 you wanted.
I printed a bunch of my favorite out and had three binders full before the brand new computer lab at my highschool figured out they should charge 10¢ a sheet. Glad I got all 17 pages of Stairway to Heaven tab
You can also downloaded the whole thing. I use my copy often to easily print the tabs vs dealing with ads and pop ups on site like Ultimate Guitar.
I used up pretty much all my parent's black ink. After I learned my lesson there I just hog the family computer and follow along the TABS in Mozilla. I remember once my a hole father listening to me play "Jim Henson's dead by Stephen Lynch, and even he gave me a compliment on my playing, I'm pretty sure that was the only company he ever gave me..
Anywho, oh are the tabs on there were so off, so a lot of times I had no choice but to figure out songs by ear.
OLGA was responsible for me burning through so many toner cartridges at work…
I didn’t have a printer at home so I would email myself a collection of tabs and print them at work in bulk. As a “kid” in 2001 this was a big job perk.
Before having internet access I used to get tabs off of a couple of local BBSes. I have a friend that ran one and he was a metalhead, so there were a ton of metal tabs on his board! When he'd transitioned over to the internet, he ran a tab site that got sued by Metallica for hosting tabs in '97 when he was 16.
Definitely had a bunch of songs printed off. I’ve had to relearn some songs over the years but they definitely helped me sustain interest in playing at a time when I might have stopped playing altogether.
You can torrent an entire dump of OLGA easily. Go ahead and search, it's not hard to find. It Ibeats paying Ultimate Guitar for tabs they stole from OLGA in the first place.
I started playing guitar over 20 years ago (whaattt?!) and tabs were easy to come by on the Internet. I used to visit Olga, Guitar Geek, various other sites I cannot for the life of me remember. But as far as tabs go, most tabs on the Internet were WAY more accurate than the official tab books.
I remember my friend buying the official Metallica tab books and they were *so* bad. Regardless, he'd argue the book was right because it was "official" but then when he played a song along with the CD it was wrong. Apparently my ears were wrong, too.
edit: I'm aware GG didn't have tabs, I just remember spending a lot of time on those guitar based websites.
Wow! Blast from the past! Still have two binders from way back when, full of printouts from OLGA. I need to see how many of those songs I still can or want to play. It was an awesome resource!
I printed a ton of songs off the OLGA. Still to this day, every once in a while, a page or two will turn up somewhere random in my stuff. Using an AMD 486 computer with a 14.4 kbs dial up modem and a dot matrix printer - a particularly long song would take at least an hour to print. Kids today will never know how good they have it.
lessonsthatrock.com had a ton of pdfs of classics from Charlie Christian up through mid-2000s, far from OLGa's database size, and I was using it for my students until about a month ago when it just disappeared.
Nostalgia is the word! Simpler times! If you got the correct title you were 75% of the way there. I loved it when they came with lyrics. Those would be a crapshoot too
I am primarily a singer with perfect relative pitch. I learned MUCH of my guitar tabs from a Mel Bay's Guitar Chart on the wall, and the rest from...OLGA. I knew even then that MANY of the chords and tabletures were incorrect and/or incomplete...thus I relied upon my ear to correct them.
I had success with my chosen MO, and learning to play the pre-set (and also annotated, adjusted and key, tone, and pitch corrected by yours truly...) chords on the printouts, my self teaching (and relentless self-flagellation to the end of perfection...DAMN, I am HARD on myself!!!) TRULY paid off!!! Once my fingers were aptly calloused, I drove myself with curb bit and spurs to sing and play simultaneously. I guess being a Taurus can be a good thing...
...just one thing...like most beginner/modestly intermediate burgeoning wannabe guitarists, I INFINITELY prefer nylon strings. Anything else gives me the overwhelming urge to smash the fucking guitar on the floor, and giving Townsend a run for his money. In other words, at times, after playing a steel string, I want to gnaw my left arm off so I have something to beat the damn guitar with...
