TabBook Lets You Download Guitar Tablature On Your iPad And Look Cool To Your Bandmates

Think of TabBook as a digital version of the notebook that you take with you to band practice. Instead of a messy, torn up, spiral notebook full of scribbles that you can no longer decipher, all of your guitar tablature notation can be kept in one convenient location.

Tablature notation, also known as “tab,” is for fretted instruments, like guitar and bass. For musicians, tab is a life saver when trying to learn a cover song. There are thousands of user-uploaded websites that offer bass and guitar tab for popular and obscure songs. Because tab is user-uploaded, a lot of it is wrong, which is only discovered after trying to play the song. TabBook helps make this process easier by giving musicians the ability to input whichever tabs they want into the app. Once the correct tab is located, add it to the app and you’ll no longer have to search around on the Internet for hours, trying to find the correct notation.

To add tabs to the app, you must first register your name and email address to tabbookapp.com. Songs are added and edited from the website only. The album artwork will appear, if it is available through LastFM, after adding the artist’s name and album title (I had trouble with this feature; artwork would appear and disappear and none of the images saved). Adding the actual tablature is very easy. Either copy and paste it from another webpage or input it yourself. This is especially helpful for bands looking to keep tab notation of original songs. Once songs are saved on the website, they can be downloaded into the app by tapping “select tab” from the upper left corner of the screen and then selecting “download new tabs” from the pop-up window. Downloads can take a while if there are a lot of songs. Once songs have been downloaded into the app, they can be viewed anytime, including offline.

Overall, this music notation app for the iPad is good if you have the necessary time to add song after song to your account and then follow up with the in-app download. It seems like a whole lot of effort for little return. The only real feature is the album art inclusion, and that didn’t work for me. Since the whole process involves copying tabs and pasting things into a file, it seems like you could just use the iPad’s native notebook to do the same thing. It seems like too much work for something that one could do elsewhere, without needing to create an account and download files.