Pink Floyd owes its name and much of its early musical influence and style to original front man Syd Barrett. When Barrett succumbed to a gradual mental breakdown circa 1967-1968, fellow band members picked up the pieces and continued to be a hugely successful musical group. But they would not forget him. In 1975, guitarists Roger Waters and David Gilmour put their ongoing sense of loss over Barrett into music in the single “Wish You Were Here.”

Like Barrett itself, the song has an enduring legacy. In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked it number 316 on a list of the “500 Greatest Songs of All Time.” Performers from a diverse cross-section of genres have recast the song in their own cover versions: reggae artist Alpha Blondy, rock group Pascale Picard, metal band Angra, hard rock group Velvet Revolver, and rapper Wyclef Jean, among many others.

The song also draws emulators from legions of amateur guitarists who look for and learn the wish you were here guitar tabs. The Internet affords them an abundance of resources for doing so. For starters, they can go to Pinkfloydonline, a Pink Floyd fan site that has guitar tabs for many Pink Floyd songs. The written tablature and the lyrics for “Wish You Were Here” are here, all on one comprehensive page.

If you look up Wish You Were Here guitar tabs on YouTube, you’ll get a whopping 2,380 results—a huge number for any one song. They include four videos by Justin Sandercoe, a musician who runs the guitar Web site Justinguitar.com.

Each of Sandercoe’s four YouTube videos is a 10-minute walk-through of specific chords: Video number one is the intro chords, video number two is the verse and chorus, video number three is the into solo, and video number four is a demo of the intro, verse, solo, and chorus all put together.

Other sites for finding Wish You Were Here guitar tabs include the following: Tababunga, Ultimate Guitar Archive, and Guitaretab. Tababunga has a 10-minute video presentation plus tablature.

No fewer than 20 tablature pages await you on Ultimate Guitar Archive; different pages break down different parts of the song, so you might scroll around to make sure you have all your bases covered. Guitaretab’s results are a little simpler. Just four pages come up, and each one shows only a few lines of chords. This site is a good starting point to get the basics down pat.

Experienced musicians know how to read tablature and thereby play the tunes that they like. Amateur music fans might not be versed in how to read tabs, but that doesn’t mean that they have to miss out on the fun. Video game guitar tabs allow them to play songs with no knowledge of sheet music required.

Video game guitar tabs are an online trend geared uniquely toward guitarists (video tabs for drummers and keyboarders haven’t come out yet, though you never know when that may change). What these tabs do is display a row of vertical lines representing guitar strings and then flash numbers along the strings. Each number represents a location of where you would hold down the string or strings.

Video game guitar tabs have a few drawbacks. For one, they don’t tell you how long to hold each note. That’s not too big of a problem, though. If you have a good feel for the song, you can deduce by ear the length of time that will work best for given chords. Another shortcoming is that non-guitarists will not know how to read these tabs. If you’re in a band and need to collaborate on a song, you may run into a lot of complications.

But in all, video tabs’ pluses definitely outweigh their minuses. They’re a great help to new guitarists learning to master hammer ons, slides, string bends, harmonics, and other techniques.

LoveToKnow Video Games is an excellent go-to site for general information about video game guitar tabs and for leads on the best sites you can visit for finding game tunes that you might be looking to play.

Video Game Jam is one such lead. This site has a vast selection of tabs, and you can view them or print them for free. In addition, guitarists who have created their own tabs can submit them to the site for possible publication.

Game Tabs is also a great site to visit. Its collection has guitar tabs from many popular computer titles and consoles. The tabs are free to download. You’ll find side forums on this site for discussing tabs with other users and for suggesting other tabs that you’d like to see created.

The Mushroom Kingdom is yet another worthy tabs site, albeit with a Mario Brothers theme (hence the name “Mushroom Kingdom”). You’ll find tabs for most Mario Brothers songs, in addition to graphics, MP3s, and desktop fonts.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers hit “Under the Bridge,” a deceivingly ambient melody in which front man Anthony Keidis relates his struggle with heroin addiction, still gets regular radio play nearly 20 years after its debut on the 1992 album “Blood Sugar Sex Magik.” It also gets repeated props from aspiring guitarists in dorm rooms and apartments everywhere who take it upon themselves to add the “Under the Bridge” guitar tabs to their repertoire of covers.

