Tablature Books in the 90s Were My Cliff Notes

For beginners like me in the early 90s, the hunt for guitar music lead you into the realm of sheet music that most of us couldn’t read.  My mother could read piano music, but I was not patient enough for that.  I took formal lessons a year or two into my journey, and once again I wanted to play stuff that my talent wasn’t ready for and began to teach myself some of the basics.  Tuning up, plugging in, and completing a song was the goal. As a student in high school I figured out that tablature books in the 90s were my cliff notes and my cd player was my cover band.

First off, I'm going to use a couple of specific examples for purposes of talking about tuning differences. Nowadays there are many, many examples of alternative tunings. They are all weird and wonderful, but for a beginner that was never really good with math, I needed to keep it simple. These are some key lessons that I learned on my own that gave me a greater understanding of what I was attempting to achieve. Lets strap in.

Upon learning how to operate a tuner I could generally keep my guitar in tune. Never mind intonation. We'll get to that later. The different people I jammed with were always helpful and we'd generally agree on where we all were tuning wise. The thought of practice without a full band present was still new to me. I'm not even sure if I had done a complete play through / along with any recorded song up to that point. I could do riffs of classic songs that everyone poked fun at. We tried to write songs with generic structure and thats what we played. The cheesy stuff that is now banned from guitar stores everywhere was all we had on the radio. The invention of tapes and cds made the play along experience even better.

Pic of a tablature book from the 90s

This is a pic (from someone's eBay) I borrowed of a tablature book that I once owned. Most music instrument stores and some record stores in the 90s carried a healthy stack of tablature books. The major guitar magazines started featuring tablatures of all the ripping songs of the 80s and 90s, but you had to buy the magazine or have a real good memory for the couple of licks you could pick up in a glance. I would cut out all the tabs that were my favorites, staple the pages together and go through them diligently. I had a huge stack of yellowing tablatures that I carried around for over 10 years.

This was a reality check for my playing journey. I could barely read the solos fast enough to jeep up, much less play along. But, I tried my damnedest. It was mostly in standard tuning to my joyous surprise! Skin o' My Teeth is still one of my favorite metal songs. At that point in the 90s, most every band that cut a popular record had a tablature book that was released. I don't know if they were all sanctioned or whatever by record companies or exactly who got paid what, but all I know is that they were everywhere. All the bands that were being jammed down our throats on the radio and tv were doing full catalogs of the albums they were associated with. It was crazy, but I digress.

That album was in standard. Dookie was in standard. Blood Sugar Sex Magic was in standard. The black album was in E flat. I had no idea. Then I got the tab book to Superunknown and my mind was melted. On half of the songs of the 16 track album, each individual string had a separate tuning for both the lead and rhythm guitar parts. Mind blown! I got a hold of a Rage tab book and discovered that not all parts have to be played in their born tunings. E flat and drop D could be the same thing to an untrained ear and a budget stratocaster. I was trying to play all of their songs with drop D, but never played along to figure it out back then.

There in lies my ever present challenge. When I listen to a song the first thing I try to do is figure out what tuning the guitarists use. I would listen to countless tracks and albums picking out the parts that I could play and dissecting them down to the lowest note that I thought was the bottom of the fretboard. Lots of my favorite hair bands in the 80s and 90s all seemed to use E flat tunings exclusively on their entire catalogs. The guitar magazines in the 90s were amazing resources for tablatures. I learned later on that the trend of flat tunings continued into the grunge era of radio rock. There was tons of groove metal coming out in the 90s. When the tablatures came out that Dropped D tuning was the preferred tuning for the pioneers of the scene, I was hooked.

I was blown away by the scope of material that was out there in the under advertised music scene. I made sure that there was a cd player in every location that we practice jammed at. If someone came over with a disc exclaiming, "You've got to hear this", everything stopped for a moment of greatness. I kept one guitar tuned to E standard and another tuned to dropped D that I could drop down to C if I had to, just so I could figure out the tunings of these crazy masterpieces. We had no YouTube. If you didn't see a flyer or go actively looking for where live music was, you wouldn't find it. The internet was still for email and messaging. We were still buying paper tickets to the concerts we loved. We had to learn the hard way or from some miracle shredder that graced us with their presence.

The opening bands for many of the acts that came through were invaluable considering the exposure to all types of genre bending music. I would stare at every single guitarist that took the stage; studying and taking mental notes when the chorus kicked in and the sing-along started. That was the absolute best way to get a feel for the songs you love. Turn it up, plug in, and try to keep up. Its going to be a fun ride!