I get a considerable amount of e-mails from people asking me about gauges for restringing to use SY tunings. (On another note, I don't expect to update the Gear Guide for a while, so I've secretly added one more item since last week's update - an Italian magazine from January 1996 called Chitarre.)

These scans are taken from Guitar Player February 1989, Guitar Player August 1991, and Guitar (Japan) September 1992. I cut the text out of the Japanese mag tabs, but they really put a lot of focus on different elements of the band's sound - riffs, solo, improv, structure, etc. None actually transcribe a complete song (I've still never seen a full SY song in any guitar magazine, ever) but there's lots of interesting stuff to read and it's just so cool to see actual SY tunes tabbed out 'properly'. Very, very few of them contain any attempt at tablature, but I picked out three that I wanted to share here.

Speaking of quality tablature.if you haven't checked out the Gear Guide in a while, I've been documenting tons of guitar magazines that feature some kind of Sonic Youth content. So please, if you want to work some tunes out and send them in, I'm totally interested! I have a batch of new ones to offer, but even now I'm not going to praise my efforts too much - I'll save that for the handful of people who actually e-mailed me tabs over the past few years! They're all so nice and properly typed up and measured out and user friendly, while mine are still vague and blunt as always.

I really would love to overhaul or at least continue to update this site - I'm pleased with the quality of much of the content, but I'll admit that some of my own teenage tabs are pretty weak. There seemed to be a real sweet spot in '97/98 and another in 2002 where some great folks were figuring out these great songs and inspiring me to do great work by sharing them online. If you want to know when it goes live, keep checking the front page of SCREAMING FIELDS OF SONIC LOVE or if you're like me and get most of your band news from Facebook, come join Screaming Fields of Sonic Love, a page I started 8 years ago and have not used once.Īnyway! New tabs! It's funny to go through this site and still see tabs from 1997, the year I started it. UPDATE: MAY 31st, 2020 - Welcome! This will be the last of my May updates (it is the last day, after all! plus the servers are about to crash and stay down until june 2nd.) but I have a big SY project coming within the next few months - a few other non-SY things have to fall into place first, but I'm relatively optimistic.

All right now tabs