Scribd is the closest thing I’ve seen to a subscription service for guitar sheet music and tablature. If you haven’t run across Scribd before, “Scribd gives you instant access to ebooks, audiobooks, articles, podcasts, sheet music, and documents — all in one simple digital subscription.” It even has magazines. The real secret, though, is that you can access other people’s uploaded documents. All together, this is an amazing source of music resources. Let’s take a look.
There are a lot of ways to use Scribd, but I’m going to specifically walk through the website, and take the path of accessing guitar sheet music and tablature and point out some hints and insights along the way.
To follow along, you can create your own Scribd account here and get 30 days for free.
1. Select by instrument.
The top of menu of Scribd has a helpful “Sheet Music” category and, if you click that, you can select “Guitar, Bass, and Fretted” to filter the sheet music.
This is a helpful starting point for digging into what’s available.
2. Click into a book.
There are a LOT of music books available here. And the Scribd team has helpfully grouped them to make exploring easier – ‘Bestsellin’g, ‘Guitar Heros’, ‘Classical’, etc.
There’s a mix of tab and sheet music available
Hold up! One issue I have with Scribd is that when I view a book, the viewer keeps the pages relatively small.
Since we guitarists are trying to read all those tiny notes, we need some sort of magnify or zoom in mode. I messaged Scribd support about this and they said,
“to get a closer look within content where the font size cannot be adjusted, you can use a reverse-pinch gesture on a mouse trackpad (or your device’s screen when using the Scribd app) to zoom in on page.”
While this does work, it takes a bit of getting used to. I think these controls would be an area of improvement for Scribd’s interface in the future.
3. Search by artist
Let’s take another approach, let’s search for some fingerstyle guitarists specifically (hint: this is where it gets interesting!):
Lets search for Joe Pass.
Pass was the pinnacle of fingerstyle jazz and should have a variety of jazz instructional and sheet music/tab.
And indeed, the search results turn up a number sheet music results. More interestingly, though, we get something called “User Docs”. This is where other Scribd members have uploaded PDFs of their own materials related to Joe Pass.
These User Docs are a gold mine of information! If you’re looking for out of print materials, DVD booklets, personal transcriptions, one off pages of sheet music, this is where it’s at.
4. User Docs are a gold mine
For example, clicking on the “Jazz Lines” result gives me the DVD booklet from Pass’s instructional DVD “Joe Pass Jazz Lines”. It includes the sheet music for the examples and instructional material from the DVD.
You can also watch this DVD on YouTube. This is a powerful way to access out of print content
Let’s try a few other searches:
5. Music Theory and Instructionals
Accessing the “Documents” drop down in the top menu, and then “Music”, yields an entire new category of results: Music theory books and general music materials.
6. They’ve also got guitar magazines!
And ebooks and audiobooks
“The Birth of Loud: Leo Fender, Les Paul, and the Guitar-Pioneering Rivalry That Shaped Rock ‘n’ Roll” is a great read on the history and development of the modern electric guitar, and you can get it as part of the Scribd subscription.
Conclusion
Scribd has an incredible amount of guitar resources on demand. It’s almost overwhelming. It’s highest value is as a deep pool where you can dive for specific resources around a particular guitar player, or song, or style. The amount and variety of materials that are available make the service a rich find.
Scribd pricing is $11.99/month, which includes access to the full library of materials.
You can also “Read free for 30 days”, providing a pain free to test drive the service.
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