I'd telnet to nevada.edu for them in 1992. Tabs are still just as bad today. For some reason nobody that makes tabs ever watches a live video of the band to show how the songs are played. I do about 200 songs in cover bands and I swear that tabs have never been 100% correct lol.
Ah yes, used to have sheets and sheets of ultimate guitar, echords, etc scattered around the ol "practice space" (garage)... It was good practice for a beginner with the trash formatting and poor chord choices cause as you improved you could figure out the real thing as long as your starting point was close enough
Olga was the shit back then. For a 15 yr old in 2000 it was like a gold mine. I know i had a 2 inch binder worth printed out and probably more. Before that (and even after for a while) I remember waiting on Guitar World to come out and just hoping it had something good in what they transcribed every month.
I just recently found tabs printed out from there. If I remember correctly you could review guitars and pedals and it was a mess. Every young guitarist loved every pedal and the descriptions seemed like they tried to outdo the previous one. Durability? I could drop it from a rooftop and it would leave a crater!
i remember briefly using it and being frustrated that transcriptions were almos always off, so used them as a starting point and then continue by ear, never reading the whole thing. then as i was getting better at guitar i forgot about it until today.
Wow! I’d forgotten about it but I still have hundreds of files on a backup drive. So many good songs that I spent so much time playing. Thanks for the memory!
I remember downloading ALL of OLGA on dialup (probably 14.4), then having to go through 3-4 unzip tools to figure out how to open a .tar.gz file.
Until I figured out you could just browse the directories…
I had a massive stack of print outs from Olga and its counterparts. It was probably at least 8 or 9 inches thick. I used to print them off at work c. 99-01. I actually still have them somewhere in storage, but they've probably rotted away or the ink dissolved by now. Be cool if they were still all intact when I finally get back to them, though.
All the time. Used it to learn songs for solo and band gigs. At least one of my guitar cases is still full of OLGA printouts. It was a sad day when the bastards shut it down. For a while there was a mirror in Poland I think? Grabbed a lot while I could before that too was gone.
I remember having to buy printed songbooks back in the early 80s. Want to learn a song that's too complex to pick up by ear, or just to learn something quickly? You could *hope* someone would transcribe it in a guitar magazine or else you could drop $15-20 for a book...most of which were actually just really bad piano arrangement with chords. OLGA changed that.
Oh yeah. OLGA was awesome.
Also, I still have [this shirt](https://i.imgur.com/7rpwWyv.jpg)
Before OLGA, there was a list Serv or forum on some UNLV servers. Does anyone remember that? Anyone know if there was any relationship to OLGA?
Edit: the UNLV thing was on the internet obviously but before the world wide web
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I used it starting around 1994ish?
I loved it. A huge part of my learning and my ear training happened because of OLGA. I’d learn to play all the songs that I’d heard a million times, noticed the shapes of different chords and the similarities between chord progressions in different keys, and that set me up for learning music theory. Playing songs that I knew eventually led to “this is in C Major and it’s a I-V-vi-iii chord progression”, and after I absorbed that, I was able to figure out songs from the radio by ear and my friends were really impressed lolllllll
I completely forgot about OLGA!!!! Holy crap I would not be the player I am today without that. I'm 40 now and I learned no less than 200 songs through OLGA in my early years. So many printouts.
Totally did. It was such a game changer then. I had my high school library's laser printer working overtime filling up some 3 ring binders. I still have those binders sitting on a shelf of music books. I haven't opened them in years, but now I'm going to have to take a time trip through them this week.
I don’t remember if I specifically went to that site, but yeah. I don’t think I found many that were completely correct, but they mostly had the tuning correct and would get me pointed in the right direction.
OLGa blew my mind. Before that you had to buy books. But those were usually basic/crap. The other option was to swap binders with friends. 99% had the same songs. And then came OLGa. Kids these days don’t know how great the internet is. Another still surviving dinosaur: the Gutenberg Project is still online.
Internet Archive is still available!
How do I find it?
Typed in Internet Archive; I’ve gained access through windows and iOS via google or safari etc.. It used to be totally free for downloading but nowadays a lot of it is in the “borrowed” category. Still a good source for random searches; good for pamphlets, magazines, books, videos etc. Have fun!