Enter the term “Under the Bridge” guitar tabs into the YouTube search engine and more than 180 results will pop up, including step-by-step lessons in how to play the song. Contributor John Hasson, for example, created a virtual graphic presentation that shows a computer image of a guitar’s six strings and beams lighting up each corresponding string as the song plays in the background.

Hasson’s video is only 46 seconds. But a full 3-minute video by Joe Wiles of the Rock and Roll Conservatory appears in person with a guitar in hand and demonstrates the specific chords and how he forms them. Wiles notes that at the time of the video’s production, the tabs to “Under the Bridge” are the 66th most frequently downloaded guitar tabs on the Internet.

When you’re just starting to learn the “Under the Bridge” guitar tabs, it probably helps to have the chords written out for you as well as told to you verbally. You’ll get the written tablature at the site Tababunga, a Web site that compiles guitar tabs to hundreds of songs.

Accompanying the Tababunga “Under the Bridge” tablature is a 10-minute video showing a guitarist playing the song for you. He doesn’t say anything, but he does stop and play each chord slowly while the camera zooms in up close enough for you to see what he’s doing.

Once you master “Under the Bridge” and start playing it, you’ll be in good company. The a cappella group The Flying Pickets covered it on their 1994 debut album. Jazz musician Frank Bennett followed two years later with his own version, in which he added some elements of bebop and big band. Mos Def, Tony Hadley, and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra have also adopted the song into their play lists.

All Saints, a British pop band, is credited with having the most popular cover version, though it deleted certain references to drug use. Keidis did not think very highly of this version, however.

“Iron Man,” Black Sabbath’s 1970 power rock ballad about a man who travels into the future, witnesses an apocalyptic landscape of ruin, then returns to his time to try unsuccessfully to warn his fellow humanity to reverse course before it’s too late, is one of those immortal rock classics. Fans bought the LP in droves at the time, and the band won a 1999 Grammy for Best Metal Performance for playing it during that year’s reunion tour, almost three decades later.

And through the present day, aspiring rock-music performers have counted the song as sources of inspiration to start their hoped-for music careers. Most of them make a point of mastering the Iron Man guitar tabs before venturing far into metal music.

Type “Iron Man Guitar Tabs” into YouTube and you’ll see for yourself this song’s enduring popularity. More than 250 videos will pop up, contributions by guitarists who not only learned the song themselves, but decided to share their new knowledge with viewers. Contributor Toni Lommi chose this song to be his first guitar solo.

If you have 10 minutes to spare, “Guitar Lessons from the Can,” an ongoing YouTube video series produced by California-based musician James of Zombie House Productions, will show you step-by-step how to perform the Iron Man guitar tabs on one’s own guitar.

“Definitely one of heavy metal’s finest songs, an awesome riff,” James announces at the video’s outset, before launching into the specific chords that form the main riff, then the following notes and power chords. He tells viewers that there are “hundreds” of ways to play the song. But his video makes his particular way fairly simple and approachable.

Joe Wiles of the Rock N Roll Conservatory also has an instructional YouTube for playing “Iron Man.” It’s less than two minutes, a lot shorter than James’ but long enough to go over the basic chords and frets.

Other YouTube tutorial videos for playing “Iron Man” are brought to you not by lone guitar amateurs, but by established guitarist-instruction Web sites. Avcsguitarworld.com, an online library of free lessons for beginner and intermediate guitarists and bass guitarists, is one such site.

Jamplay.com draws from its own archives of more than 400 hours’ worth of video lessons from 38 different guitarists to put up some black Sabbath tutorials on YouTube’s site as well. These videos are longer and more detailed, as you’d expect from guitar professionals.

It’s almost a cliché now that MTV used to play music but really doesn’t anymore. Just about any music fan will agree with you if you say that there aren’t very many music videos running on this TV station nowadays. Why, though, is a tough question to answer.

Maybe, in part, it’s because YouTube and other video-sharing sites on the Internet have taken over the job. Type just about any rock-music song into YouTube’s search engine, and chances are you’ll find a few versions of videos for it, some of them official and some of them artsy presentations assembled by users at their home desktops.

Of even more interest to some music fans, you’ll also find videos presenting the guitar tabs for the songs in question. Take Incubus, for example. YouTube has over a hundred Incubus guitar tabs videos in its vault. Most of the band’s biggest hits are broken down for you, chord by chord, for your viewing and practicing pleasure: “Drive,” “Love Hurts,” “Pardon Me,” and “Wish You Were Here,” among others.

