For the love of GOD, help me.

[SixStringMadman]

Alright, here is my situation...

I heard the Doobie Brothers song "Blackwater" on the radio this afternoon and decided, "Hey, it would be nice to look up the tabs to that song and play it!", boy was I blowing sunshine right up my ass. First of all, the tabs on MxTabs, TabCrawler, and Guitarists.net are all the same one, and it sucks--there is more that just the simple finger-picking riff to the song than they have lazily tabbed, not to mention the solo is missing.

So, my hope is that someone here knows where I can get the tabs for that song, so PLEASE help me if you can--this song is awsome.

SixStringMadman.

[cyberfret]

Use your strong desire to play this song as incentive to start building the necessary skills to transcribe songs. Learning how to play songs by ear is very important skill to have. One that too many guitar players these days neglect because of all of the readily available (and dreadfully incorrect) tablature on the Internet. Back in the day... I would sit for days or week listening to just a small section of a song trying to figure it out. And that developed my ear in a way that is just not possible otherwise.

You could also just buy a Doobie Brothers tablature book from some place like SheetMusicPlus.com (http://www.sheetmusicplus.com/a/home.html?id=15350).

--Shawn

[jaytee]

hmmmmmm that just makes me think....
i always give up on transcribing cuz i get frustrated and then i feel bad if i cant get it right away......somehow the people i know never said how long it takes them to transcribe...one guy tells me he can tab out any song in just a day or two....guess i expect too much of myself? prolly i should try again....not a bad thought...

--jt

[gck]

Unless you have the "perfect pitch" (i.e. you can name isolated pitches just by hearing them), it is indeed difficult at first. Also, you have to remember that the guitar is a transposing instrument, every note you play (or the guy in the song you want to tab plays) sounds an octave higher than it is written: Note this, when you are sitting at a piano when you try to get down the melody, rather than with a guitar, because the piano is (usually) tuned to concert pitch.

What you can develop pretty good is "relative pitch" i.e. the ability to hear intervals: there are lots of ear training program for this type of stuff which will definitely help you out.
As an alternative, you could do what my music class in school does: whenever there's nothing to do, our teacher has us play random intervals (but in a fixed key which she also chooses randomly) on our different instruments and the other have to name them: she throws a little ball at someone who has to say it then. Apart from having been hit by the ball on the nose once, I think it's a good ear practice, because apart from learning the intervals you also get a feel for the different sound of the different instruments.... usually, the one with the most correct answers gets chocolate afterwards...

by the way, I want to note that I'm not 4 years old :)