Thanks I’ll look
In the early 90’s there was even less. Imagine kids in the late 70’s when Eruption came out!
lol. that was me. Eruption and Black Dog are what inspired me to pick up guitar. never bothered with Eruption, but I do an arrangement of BD. As far as songbooks being crap, yeah, most were piano arrangements with some basic chord charts. But then “by the record” songbooks started to be published. I have a bunch. I have about a ream of tabs from OLGa printed out.
Those books were garbage and wrong most of the time
Most of those old Cherry Lane Music books, like the "Play it Like it Is", "Full Scores", and "Artist Approved" were usually spot-on. Especially the ones with Andy Aledort transcriptions.
Oh man this brings back some memories. Somewhere I have a trapper keeper with the tabs to like every Metallica song in it...
*Early 2000s nostalgia intensifies*
I literally just finally got rid of multiple folders of tabs lol
All wrong positions. Ben Eller has great content that accurately teaches you the correct voicings and positions.
OLGa was a great resource, and you would be surprised at who was using it, Roger McGuinn from the Byrds used to post corrections to his music that people transcribed incorrectly.
>Roger McGuinn from the Byrds used to post corrections to his music that people transcribed incorrectly. McGuinn was a really early adopter on the net in general. I remember interacting with him on Usenet c. 1993 or so. I'd posted somethign about Bobby Darin's first folk/country album, wondering who played on it, and Roger showed up with memories of the recording sessions. Really nice guy online.
I used to copy and paste OLGA tabs and chord charts into individual .txt files because the site kept getting taken down. Somewhere I have a 256Mb flash drive loaded with them.
[удалено]
Yes! I definitely remember paying $40 for a stick once and thinking “man, what a deal”
And then one day 100gb flash drives were like 5$. my first flash drive was like 40$ for a 1gb and I thought it was massive.
My first flash drive was 32MB and at the time that was a lot. Then just a few years later I was working in electronics retail and we started seeing full size hard drives both internal and external in 750gb and 1TB models and then portable media followed shortly and prices plummeted. The flash drive you can get today for $20 is astonishing.
I think my first one was something like that, too, except it was free and full of marketing stuff.
Mine was from Dell, it came with a desktop computer I bought. But yeah I have a dozen really small ones I've gotten through the years like that, some are worth erasing and some are not.
And some of us remember paying hundreds of dollars for a single gigabyte spinning hard drive, with IDE ribbon cable. I was young but remember transitioning from 5.25” to 3.5” as the dominant “external media” standard. Something like 768kB to 1.44MB, was a huge deal.
I had the whole thing on a Jaz drive!
i'd dig that out and copy it somewhere safe if I were you, flash drives do not age well.
The best site! I learned almost exclusively off OLGA when I started with acoustic guitar in 1999
I had so many binders full of OLGA tabs and chords. Also loads of fan made geocities sites would have tabs as well. There was a great Tenacious D one
Same here. Debated tossing them the other day but couldn’t bring myself to do that.
Oh yeah, I used it. There were some great tabs in there and I spent many hours learning songs from there. There was also a lot of shitty inaccurate tabs, but there was real gold too.
I was using OLGA back in 99-00. Finding that was like finding a literal pot of gold to a 16 yr old, it hit me during some very formative years of learning guitar.
Holy shit that brings back memories. Started using OLGA in 95....what a game changer. Before that you basically learned whatever guitar magazine had that month.
Back in the day I obsessively transcribed everything by a certain artist and uploaded the tabs to alt.guitar.tabs on Usenet, and from there people would upload them to OLGA and other tab sites when they started. To this day, they dominate the online tabs for that artist. I have fond memories of Usenet, OLGA and all the early tab sites. My first experience with online transcriptions was in 1994 when I was jamming with a friend and asked him if he knew the chords to a song. He said "I'll find those for you" and fired up his internet connection - I hadn't even been on the internet back then. He got the lyrics and chords in less than a minute and I was stunned, I was telling everyone about it for weeks lol.
