E-Chords.com: Tab Oasis or Mirage?

by Mick Lewis
27 November 2005

I found this site several months ago and was taken enough by it to sign up for a premium membership (!), but as often happens with impulse buys, I didn’t explore much further and promptly forgot about it. While searching Google for KEANE tabs this week, I happened upon E-Chords.com again, and when Roboform popped up and offered to auto-fill the login, I vaguely recalled that I had a paid account. Once more, I started to use the site, and I now recall what about it had originally grabbed me, as well as why I had drifted away.

The most annoying thing about using tab/chord sites is that tabs/chord sheets are generally ‘unofficial’ submissions that are either poorly formatted, incomplete, in the wrong key, or just plain wrong (if the song for which you are looking is there at all – is there really nobody out there who cares enough about THE WALKER BROTHERS’ “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore,” which charted at #13 in 1966, to sit down and figure it out?! I guess I’ll have to do it… ). And when the tab is actually good, it will sometimes list unusual chords without giving a clue to correct chord location and finger formation.

E-Chords.com has some amazing features that I’ve often wished I would find on other tab/chord sites. With a click, you can either configure the print area, transpose keys, view relevant guitar or keyboard diagrams, switch between text/RTF, split into columns, add to a personal songbook, submit your own corrections to the site administrators for review, or upload your own songs. Some songs even have MIDIs to remind you of structure and melody line!

The caveat: Poor site layout/construction vexes me enough to render these useful features unusable. Many features rely on being signed in, but after doing so, I found that opening new songs often resulted in the accompanying warning “Your level of membership does not allow you to use [feature name here]. Sign up FREE!” despite me being signed in as a premium member. I had to go back to the main page to sign in again. The supposedly convenient E-Chord browser toolbar was so buggy that I uninstalled it after 20 minutes of trying to get it to work. These usability annoyances are especially strange to me considering the obvious care that has been put into devising ingenious features for the tabs. E-Chords.com should get its act together, because this is a site worth paying for, if it works properly.

E-Chords.com

Filed under musician resources