Tab licensing...again...

It's happened again. A bunch of my tabs are no longer available. Let me rant for a moment or three.

When I'm arranging a cover I scribble down what I come up so I don't forget when I return over the next days/weeks. Seeing as we live in the age of computers, "scribble down" means write up beautiful scores in a score writing program. So by the time I have finished my arrangement a beautiful score exists. Twenty years ago I just offered them as a free download with the videos I posted, "Learn This!". Even though I wasn't profiting from that it was illegal.

After a while I looked into how I could get them to the people who wanted them but legally. I mean books of cover music to learn have existed forever - I still have fond memories of a Beatles music book I had in the 70's. I wonder where that is now? Hmm. But I digress.

I remember having an email discussion with someone from the Harry Fox agency, that company managed a massive amount of music permissions at the time. "How many CDs are you going to make?" they asked. "Well, none, it's all music sheet for digital download." I said. "Yes, but how many CDs are you going to make?" "..."

I abandoned that and kept giving them away. Many people at the time were just selling them anyway with no respect to the copyright holder, one guy I reached out to suggested that I should do the same, that it was quite lucrative. Whilst giving them away for free was already illegal, selling them was no something I could do in good conscience.

At some stage I was getting annoyed by people complaining about the tabs. You know these tabs take me a long time to make, and you got it for free, and you are complaining? So I put a "donate" button on my website in the style of "I you feel like supporting my efforts, buy me a coffee!" - some people did and that pacified me for a while.

But after another year and another a hundred thousand downloads I couldn't take it anymore and took them all down. A few people a month would ask for a tab, if they emailed me I would send it to them. And by that stage I had switched from the very clunky Powertab to MuseScore which really are beautiful. At that stage Patreon had come out. I decided to start as a Patreon artist, and anyone who would sign up as a supporter I would send them a zip of all the tabs I had put into Musescore. That went okay, maybe $30 a month was coming in which made me feel like my efforts were being acknowledged, but it still didn't appease my guilty conscience on copyright.

In the background...The Hal Leonard Conglomerate...had existed for a while and they had "made arrangements of covers easy to distribute"...for the low low price of $10+ for a sheet and as the arranger they would graciously give a dollar to. For starters, I didn't think my arrangement was worth $10, and for a 10% cut, streuth, that is just taking the piss. In my mind I could see the numbers - 50% would go back to the licence holder, of which 2% would go to the actual writer and 40% would go into their pockets as "administration fees". Makes me angry just thinking about it.

But up popped PaidTabs. They were big enough that they seemed legit, many big name arrangers were using them, and they looked after all the permissions for you. They took only 20%...so 80% went back to you! It didn't seem possible, and I kinda didn't believe it, but I took them at their word. Besides, YouTube already covered all the royalties when you posted a cover on their platform, so how hard could it be, how much did the copyright holder actually get anyway? So I switched out from Patreon, letting my users know what I was up to and giving them a way out. There sure were plenty of supporters in the last six months who would pay a month at $3, download all the tabs - about 50 by the end - and cancel. They got a bargain. But now at least I was finally able to offer tabs and the copyright holder was getting something!

That has worked alright until recently. I guess they got big enough to be noticed, and I guess they weren't quite doing everything as by the book as the copyright holders wanted. The email I got basically reads "Our terms require sellers to hold the rights and permissions for what they list." Ah. So you haven't ever been properly covering royalties, as I suspected, but I took you at your word. It was probably buried in the fine print. Which interestingly these days I copy and paste Eulas/T&Cs into the AI machine and ask it specific questions - does a much better job than I do!

What are they doing if they aren't covering the permissions? Just a digital marketplace? Anyway, another similar service to PaidTabs is MyMusic 5. The AI machine reports the model is pretty much the same as PaidTabs, they _kinda_ pay out royalties in some fashion..but there is nothing to stop them from getting a cease and desist like PaidTabs as well. Not worth moving there.

