Introduction
Ultimate-guitar.com is the guitar enthusiast’s dream Website. The site was the brainchild of Russian student Eugeny Naidenov and contains over 20,000 guitar tabs. The site claims to be the fastest-growing guitar enthusiast’s page on the net. Upon loading the homepage, the user is greeted with a dark page literally filled with links containing tabs, the latest rock news, musician interviews, music reviews and guest columns. The site is a bit overwhelming to the beginner in that it is loaded with options. To unlock all the features of the site, users will need to complete a simple free registration.
Features
The first thing you notice on Ultimate-guitar is the sheer volume of guitar tabulations. The tabs are arranged in alphabetical order, but due to the huge number, it takes a few minutes to find your artist. We checked out Eric Clapton and found well over 600 tabs for “Slow Hand” alone. Dozens or versions of his popular hit “Layla” were readily available. The site seems to have almost every song by every artist covered.
The articles section contains some great writing on guitar advice and the music scene in general. We were amazed at the quality of the writing in the section – this is a terrific feature of the website. New articles are posted everyday and users spend time in the forums talking about them.
The forums are fantasic. Dozens of topics are in play and there’s even a songwriting and lyrics forum where users can participate in a songwriting tournament. One forum – guitar basics – contains helpful playing instructions from seasoned artists to the newest guitarists among us.
Tips & Tricks
Since the site is flooded with information, we’d suggest checking out the site map at the very bottom of the page. Clicking on that gives the user a less intimidating list format of where everything is located on the site. When looking for a band or individual artist, use the search bar at the top of the homepage. Clicking through the vast library manually is far too time-consuming.
Music lovers will want to check out the news section. It’s packed with up-to-the-minute rumors and hard news from around the music world.
Newbie Friendly Rating
Ultimate-guitar can be a bit congested with information and somewhat confusing to the new user. Additionally, the site is filled with pop-up ads which become annoying quickly. Many sites wouldn’t be worth the aggravation, but Ultimate-guitar certainly is. It might not be an overly friendly site, but we must recommend it based purely on its vast wealth of content. Overall, we’ll give Ultimate-guitar.com a Newbie Friendly Rating of 5.