Ultimate Guitar Tabs & Chords

Summary

With tabs and chords for over 300,000 songs, ultimate-guitar.com is a favorite among musicians, especially guitar players. Now there’s a mobile version for your Android smartphone. This app gives you all the tools needed to join the thousands (millions?) of other cover artists on YouTube. 

Find out what Ultimate Guitar Tabs can do in our test.

Ultimate Guitar Tabs starts up directly with the app’s key feature: searching for tabs and chords. The search function works just as smoothly as the app’s “big brother” including search predictions. Search results can be listed alphabetically or by popularity. You can also limit your search to specific bands. Finally, you have the option of viewing the 100 most popular tabs or pick a random tab.
In the Tab Pcks section, all the UG tabs are divided into different categories e.g. rock, metal, pop or easy – this is a great way to find new tabs that fit your musical tastes and skills.

In addition to tabs and other main features, UG Tabs also offer a bit more:

• By saving your tabs as favorites you won’t need an internet connection because all your favorite songs can be stored directly on your SD card. Definitely a plus for those of us without unlimited data plans. If you have an Ultimate Guitar Community community, you can even synchronize your favorites online
• Like on the internet page, you can transpose your chords up or down in terms of pitch to match your guitar’s tuning. Very useful for people that know the basics about guitar tuning and pitch.
• Another very useful feature is integrated song playback. If you have a version of the song saved on your smartphone (with the appropriate ID-tags), you can play it directly from the app. Unfortunately, you can’t listen to a particular section of the second because pause and play are the only buttons available.
• Tabs and lyrics can also be sent from the app via email, but they are virtually impossible to read once you receive them. The problem is that the tabs and lyrics are inserted directly into the body of the email. When you open up the email, your email app or provider automatically edits the text so that everything is completely jumbled. To solve this issue, the developers should allow you to send lyrics and tabs as .txt attachments instead.

Bottom Line:

UG Tabs is an extremely useful app for dedicated guitar players or rock star wannabies. Despite some minor improvements that could be made to the app, UG Tabs does exactly what it’s designed to do. 

Ultimate Guitar Tabs is easy and intuitive to use. When viewing tabs, you can easily adjust the text size with pinch-to-zoom. Even the text font can be changed by selecting from six different fonts included with the app. The famous auto-scroll feature from the website is also included and automatically adjusts to your screen position.

Ultimate Guitar Tabs is, for the most part, pretty stable and reliable as long as you have an SD card. The app did crash when I tried opening tabs without any SD card. Since everyone should make a habit of always having an SD card, this is hardly qualifies as a problem.

Ultimate Guitar Tabs can be purchased from the Android Market for $2.99. The price is justified for an app that does a great job of complementing the popular website.