So I'm back to the start again. I have sheet music, I would like the people who would like a copy to have it, I would like this to all be legal, but I don't want Mega Corporations profiting off my work. Since I don't specifically want a lot of money - my day job is just fine - I'm not planning on retiring into the sheet music production business - at the same time there will be people in the arranging business making a living so I don't want to undercut them...so I'm considering Hal Leonard again. Because even though I can almost picture the song writer getting paid 25c while they are pocketing $10 and sending me $1...at least I have an avenue to get a tab into someone's hand legally.

I read their info on what to do to create a legit sheet. Wow. They tell you how the sheet should look, where all the names should be, and for each song here is a paragraph of words that must be included on the bottom of the sheet (it's different for every song, different copyrights). That made me cross - I go to some lengths to make sure my arrangements can fit on one page, so it's easy to have just a single page in your lap while you learn it. Now it needs a paragraph of legal crap at the bottom so most of my sheets will need to go to two pages...

I need to do something. Don't know what that will be. I will probably suck it up and go to The Hal Leonard Conglomerate. It will just be my pride getting in the way - about how *I* think the world should operate, not how it actually does!

(The flipside to this - if I do have sheet music that obeys all the laws, all the correct copyright notices are in place, but my arrangement has errors or is just a crap arrangement - who is gatekeeping that? My name becomes mud, high risk for little reward? The Conglomerate doesn't care, they got paid...)

Canon 20 years 2026

Yep, it happened.

As previously discussed, it was difficult, not much fun, and I didn't really like the results. It was okay but I wanted better. Maybe again in 20 years time? I played it on the electric which is problematic - Drop D meant the bottom string was flabby, and my left hand fingering meant that I was bending the bottom string badly enough that even I could hear the F#m chord was out of tune. The second commentor also noticed...

It's okay, I learnt to let go of perfectionism quite a while ago. I have ranted about it for years. Don't let it consume you! Do I think I played it better than 20 years ago? Yeah, I did. But a clean playthrough on the nylon would have been better.

But let's talk stats!

I don't do any of this to drive engagement yudda yudda, but I love statistics. And I'm always interested to see what Mega Tech is doing with the stuff we feed it. Here's a graph:

So not unexpectedly, the algorithm still owns us. 81% of all traffic to this video was YouTube recommendations.

But look, 2% of you were notified and watched! Old school! And then another 11% were fed from subscriptions feed which could possibly be the last vestage of non-algorithm feed on the entire interwebs, and some of you are still using it!

YouTube Search is mostly The Algorithm, and Other is probably direct links.

So I want to say that around 85% of all traffic is The Algorithm and 15% is non-algorithm people actually following me and clicking on the video. So creators are still firmly in the hands of YouTube. It's been this way since around 2016, I can't imagine it's going to change anytime soon.

What's happening September 2026

A co-worker challenged me last month to play "September" in September. Which I promptly forgot about, and then on the first of September the conversation went: "Well?" "What?" "Did you do it?" "What?" "Learn September?" "Ha, that's right, no. I'm too busy for that." "I'm disappointed." "ha ha." "No, really disappointed." "Okay, okay, let's have a look."

Pulled out the guitar from beside the desk, whipped up the chords, started noodling with it, after about a minute the rhythm was in my head and I was starting to groove with it. I'd forgotten how good a song it it. Jazz style chords, but with a pop rock feel? Something like that. I wanted to sing it as I found the groove but I'm a terrible singer. Nobody in the office was game to sing it for me.

I mean check it out - this is from Ultimate Guitar - grab your guitar and play these chords, they are a little tricky, but get the chorus in your head and groove! How is that G major 7 over A at the end! Try playing it as a Gsus2 with a high A over A bass! ...and queue trumpets! Yay!

Bm7   E7   C#m7          F#m7
Ba de ya - say do you remember
Bm7   E7   C#m7          F#m7
Ba de ya - dancing in September
Bm7   E7   C#m7          F#m7 Gmaj7/A
Ba de ya - never was a cloudy day

I have too much other stuff to fingerstyle and that one would be quite difficult, and besides, Naudo did it already - actually around 20 years ago, but YouTube cancelled his account (more than once) - lucky Juan has all his videos backed up and reposts them.

