Ultimate Guitar Pro Review: Is it worth it? - Guitar Chalk (2024)

Lots of tabs that aren't plain text.

Pro tabs are listed as "Pro" and "Official" and only accessible to those with a Pro membership.

Plain text tabs (old style) on Ultimate Guitar.

The Pro tab is easy to distinguish from the plain text variation.

There's a lot of nuance to the Pro tabs in Ultimate Guitar, making them vastly more functional, accurate, and useful compared to the free, plain text versions. You can see this by simply looking at the two screenshots above, but I'll list the most obvious improvements that Ultimate Guitar Pro offers their users:

• Guitar Pro-style tab notation with time signatures and sight reading elements
• Multiple instrument parts, often including bass, synth, vocals, and drums
• Fretboard view for multiple instruments
• Chords-only versions of the songs
• Printable
• Tonebridge compatibility and other misc features

These are the main features representing the bulk of what you're paying for if you buy Ultimate Guitar Pro. For those wanting a little more detail, I'll go into each feature, one at a time.

Notation-Style Tab Sheets

Guitar tabs are traditionally displayed in a Courier font typed up in a plain text file.

While this can be useful in certain contexts, it's limiting in terms of the information you can display on your tab sheets. The Guitar Pro-style tabs solve this by showing timing, bars, and a wide range of notational elements that can't be displayed in a plain text document.

For example, you can see bends, time signatures (lines beneath notes), and bars displayed in "Sweet Child O' Mine" in the Pro tab version:

Guitar Pro tabs are far more complete and musically accurate than plain text tabs.

Some of the control features for Pro tabs in the Ultimate Guitar app.

I think what's most remarkable about Ultimate Guitar Pro is that most tabs have multiple instrument channels for each part of the song. For example, they might have bass, but then they'll also have different channels for each bass part.

To stick with our Tool example:

• Bass 1
• Bass 2 (drive)
• Bass solo

You'll often have multiple parts for each instrument added.

And then for Adam Jones' guitar tracks:

• Lead guitar
• Solo guitar
• Rhythm guitar

My guess is that Ultimate Guitar has access to some kind of database where official scores and tab sheets are stored for licensed music, because doing all this manually would be an incredible time investment. Either way, they deserve credit for getting so much material to their users. Here's another look at the instrument selection interface:

Another look at the instrument selection interface. This conveniently pops out on the left side of the tab, making instrument selection super easy.

The fretboard view combined with the speed adjustment makes an already excellent resource even more helpful and functional.

As the tab and audio play, this element will light up with a yellow dot on the fret and string corresponding to each note. In combination with the ability to slow down the tab, this is extremelyhelpful and should also be noted as a valuable teaching tool.

When I taught lessons I'd have a lot of students ask me to help them learn a particular song and this resource would have been incredibly helpful for that task.

I found myself using the chords-only resource more than any other feature.

You can easily toggle back and forth between the tab and chord version of each song.

Printing or a printable format is only available in the Pro version.

There are a few other features that I won't give a full paragraph to. Instead, we'll just list them here.

• Zoom in/out
• Tonebridge functionality (effects and amp settings app)
• Left-handed view
• Countdown for starting songs
• Metronome

To get a feel for the value of this program, we need to know how much it costs. This was surprisingly tricky, though after going to an incognito browser (I already had a testing Pro account for this review) and filling out a form about what kind of music I liked and what instruments I played, I finally got to see the pricing structure.

I did the same thing this year to get updated pricing which, as I mentioned, has changed dramatically.

The price of Ultimate Guitar Pro has gone up significantly.

The prices for an Ultimate Guitar Pro membership, when we first published this review.

This increase in price is pretty disappointing, especially the month-to-month cost. The $25 per month is actually higher than Guitar Tricks, which is a vastly more comprehensive program. The thought process that went into this price increase is something we can only speculate about, but the bottom line is that it's too high.

Again, this is a bummer, because they have a great product on their hands. They're just charging way too much for it.

Here's a quick summary of the Ultimate Guitar Pro cost:

• $25 per month
• $99 per year
• $65 per year (spring sale)

All together, Ultimate Guitar Pro is one of the easiest and most functional ways to learn a song on the internet. It makes the plain text tab essentially a thing of the past.

And my experience with Ultimate Guitar Pro has been entirely positive. It's a simple, extremely helpful resource that significantly improves over what the site offers for free. However, I have to revise how I feel about the value of the program, given the increase in price.

For tabs, $25 per month is absolutely too high. Even the $99 per year is too high. And this is even more of a bummer, since their price points used to be really good.

So in summary, it's a great program that takes a hit because of what they charge.