What are the Top 850 Guitar Tabs?
Everyone picked up some hobby during covid, and in my case, it was Guitar. After a year of casual practice, I stumbled upon a Website called Ultimate Guitar Tabs/ GABs. GABs is Your #1 source for chords, guitar tabs, bass tabs, ukulele chords, guitar pro, and power tabs. They have a comprehensive tabs archive with over 1100000 tabs! Many parameters make a song popular and even more feature which makes guitar players go and learn to play that song; by analyzing the basic information gathered from https://www.ultimate-guitar.com/ list of 5 star rated guitar songs, we can start to understand better the underlying patterns which drive guitar players to learn a song. I want to analyze the data and create a predictive regression model that will help detect if a piece will become popular based on variables such as the key, Tuning, Capo, and Difficulty. To best understand the underlying patterns in this data set, I will break this blog into multiple segments for ease of digestion.
Acknowledgements
All rights considering the data go to the team at https://www.ultimate-guitar.com/ which work really hard on their amazing website.
The data reported in this table includes:
• Artist (The Band/ Artist who wrote the song)
• Song Name (The name of the song)
• Song Rating (The number of 5 star ratings it has received)
• Song Hits ( The Number Of Views)
• Page Type (What Type Of Notes Did The Page Contain Tab/Chords/GP etc)
• Difficulty (How Difficult are the tabs/chords)
• Key (The Key Of The Song)
• Capo (Do You Need A Capo To Play The Song And On What Fret Do You Apply The Cappo)
• Tuning (Guitar Tuning Of The Song)
Quick Summary Data
Below are a few summary statistics of the dataset that I found particularly interesting. I will go into further detail later in the blog to dissect the material.
Questions
What artist has the most songs on this list and how many hits does each artist have.
My first question I asked myself was if there were any noticeable patterns of the songs with the top 10 most hits. It seems that of the top 10, the 4 largest of the Artist are known for playing some variance of folk/ blues. But if we look at the number of songs in the top 850 by artist Only Ed Sheeren is in the top 10. Thus research more difficult…
What is the Distrobution of Capos?
I have always enjoyed playing with capos. The ability to change the tune of your guitar by simply placing a capo on it was mind-blowing when I first learned about it. I initially thought when I would be examining this data that there would be a higher ratio of chords/tablature with capos on them. I am interested in seeing what the distribution of songs with capos is. It was expected that there would be more songs without capos than with them, but I was genuinely surprised by the distribution. It appears that in the top 850 songs on Ultimate Guitar tabs, only a fraction use capos.
Is their a correlation between tuning and Song Hits?)
I recently discovered the wonders of returning a guitar and all the new sounds you can produce with it. I am interested in learning which songs in the entire 850 most rated use a nontraditional style of tuning that being the typical EADGBE/EADGB tuning. Below is a searchable data table of all the 136 entries of the 850 that use a nontraditional tuning of the guitar.
Box plot of page type
I was interested in seeing if the page type might impact the number of 5-star ratings it would receive. I created a histogram to find this answer and removed outliers with song ratings of 5000 and above simply for an easier comparison of the two graphs. It appears that Chords, on average, have a higher degree of variance but also have a more significant 50% quartile than that of the Tab page type. 
Is there a correlation between the key and the number of song hits
It seems that the D flat Key has the highest number of hits of all keys. But what if the top 10 songs are over-representing this distribution? It does not seem like it has made a great deal of difference. Therefore, there might be a correlation between the number of song hits and the Key of the song!
Predictive Regression Model
Since discovering this website, I have wondered if the number of hits or views were a predictor of the number of 5-star ratings a song tablature would receive. So I asked myself that question. Can the number of hits be a predictor of the amount of 5-star reviews a song will get? Before performing this research, I hypothesized that there would be no correlation between the two because the music on its own is highly subjective, but I wanted to be certain. To do this, I created a predictive regression model graph to show the relationship between The Song Rating and the song Hits.
Analyzing the results
I first looked at all the available data to see if there was a strong correlation between the variables. Still, as you can see, the data has a few outlier points that need to be filtered out to understand the relationship better.
Scaling down
Below are a few graphs showing the change in the visualization as I scale down.
Final Graph and Findings
As you might have noticed, as the graphs were zooming in, there seems to be not a lot of support for a correlation between these two variables. When we look at the final chart, we can see that the number of song hits does not have a vital correlation to the number of 5-star song ratings. Unfortunately, while it does appear that songs with a higher rating have more hits, it is tough to say that there is a real relationship between the two that would allow for accurate prediction.
Sentiment Analysis of Ultimate Guitar tabs
I want to learn more about the community around Ultimate Guitar tabs. Are they generally talking positively about the company, or is there a higher degree of negativity associated with the brand? To find out this answer, I went onto their Twitter page and only had access to scrape the 26 most recent instances of their handle being mentioned. I then analyzed the words in each tweet and counted the number of words with positive and negative connotations.
Results
Based on my web scrapping, it appears that overall, there is a more significant sum of positive words being used in relationship to Ultimate Guitar. Still, there seems to be a broader variety in the negative terms used. Overall the most significant takeaway this analysis offers is that Ultimate Guitar tabs do not have a very active Twitter following but are more likely to use positive words associated with them.
Conclusion
Based on the research presented above, it appears that people who strive to learn songs on guitar gravitate toward songs that are in the Key of D flat, are in Standard tuning, and are written in chord page type. Unfortunately, I found that the number of views does not directly correlate with the number of 5-star ratings a song would receive. If I were ever to go into further depth, I would want to categorize each song into its genre, analyze the lyrics of every song and then further compare to see what words are most commonly used in the top 850 rated songs on Ultimate guitar tabs.