Meanwhile, as the world is circling around music and AI - so much so that I not longer believe anything I see or read - what do we do? Perhaps the only thing that is truly real these days is what you are seeing and hearing right in front of you. Your conversations with people in real life (given they aren't reading from a script or wired into the matrix). Or the musos you see at your local - given that they aren't playing/miming to a backing track. In fact musos, I think in the middle of every couple of songs, just kinda hold a chord progression for several extra bars, and talk to the crowd, razz them up a bit, even respond to shouts and heckles (I'm sure you all do this already) - it proves "this is real."

Speaking of not being real, I am re-recording Canon in D for the 20 year anniversary since I posted that video. Yep, I started practising last month and I have two glaring problems - I still haven't been able to memorise it, and I still can't play it much better than I did in 2006. After putting a few hours of effort into it over a few weeks, and generally getting dismayed, I kinda gave up. I decided I won't ever be able to memorise it, and I don't mind. To be honest I don't mind if I'm unable to play it well, it's not that important to me. Sorry! It was important at a time and place a couple of decades ago, that is no longer the case. When my daughters get married I won't be playing it at their weddings, I will be walking them down the aisle. Beautiful music, very hard to play, I have some good sheet to play from, I will play it every now and then and it will put a smile on my face briefly before I get frustrated that I can never play it to my expectations.

All is not lost though! I recorded around 40 minutes of me attempting to play it...I was never going to get it in one take, in fact I just assembled the video and there are ten splices. Yeah, not great. Twenty years ago I played it through in one take! This time I needed to forgive myself and move on.

And yet you know what? I can play 8 minutes of "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" totally from memory in one take. I enjoy playing that more.

* * *

One more thing, in case I haven't said it enough. I never use AI when writing these posts. Not even to get ideas, not to proof read, not even the tiniest suggestion. I don't want it interfering with my thoughts, this was always a place to brain dump about all things musical when I'm not doing musical things. AI has its place, but that is not for rambling about the things in your mind.

Custom Bass

I built a custom bass for my youngest daughter for Christmas in 2024, the delivery was actually not until 2025...it took longer than I thought! It worked out great though, it has a bright punchy tone. It is her regular bass that she does all her performances and recording with. This was my thoughts when getting parts:

• 4 string Precision Bass (P-Bass) style - ie old school Fender with the single split pickup
• I was really happy with the Custom Neck I had made in China so I got onto them to make the neck
• I just wanted a bare body that I would paint myself. Note: Don't ever get a bare body. Get them to at least primer it if not paint it, you can lightly sand it and repaint it later. It is more effort to prepare bare wood for painting than it is worth.
• The best possible pickup that money can buy. This ended up being a SD SPB-3.
• The best possible high mass bridge, tuners and various hardware that you can get on Aliexpress.
• Custom paint and pickguard to my daughters specification. Purple and black/white checkerplate.

I recorded a video of lots and lots of the construction. I have yet to assemble it into a coherent video. I will do one day. But that day is not today and I've had this post sitting here in draft for more than a year, I want to post it! Most importantly, for the records, here is the parts list with the supplier and cost in $AUD2024:

Item	Store	Cost
Bass Guitar
P-bass maple neck/ebony fretboard/pearl inlays	Qing Ping Aliexpress	$243.23
Mahogany P-bass body no paint	Qing Ping Aliexpress	$225.16
Seymour Duncan SPB-3 1/4 Pound P-Bass 4-String	Mannys	$199.00
Guyker Tuners	AliExpress	$49.28
BB404 Bass Bridge	AliExpress	$38.05
Checkerboard pick guard	Dopro Aliexpress	$22.77
Primer Paint	Bunnings	$11.95
Purple Paint	Bunnings	$11.95
Clear Paint	Bunnings	$11.95
Guyker Strap Buttons	AliExpress	$5.62
Neck Joiner Plate	AliExpress	$5.25
Potentiometers	AliExpress	$3.98
0.047uF Capacitor	AliExpress	$2.90
Input Jack	AliExpress	$1.70
	Sub Total	$832.79
Accessories
SKB Hardcase	Mega Music	$189.00
Zoom B1 Four Bass Multi Effects Pedal	Mannys	$179.00
Guitar Strap	Aliexpress	$6.85
	Sub Total	$374.85
	Grand Total	$1,207.64

Finished enough! Paint is not great up close but looks fine from a distance! Here it is out and about!