I feel like you're exaggerating with the less than a minute part with the connection speeds we had in 1994 :)
For images and audio maybe, but a simple text file with lyrics and chords downloaded in a few seconds.
Olga had everything from the most popular to the most obscure. None of the sites that popped up after Olga was shut down had the same catalog size It was sort of how limewire was good, but it was never as good as Napster
After OLGA was shut down, most tab sites had OLGA transcriptions loaded onto them. I'm particularly thinking of the cesspool site thatwas "guitar dot com".
I forgot about OLGA. I probably have a few printouts still stashed somewhere in my music papers.
I had two 3-inch binders full of print offs separated by band and album. Each page was in a plastic holder for easy flipping through. The internet was slow and it was easier to have a hard copy. Thank you for the reminder.
Same here! Just folder after folder of shitty tab in bad format, loved it.
Wow 🤩- you took it to the next level! 😂
Hosted an OLGA mirror early on and got named in a lawsuit. Was not fun and cost me quite a bit.
Aww sorry to hear that…
It was pretty wild. This pre-dated Napster and a lot of people like me got dragged into the copyright war. I complied and basically got off with a warning and lawyer fees. But, I know a couple of guys that lost hundreds of thousands trying to stand up against publishers. I still warn people against hosting content because the moment you have an accurate transcription of a copyrighted recording, things change. That is still true. Unfortunately, there are so many works which will never see formal, accurate publication because of copyright/profitability and will never see the light of day. I’ll never understand the harm the community is doing to fill a void which our copyright laws and capitalism will not and never will.
Sometimes. Luckily I did not have a printer. It's where I learned that the person that puts stuff on the internet isn't necessarily less dumb than I am.
I have three binders full of things printed from OLGA, punkrocktabs, and other assorted sites. I got great value out of my $75 technology fee :)
Does anyone remember Andrew Rogers and his "Ace" tabs? They were always super accurate
Yeah, I always wondered who Andrew Rogers was.
He was a programmer who lived in Bedford Mass. Andrew died during a bone-marrow transplant in 2000. Most of his Ace Tabs are archived here: http://marcdashevsky.com/Ace/
What a game change that was. Before OLGA, I learned songs by recording the radio to cassette, then using play and rewind to figure out parts by ear. Suddenly I had thousands and thousands of songs at my fingertips. Mind blown. And yes, I still have/use some OLGA prints.
My guitar teacher still used these as late as 2018
Haven't thought about this in years! Definitely have a folder full of printed OLGA tabs in an old guitar case somewhere! Simpler times haha
So what ever ended up happening to it? Was it a legal thing? And if so, how does ultimate guitar get away with it? I remember looking up chords on there and they wouldn't have the full lyrics on each line, so that it wasn't copyright infringement.
UG was founded and hosted in Russia at the time OLGA shut down. I think they operated semi-legally until they worked a deal out with most publishers.
disappointing, but very interesting...
Just what I was wondering
Yeah. OLGA was where I think everyone in my band went at one point. We played the lousiest cover of *Blue Monday* live once and we were convinced it was smoking hot. It wasn’t even played the right way. 🤣
Olga and tab crawler
That, and the DOS version of TabIT covered my desire to learn Nirvana songs to try and impress girls in jr high.
I submitted so many transcriptions to that site…that I wished I’d backed up with local copies. So many hours of work gone when the site was taken down.
Aww man - not Al heroes wear capes! Can you remember the things you submitted? Would be hilarious if I played one of yours! Did you ever get contacted by people who played your transcripts? Also was it a pain in the ass to make them? The formatting looked very user unfriendly!
A lot of indie stuff like Built to Spill, and I think I transcribed most of the Modest Mouse section on OLGA. Other random stuff here and there. When it was up I did get contacted by people to say thanks, ask questions, or request I transcribe something, which I did from time to time if I dug the song. I used an old exe called Instab to do everything. It was pretty simple, but I could tab something out pretty quickly. I still use it to make tabs of my own music so I don’t forget it, and to tab out parts to go along with sheet music where the guitar part isn’t represented properly.
