An adventure in OCD.
Reflex
It was January or February of 2011 when my guitar teacher put on Christian Alsing's song "Reflex" from YouTube. I was instantly blown away by the attitude, the beefy low-C chuggy telecaster sound, the rich and playful production and of course the widdly-widdly guitar licks. It just clicked with me immediately. This was a niche of shred guitar that really resonated with me.
I wanted to play it, but there were no tabs for this obscure Swedish guitar album. So with minimal tabbing/transcription experience (I'd tabbed a couple of songs before, nothing of this difficulty) I decided to do it myself. It ultimately ended up taking years, as I started tabbing other songs out of frustration of getting stuck on some part of Reflex. Originally I wanted to just get the lead guitars and melodies, but some rhythms were so hard to figure out I needed the drums there too. And then I needed the bass to figure out some chords and then I just decided to tab all parts of all songs. I didn't have much of a life then so I had plenty of time. And boy did it take a lot of time. I think I finished around 2015. Obviously I wasn't tabbing 24/7, but I put in hundreds and hundreds of hours.
A big problem is that I didn't really know what I was doing, I was learning to tab while trying to tab something above my skill level. So I would end up going through the same song multiple times as my hearing improved. I mean, in the beginning I didn't realise that many lead parts were double-tracked. So one note in a widdly-widdly lick would be different on the left channel than on the right, and that threw me off (how can he play a two-note chord here and stretch his fingers etc.) I ended up having to tab the tracks separately (so in many songs you will find "Lead Guitar - Left" and "Lead Guitar - Right").
I still haven't finished the intro and outro themes, I think I was too burned out, but I'll get to that someday. Some parts of some songs might have weird fingerings and chords that are off (some dissonant distorted stuff can be a bit tricky to figure out) , I have marked them in the tabs. They are in GP5 format, opening the tabs in later Guitar Pro versions can cause some weird little changes (sometimes even missing notes), although I haven't tried it with Guitar Pro 8. PDF's and midi are provided as well.
(Btw I did manage to meet Christian and play some of his songs for him!)
Tips for Tabbin'
Tabbing for me is mostly an exercise in hitting your head against a wall. But with practise, you can do it with less pain and less brain damage. For what it's worth, here are some of my tips:
Covers
Below is my synth cover of Rubberbend It (recorded in 2012) and my guitar cover of Bro (recorded in 2019).