What's happening July 2026

Just sitting in a holding pattern. I think that is fine, you don't need to be go-go-go your whole life. I still regulalry mix songs - there is plenty to be learnt there. I pick up the guitar which is hanging right behind me and play it whenever I'm here. I still play "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" a lot, I find it quite relaxing. I play it weekly in the lunchroom at work and I usually follow with "Wish You Were Here" which then segues into "Breathe". I think I need to go and play them at an open mic, I haven't done an open mic in years. I need to share my love of Pink Floyd music. And maybe give them a short list of 20-30 songs "you choose what you want me to play next". I quite like that idea - keep a heap of songs fresh in my memory and play requests. I need to play a song through once every few months to keep it fresh in my head.

Except "Canon in D". I've dusted it off, practising it to record again for the 20th year anniversary of posting it on YouTube. I've changed a few parts to both improve the arrangement and the playability. I thought if I put in enough effort I would finally be able to memorise it and play it well. I was wrong. It is the one song that I have been unable to memorise, and as I push harder into it I start disliking it. I have been through this cycle several times in the last 20 years, including the first time I learnt it. (That's why the first recording of me playing it is from sheet.) I have resolved once again that I can only play it from sheet. If I push any further, I will stop playing it. It's like some sort of nemesis. That's okay, I will play it from sheet, put up the 20th anniversary play through, and maybe in another decade Canon and I will be on better terms.

AI coding - just when you thought it was amazing something changes and it's even more amazing. We are now at a stage where you can take your favourite software, ask Claude (running in the fable model) to rebuild it from scratch but fix up all those little things that you don't like about it. And it will give you a working application straight off the bat. I don't know what this means for software - will it all be bespoke going forward? The code itself is completely unmaintainable of course, I gave up understanding what is happening in there a while back. I'm glad I grew up when you had to write code yourself, because I understand how to write code myself, but now I kinda don't have to anymore. I will become dumber, I'm sure, but the amount of work I can produce that "gets things done" has gone through the roof. As with most things AI, I'm still not sure how I feel about it. But the genie is out of the bottle. I watch it, interact with it, let's see what happens.

More earbuds

When I'm mixing I use my Steven Slate VSX headphones which are kinda expensive and sound good, they can also emulate other headphone sounds which is great. I reckon you want to mix so that the song sounds good on any system - which is a compromise - but I have been surprised how little of a compromise it really is. As in, you can have a mix which sounds great on great headphones but sounds bad in a car, or with phone speakers...but with a bit of tweaking it still sounds great on great headphones but now sounds good in a car and on phone speakers as well.

Part of this is experimenting with cheap and budget headphones. Always wired, usually earbuds, and I avoid ones with built in microphones. As in, I buy them to test mixes to see what that style of headphone will actually reproduce. I reckon a lot of people are going to listen to a mix with built in phone speakers and it's never going to sound great on them. You aren't going to hear any of the textures or subtleties so the best you can kinda get is keeping the mix clear enough to understand the vocals and feel a beat. But I'm suspecting that many people will be using a budget set of earbud headphones, possibly some that came with their phone (is that still a thing?) so having a mix sound good on that is pretty important.

In my testing of budget headphones I have discovered a few things. Firstly, that there are good budget headphones. If for you headphones are a bit of a consumable, like they are for me - as in, you will get five years tops out of them before you have broken them somehow - then budget headphones can be a wise choice for casual listening. You can also have a few sets scattered around your house for quick and easy listening. My recent purchase exposed something to me that I guess I had always known but really stood out this time.

The real low end cheap headphones will reproduce sound but they aren't worth the money, even small amounts of money. They will do some electrical or mechanical trickery so that the bass sounds big (annoying - what are we, all gamers wanting to hear big explosions?), they will cut out the low mid muddiness but push the upper mid range so that guitars and vocals sounds crisp and clear. They aren't fooling anyone.