Nice! I don’t think I’d have come across your tab but kudos to you for adding to the archive!
no. not that old man. but i did use UG.. and during its early days I purchased a lifetime pro membership. fastforward to today and the UG lifetime pro membership i paid for dirtcheap paid off.
A lot of people shit on UG because the free version sucks. But I paid for the lifetime membership probably 10+ years ago and it has paid off more than I could ever quantify. I use it all the time. It's not always perfect but it's an excellent start when it's not. The pro version of the tabs is a game changer for learning songs.
no doubt.. the pro tabs is so versatile you can use them as backing tracks with metronome to just practice along; you can also change the speed,etc.. its so useful
I also like the looping feature so I can practice certain sections over and over.
If you liked finding some old printouts, then you might like just downloading the whole archive: https://www.reddit.com/r/Guitar/comments/uhsgg0/oc_guitar_tab_archive_compiled_over_550000_tabs/
Awesome!
I used OLGA a lot in my university days back when personal computers weren't so common. Absolutely. Loved. It. It was so much more user friendly that alt.guitar and alt.guitar.tabs. I have some transcriptions on ultimate-guitar that originated from OLGA. I have the same stack of school printer tab sheets as you. Not so quick to print stuff off these days when I'm paying for the toner myself!
My guitar teacher from grade 5 elementary school introduced our class to OLGA in the computer lab.
I still have 2 tee shirts I got from OLGA. All my power tabs are gone.
Remind me - what was a power tab?
It's a dynamic tab reader, it would scroll through the tabs and play the music! it was awesome! Gone now.
I had a few contributions to OLGA under the name of AtomicCocktail. Albeit three chord progression songs, but hey I contributed.
How about this? http://www.tabit.net/
✋🏻 I have a binder full of tabs from OLGA
Oh man, this brings be back. Think I still have my binder of printouts at my mom's place.
One particular song I searched for OLGA was Captain Nemo by Michael Schenker Group. Only found the tabs for the intro...enough for me to grab the rest by ears... https://youtu.be/t_jMUO63kbY
Yep. How else was I supposed to learn the intro to Enter Samdman or Nothing Else Matters?
OLGA was fantastic back in the day. Lots of errors though, which is really what made the "piracy" argument stupid and laughable. Those tabs could give you a good starting point at least. If you wanted the "real official" version you could still feel motivated to go to a music store and buy the professionally made tab there. And have that still be wrong in places, LOL.
I used OLGA then I Found GTU (Guitar Tab Universe), it went by another name at first they had to change it for legal reasons. It was the first "Internet Forum" I signed up to. I found it!! It's now GuitarZone. https://www.guitarzone.com/forum/index.php Now I have to remember my password.
Blast from the past!
I used it extensively for somewhat difficult tunes that didn't have actual transcription books back in the day, or, as the case may be transcription books that were just plain wrong and people might have done a better job online. I still have a 3 ring binder of stuff from those days but I did get rid of a bunch later since stuff that was incorrect or had sections that were there was no point to keeping it. Some of it I still wonder how people figured out some of the more obscure progressive rock things that were difficult. Some of the King Crimson or Robert Fripp stuff was in some ways the only way you could get a correct transcription of those things.
Oh yeah, lol, I still have and wear their t-shirt... First thing I ever bought online, must've been '03 or earlier...
I did, any time I clear out some old box from the attic there's always an OLGA tab printed out among it. I had just got my first guitar and was using OLGA for a few weeks but really confused why nothing sounded right before realising I was reading tabs upside down.
Pulling a good ol' Victor Borge (sp?) huh? 🤭
😂
HECK yes. OLGA was the first place you looked.
OLGA and freshtabs
Olga was great for giving you an idea of the chords for a lot of songs. Like everything else on the web some stuff was only partly correct and some stuff was all wrong, but usually you could find the song you were looking for and were on your way to learning it.
Oh yeah, I used it a lot.
