Ultimate Guitar Archive
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| URL | http://www.ultimate-guitar.com/ |
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| Commercial? | Yes |
| Type of site | Tablature archive |
| Registration | Optional |
| Owner | Eugeny Naidenov |
| Created by | Eugeny Naidenov |
Ultimate Guitar Archive, also known as Ultimate-Guitar.com or simply UG, is a large guitarist community website known for its large amount of guitar and bass tablature, reviews of music and equipment, interviews with notable musicians, online lessons, and forums.
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Community
UG is home to over 520,000 registered users and a strong community of forum users who frequent the site. The UG forums can be a good place to learn about playing guitar or bass, since there are many experienced players to answer questions. Some of the forums include electric guitar, bass guitar, music theory, and genre forums.
The site provides several subforums. There is a forum named "The Pit" for off-topic discussion, a forum for new members to come and ask questions, and a forum for site feedback. The Pit is almost always the sub-forum that is being viewed by the most users at once. There is also a Bands & Artists forum, in which there are many sub-forums devoted to specific genres. The most viewed of these is the Metal forum, with the Classic Rock forum in second. There is also a forum where users can post their tablatures, reviews, or articles to be reviewed before posting them to the main site, although they aren't required to be sent to the forums. The forums are controlled by a group of moderators, users who were assigned their rank after being noticed as especially helpful and responsible. These members have the power to close threads, as well as warn or ban misbehaving users. There are several different moderator ranks including Moderator, Super Moderator, Administrator, and Column Cleaner.
Community members may also create guitar lessons or other related articles, and have their approved works published on the website and read by its many users. Like the tabs, the lessons and column are also rated by users, which attributes towards UG Points (or rather number of contributions), your UG score also increases, or decreases as the members rate your contribution.
MPA Conflicts
In late 2004-2005, after many tab sites began closing due to legal threats from the Music Publishers Association of America, UG saw a surge of new users flock to the community. UG, which pays licensing fees to publishers, was unaffected by MPA legal actions. As stated in an article posted on the site, UG finds the MPA to be humorous (a satirical picture stating "When you download tabs from UG, you're downloading communism" was made in response to the MPA's warnings) and does not take their warning seriously, mainly because the site is based in Russia and is not affected by American Laws. The site also pays royalties to show the tabs on their website.
Tablature
Tabs can be voted from 1 (the worst) to 5 (the best) stars, and comments can be made about the tab. The most popular tab is "Stairway To Heaven", a 5-star tab with over 2400 votes. Tabs of albums can also be submitted, but aren't submitted as often as just single song tabs. Red Hot Chili Peppers has one of the highest tab counts of the website which is around the 1600 mark. Around 1500 tabs are added every few days.
There are many types of tablature files that can be submitted to Ultimate-Guitar. Files such as basic guitar tabs and bass tabs can be read from your browser in ASCII format. Guitar Pro and Power Tab files are run through programs that can play the tablature and often include multiple instruments tabs. These files can be saved and opened on your computer.