So the mid tier budget headphones will have a more natural flatter EQ, they don't need trickery because the drivers are better. I think back to the Sennheiser MX500 earbuds - the fit, the sound - it's earbuds so the sound is not going to be perfect, but they kinda got it right. The Apple ipod style were also okay but I was never into the Apple scene.

Which brings me to my point - the most recent budget headphones I have been using, when I'm walking around the house listening to mixes - kinda impressed me. Yincrow $AUD20(2025) earbuds, quite acceptable. I was testing $AUD30(2026) NiceHCK B40s. Both had a nice natural sounding EQ, there did not seem to be any trickery involved trying to disguise badness. In my A/B testing, the NiceHCKs had some edge over the Yincrows that I couldn't put my finger on. Sure, the NiceHCK has a slightly boomier bass and a slightly elevated high mid, but neither sounded "forced". The NiceHCK also had a slightly higher volume, I noticed the driver was slightly bigger so maybe it was pushing more air? Or just more efficient? I was nudging the phone volume up/down two clicks during the A/B test so to identify tone differences not volume differences.

I did some research (okay...lazy AI research...I didn't read and think through every subreddit post about headphones...) I realised what I was hearing was the minute transient response difference between the drivers. The NiceHCK must be able to respond a tiny bit faster and better articulate those tiny tiny harmonics and overtones present in the recording. So while they both had a similar frequency response there was some sort of time domain frequency smearing more apparent in the Yincrows. Quite the epiphany. Sound is complex, headphones are a compromise in reproducing it. Manufacturers are doing well with mid-tier budget headphones. Both these headphones are acceptable but the NiceHCK ones have an edge over the slightly older Yincrow, there is a lot going on in those tiny little speaker drivers!

20 years of YouTube

...20 years just clicked over last week - 28th May 2006 was the date of my first video upload. I didn't think I was an early adopter, YouTube had been around for a year. But in hindsight I was an early adopter. I was ten years earlier than Rick Beato who celebrated his ten years (I just watched his video). We had the same reason for using YouTube - it was an easy method to share videos with somebody. In my case it was for a fingerstyle forum (doesn't exist anymore). In 2006 digital videos were definitely a thing but not as easy as today's tide of smart phones. I had bought a Sony point and shoot camera capable of grainy video when my first daughter was born late 2003, in between hundreds of baby videos there are some of me recording myself playing guitar right back to 2004, so I was not stranger to it.

I never quite had that "viral video" moment like Rick did, however I had a lot of traffic - when I put out Canon in D it was getting thousands of views a day, the peak was 2010 when across my channel I was sitting at 7,000 daily views - enough to push Canon in D over 3 million views in those few years. Unlike Rick however, I didn't have much to offer - just an amateur fingerstyle hack (my original videos show the classic early stages of being a guitarist - it's just about moving your fingers fast into the next position and pluckin' them notes...it's missing musicality.) I never built anything around my YouTube channel, just arranged songs and played them, gave out my tabs for free (at least a hundred thousand downloads!) slowly got better while an ever-decreasing number of people watched. Not a problem, was never about being a star, was about sharing a hobby I was passionate about.

The stats - the early days show the rise - more and more people discovering YouTube. Then the fall - more and more people posting on YouTube. Those people, especially talented musical fingerstyle players, far eclipsed the increasing rate of people using it, hence the great rise and fall of my channel. In the later years it's the algorithm that decides who is going to see what - you can see a few blips along the way as events occurred, the one I remember the most was when Ennio Morricone died and a heap of people watched my Ennio video (I actually have two).

Black line = total views, Blue line = Canon in D, Green line = Here Comes The Sun.

Going forward? There is no "what happens now", I've always been doing the same thing! I get inspired to arrange a song, or something musical I'm interested in, and I record a video. Even back in 2008 I was talking about playing for audiences and how recording a video for YouTube is the next best thing, it forces you to finish a project - don't be a half-song playing guitarist. No more to say, I talked about YouTube statistics back in 2013 and not much has changed. I talked about how creators are at the whim of The Algorithm and not much has changed with that either.

So business as usual. I do have a backlog of songs to record but I'm not as single mind focused on just recording arrangements as I used to be...but that's okay. Just get out there and create - don't leave it to The AIs to do!