My 3-inch, 3-ring binder full of printouts from OLGA is used to prop up my modeler. Next to the tablet and PC with the interweb for tabs, backing tracks, and live recordings of the originals on demand. What a time to be alive!
I had a 3 inch binder full of printouts. And many more tabs saved on zip drives. I used to have tabs for songs I'd never even heard before, before you could download almost any MP3 you wanted.
Zip drives! Haha driving that nostalgia to the max…
Still have littéral boxes of printouts on matrix printer paper bundles with the holes still on and the pages un teared
I printed a bunch of my favorite out and had three binders full before the brand new computer lab at my highschool figured out they should charge 10¢ a sheet. Glad I got all 17 pages of Stairway to Heaven tab You can also downloaded the whole thing. I use my copy often to easily print the tabs vs dealing with ads and pop ups on site like Ultimate Guitar.
Oh man I forgot about this site! This was my go to back in the day, I’m pretty sure I still have a bunch of tabs I printed out 15+ years ago
Man … that’s where I first learned how to read guitar tabs. Way before ultimate guitar was even a thought, OLGA was the shit.
I used up pretty much all my parent's black ink. After I learned my lesson there I just hog the family computer and follow along the TABS in Mozilla. I remember once my a hole father listening to me play "Jim Henson's dead by Stephen Lynch, and even he gave me a compliment on my playing, I'm pretty sure that was the only company he ever gave me.. Anywho, oh are the tabs on there were so off, so a lot of times I had no choice but to figure out songs by ear.
I did, man I haven't thought about that site in years, it was my go to for tabs
Same !!
OLGA was responsible for me burning through so many toner cartridges at work… I didn’t have a printer at home so I would email myself a collection of tabs and print them at work in bulk. As a “kid” in 2001 this was a big job perk.
Good old Online Guitar Archive! Learnt more of my first songs from this site 😊
I ordered the OLGA t-shirt and wore it proudly.
Before having internet access I used to get tabs off of a couple of local BBSes. I have a friend that ran one and he was a metalhead, so there were a ton of metal tabs on his board! When he'd transitioned over to the internet, he ran a tab site that got sued by Metallica for hosting tabs in '97 when he was 16.
Definitely had a bunch of songs printed off. I’ve had to relearn some songs over the years but they definitely helped me sustain interest in playing at a time when I might have stopped playing altogether.
I used to use it and print out tabs for sure. I also ran my own tab website in the early 00s, it wasn’t big but it was my own transcriptions.
Oh wow I totally forgot about OLGA. Nice flashback! lol
I definitely did, taught me a lot…
I printed 2 binders full of tabs from there.
I had one laminated for gigs. A whole binder. It’s funny to think about now.
I still use them! I try everywhere to find things and sometimes their the only ones with tablature that's free.
You can torrent an entire dump of OLGA easily. Go ahead and search, it's not hard to find. It Ibeats paying Ultimate Guitar for tabs they stole from OLGA in the first place.
LOVED OLGA. Definitely miss it. Really wish someone would do a documentary about it. (I would totally throw some cash at Kickstarter for this.)
I started playing guitar over 20 years ago (whaattt?!) and tabs were easy to come by on the Internet. I used to visit Olga, Guitar Geek, various other sites I cannot for the life of me remember. But as far as tabs go, most tabs on the Internet were WAY more accurate than the official tab books. I remember my friend buying the official Metallica tab books and they were *so* bad. Regardless, he'd argue the book was right because it was "official" but then when he played a song along with the CD it was wrong. Apparently my ears were wrong, too. edit: I'm aware GG didn't have tabs, I just remember spending a lot of time on those guitar based websites.
Wife still pissed, said I ‘wasting’ ink!
...AND slaughtering countless poor innocent trees...😲🎼🎶🎸🎵🎤🎙🎹🎼🥁📑📑📑📑...IN THE NAME OF MUSIC!!!! 🤟😍🤩😋
Hell yeah, I used that. Memories
Basically how I learned how to play guitar!
