AN ULTIMATE GUITAR ALTERNATIVE FOR SONGS WITH NO TAB. when nobody has tabbed it

Ultimate Guitar is a library. Its About page counts more than 2 million tabs and chords, written by the Ultimate Guitar team (its Official tabs) or sent in by players and checked by moderators. When a song is popular, someone has almost always written it up.

Chord Lens is not a library. You paste a YouTube link, or drop in your own MP3, WAV or M4A, and it works the chords out from the recording, then plays them in time with the song. Nobody has to have written the song up first, so a cover, a live take, a local band or a video uploaded this morning gets chords the same way a hit does.

Read from each one’s own pages on the date above. Where a feature needs a paid plan, the cell says so. Ultimate Guitar’s paid plan is Pro; Chord Lens’s are Premium and Pro.

Every tab library has the same gap: it only holds what someone sat down and wrote. The songs that fall through are the ones you most often want to learn: the acoustic version from a session video, the worship song your church sang on Sunday, a friend’s band, a B-side, a song in a language the library’s writers don’t cover.

There is a second gap. A tab is one person’s reading of one version. If the live take you love is a step lower, or the cover you’re learning moves the bridge, the tab is for a different recording. Chord Lens reads the one you have open.

The Lead view puts the chords over the words as they are sung, where the song has lyrics, and lights the line playing now. A shape for each chord sits above it, for guitar, bass, ukulele, mandolin or piano. Turn on Simplify for easier chords, or Nashville to see the numbers.

Where Chord Lens finds the song’s sections, intro, verse, chorus and bridge, it marks them along the song, so you can jump to the bridge or loop the bars you’re working out. Free saves 3 loops per song; Premium and Pro save as many as you like. When you want the chart on a music stand, Premium prints it, chords and words together.

Riffs and solos. Chord Lens gives you chords and their shapes, not tablature or notation. Ultimate Guitar’s Tabs (Pro) type carries full notation, with notes and accidentals, and its Official tabs are made by its own team. If you need the exact notes of an intro riff, a tab is the faster route. In Chord Lens the nearest thing is to solo the guitar stem and learn the riff by ear.

A catalogue to browse. You can open Ultimate Guitar, search a title and start playing without a video. Chord Lens starts from a link or a file.

Players who write. Ultimate Guitar is a community: anyone can submit a tab, and each approved one earns a month of Pro. Its pages list bass, ukulele and drum versions too.

Its own apps. Ultimate Guitar has an app for iPhone, iPad and Android in the App Store and Google Play, with offline favourites, playlists and a left-handed mode; with Pro it adds a tuner, a metronome, transposing, autoscroll and printing, plus UG Courses lessons in the same subscription. Chord Lens has no tuner, and on a phone it is a mobile web app rather than a store app.

Most players don’t have to choose. Look the song up on Ultimate Guitar first. If there’s a tab that matches the recording, play from it.

If there isn’t, or the chords sound wrong against the version you’re learning, paste the same video into YouTube to Chords. You get the chords of that recording in time, the key and the tempo, and the sections marked along the song where it finds them. Move the key up to 12 semitones either way, set a capo, or play anywhere from half speed to double with the pitch left where it is.

When you want to hear your own part, split the song into stems and mute it: vocals, drums, bass, piano, guitar and other. On Free you split a 2-minute part of the song you choose, 5 times a day, on a computer. For the words with the chords on a phone, open the same song in the Studio there.

We read Ultimate Guitar’s About page, its help article on tab types, its Submit a tab page and its App Store and Google Play listings on 23 October 2026, signed out, and linked each one below. Its home and Pro pages show almost nothing without JavaScript, so we took nothing from them but the home page’s headline; no Ultimate Guitar prices appear here, see its Pro page for yours.

We make Chord Lens. Every Chord Lens row comes from the Studio’s Upgrade page, its plan limits and our YouTube to Chords page the same day.

We ran no tests and print no scores: how close either one gets to a song is for your own ears. If a page changes, the date at the top tells you how old this is.