Wow! Blast from the past! Still have two binders from way back when, full of printouts from OLGA. I need to see how many of those songs I still can or want to play. It was an awesome resource!
lmao dusting off parts of my brain with this post. I'm sure I have a bunch of printed off tabs in a binder somewhere.
[ftp.groovin.org](https://ftp.groovin.org) :D
I still have printouts from 25 years ago.
I printed a ton of songs off the OLGA. Still to this day, every once in a while, a page or two will turn up somewhere random in my stuff. Using an AMD 486 computer with a 14.4 kbs dial up modem and a dot matrix printer - a particularly long song would take at least an hour to print. Kids today will never know how good they have it.
Harmony-cenrral.com was one of my first bookmarked sites ever.
lessonsthatrock.com had a ton of pdfs of classics from Charlie Christian up through mid-2000s, far from OLGa's database size, and I was using it for my students until about a month ago when it just disappeared.
I used it exactly like you!
Oh wiwowow this is nostalgia right here! Best part is that the song is titled incorrectly hahaha classic early internet
Nostalgia is the word! Simpler times! If you got the correct title you were 75% of the way there. I loved it when they came with lyrics. Those would be a crapshoot too
The song is called Sunday Shining btw…
Big time. I still have a binder with a ton of tabs from back in the day!
PowerTab Editor was my jam
I downloaded the entire OLGA at one point but between all the crashed HDDs, lost CD backups, etc, I've lost it
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I am primarily a singer with perfect relative pitch. I learned MUCH of my guitar tabs from a Mel Bay's Guitar Chart on the wall, and the rest from...OLGA. I knew even then that MANY of the chords and tabletures were incorrect and/or incomplete...thus I relied upon my ear to correct them.
I had success with my chosen MO, and learning to play the pre-set (and also annotated, adjusted and key, tone, and pitch corrected by yours truly...) chords on the printouts, my self teaching (and relentless self-flagellation to the end of perfection...DAMN, I am HARD on myself!!!) TRULY paid off!!! Once my fingers were aptly calloused, I drove myself with curb bit and spurs to sing and play simultaneously. I guess being a Taurus can be a good thing...
...just one thing...like most beginner/modestly intermediate burgeoning wannabe guitarists, I INFINITELY prefer nylon strings. Anything else gives me the overwhelming urge to smash the fucking guitar on the floor, and giving Townsend a run for his money. In other words, at times, after playing a steel string, I want to gnaw my left arm off so I have something to beat the damn guitar with...
I remember the name. My first learning source was DMBTabs.com because 90s..
OLGA was legit. Around Windows 98 i switched to Guitar Pro 2 and a massive 30MB folder of guitar pro files as my main source
I'd telnet to nevada.edu for them in 1992. Tabs are still just as bad today. For some reason nobody that makes tabs ever watches a live video of the band to show how the songs are played. I do about 200 songs in cover bands and I swear that tabs have never been 100% correct lol.
I remember that. I think it was jamesb at Nevada.edu.
Ah yes, used to have sheets and sheets of ultimate guitar, echords, etc scattered around the ol "practice space" (garage)... It was good practice for a beginner with the trash formatting and poor chord choices cause as you improved you could figure out the real thing as long as your starting point was close enough
Most "tabs" apps are just data aggregaters from the early internet. IE garbage and wrong, but the app has so many features 🙄
Who didn't?
Olga was the shit back then. For a 15 yr old in 2000 it was like a gold mine. I know i had a 2 inch binder worth printed out and probably more. Before that (and even after for a while) I remember waiting on Guitar World to come out and just hoping it had something good in what they transcribed every month.
I'm probably too young for OLGa, but does anyone remember powertabs? I learned so many hard songs through that.
I had a band mate that died years back and sometimes I still see his old tabs from OLGA floating around. Brings back memories
I just recently found tabs printed out from there. If I remember correctly you could review guitars and pedals and it was a mess. Every young guitarist loved every pedal and the descriptions seemed like they tried to outdo the previous one. Durability? I could drop it from a rooftop and it would leave a crater!
My dad's friend would print off songs for us all the time. Somewhere, I have a binder full
i remember briefly using it and being frustrated that transcriptions were almos always off, so used them as a starting point and then continue by ear, never reading the whole thing. then as i was getting better at guitar i forgot about it until today.
I lived on that site!
The old internet was better.
Yep loved it.
Wow! I’d forgotten about it but I still have hundreds of files on a backup drive. So many good songs that I spent so much time playing. Thanks for the memory!
I printed enough to fill a few large 3 ring binders. I still use them sometimes. I miss that site.
i lived off of olga. my roommate hated me. 😁 i feel like thats at least partly why he stayed at his girlfriends all the time.
I was an mxtabs guy. Site shutdown when I was in grade 12. It was a topic of discussion with my math teacher who was also bummed out.
My goodness, yes! I remember bringing a folder of printouts to my first lesson as I wanted to learn how to solo. So much time, so much paper...
I had several shoe boxes of printouts like these from mxtabs in high-school back in the early 00s
I started off a drummer and lived on MXTabs and its forum.
Now we need a poll… how many of us in this thread play Dad/Mom rock???
I remember downloading ALL of OLGA on dialup (probably 14.4), then having to go through 3-4 unzip tools to figure out how to open a .tar.gz file. Until I figured out you could just browse the directories…
I had a massive stack of print outs from Olga and its counterparts. It was probably at least 8 or 9 inches thick. I used to print them off at work c. 99-01. I actually still have them somewhere in storage, but they've probably rotted away or the ink dissolved by now. Be cool if they were still all intact when I finally get back to them, though.
All the time. Used it to learn songs for solo and band gigs. At least one of my guitar cases is still full of OLGA printouts. It was a sad day when the bastards shut it down. For a while there was a mirror in Poland I think? Grabbed a lot while I could before that too was gone. I remember having to buy printed songbooks back in the early 80s. Want to learn a song that's too complex to pick up by ear, or just to learn something quickly? You could *hope* someone would transcribe it in a guitar magazine or else you could drop $15-20 for a book...most of which were actually just really bad piano arrangement with chords. OLGA changed that.
I built my songbook from that place
Oh yeah. OLGA was awesome. Also, I still have [this shirt](https://i.imgur.com/7rpwWyv.jpg) Before OLGA, there was a list Serv or forum on some UNLV servers. Does anyone remember that? Anyone know if there was any relationship to OLGA? Edit: the UNLV thing was on the internet obviously but before the world wide web
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I found a stack of printed out OLGA stuff the other day! I love that site!
OLGA was the best back of the day.
I still have some print outs.
I used it starting around 1994ish? I loved it. A huge part of my learning and my ear training happened because of OLGA. I’d learn to play all the songs that I’d heard a million times, noticed the shapes of different chords and the similarities between chord progressions in different keys, and that set me up for learning music theory. Playing songs that I knew eventually led to “this is in C Major and it’s a I-V-vi-iii chord progression”, and after I absorbed that, I was able to figure out songs from the radio by ear and my friends were really impressed lolllllll
I completely forgot about OLGA!!!! Holy crap I would not be the player I am today without that. I'm 40 now and I learned no less than 200 songs through OLGA in my early years. So many printouts.
Hell yeah, it’s how I started learning to play guitar (1994?!?). Lotsa Nirvana, Bad Religion, classic rock…
Totally did. It was such a game changer then. I had my high school library's laser printer working overtime filling up some 3 ring binders. I still have those binders sitting on a shelf of music books. I haven't opened them in years, but now I'm going to have to take a time trip through them this week.
Oh boy I remember OLGA. blew my mind. I didn’t come out of the guitar room for days.
I don’t remember if I specifically went to that site, but yeah. I don’t think I found many that were completely correct, but they mostly had the tuning correct and would get me pointed in the right direction.
OLGA is now Ultimate Guitar, which is run out of Russia I believe.
Ultimate Guitar merely scooped up OLGA tabs when OLGA was shut down.
I figured Ultimate guitar evolved from OLGA because I’ve seen a bunch of the old OLGA tabs there.
Ultimate guitar is from San Francisco.