When you’re done perusing YouTube, you should visit some of the Web sites that run nothing but guitar tabs and guitar tutorials. These sites are many, and you’re bound to come across a fair share of Incubus guitar tabs if you search around on them.

Ultimate-Guitar.com is one such site. Go to its home page and type “Incubus” into the search engine. You’ll get back a whopping 500 results. Note that not only are many popular Incubus songs presented here, but there are multiple tutorials for each one. “Drive” has five versions. “The Warmth” has eight. “Make Yourself” has six. So on and so on.

You could spend hours viewing and studying all the Incubus guitar tabs presented on Ultimate-Guitar.com. Just make sure that you have the needed software installed first. Most of them require the Guitar Pro or Power Tab programs.

Fretplay is another useful guitar-tabs Web site. Its Incubus page is substantial—and apparently still growing, as it requests users to submit any guitar tabs that they don’t already see displayed. There are dozens of links as it is, so fan participation seems to be fairly high. The page also has links to other pages on the band’s history, its albums, and reviews of their music. And for guitar newbies, there is a handy guide on how to read guitar tabs—those authored by Incubus or otherwise.

You can find just about anything on Facebook, even guitar song tabs. Enter “guitar song tabs” into the search engine and dozens of guitar-tab-related groups will come up. These groups’ members hail from all over the globe and include speakers of just about every major language. It would be impossible to describe every one of these groups in one article. But here are a few words on some of the most noteworthy:

“Guitar Tabs” is a group that was launched by Hasnat Karim Saikat, a Bangladeshi artist, and is a meeting place predominantly for guitarists from India, Bangladesh, and other parts of South Asia. It has 1,131 members at the time of writing. The main page features a lively, discussion-filled wall and a link to Saikat’s own Web site, whose home page displays a vast list of tabs for popular Bangladeshi and Hindi songs.

The title of the group “Huge Collection of Guitar Tabs and Chords—Guitar” just about says it all. It’s another predominantly South Asian forum, one with a grand total of 1,273 group members. The members learn and share tons of Hindi and Bangladeshi songs. See their wall and marvel at its diversity: Various postings are written in English, Hindi, Sinhala, Bengali, and many more languages besides. You’ll also find a thick photo album and video collection of guitar-themed pictures and videos.

“Leave My Guitar Tabs Alone!” is a group that was formed not just to share guitar song tabs, but to fight for them. According to the group’s Description section, recording companies have contacted Web sites that display guitar tabs and ordered the sites to take the tabs down, ostensibly because displaying them represents an unauthorized distribution of copyrighted music.

The outraged Facebook-using guitarists who visit these sites specifically for the tablature displays feel strongly that the recording companies are overstepping their bounds and have formed “Leave My Guitar Tabs Alone!” to say so. They number 101 members at the time of writing.

“Guitars Are the Official Cure for Boredom” is an all-purpose guitar group in which a new guitarist can find just about everything he or she would need to get started. The wall’s discussions are diverse and range from listings of favourite guitarists to links to online guitar performance and instructional video clips. There are also links to helpful sites like Axebay, where one will find online guitar lessons, tips on playing guitar, and blogs by experienced guitarists.

Few people will say with certainty just what the enigmatic Oasis song “Wonderwall” really means, but plenty of them love to listen to it all the same: In 2008, it won 76th place in the U.K.’s list of best-selling singles.

Music fans apparently love playing it, too. The song is one of the most frequently covered songs in recent music history, truth be told. A version by The Mike Singles Pops reached number 2 on the UK Singles Chart in December 1995, a mere two months after Oasis’s original first hit the airwaves.

Ryan Adams came up with a cover in 2001 and released it on his 2004 album “Love is Hell.” Great Big Sea, Paul Anka, The Beastie Boys, Cartel, Rihanna, and Alan Fletcher have also covered “Wonderwall” over the years.

With this many musicians looking to play “Wonderwall,” it is understandable that a plethora of Web sites have taken to distributing the Wonderwall Guitar Tabs. As with anything else, when the market demands it, someone will provide it.

Justin Sandercoe, guitarist and the producer of guitar-tutorial website Justinguitar.com, is one such source for Wonderwall Guitar Tabs. His site once carried the tabs for many songs. Unfortunately, record companies prevailed upon him with legal notices to remove them. But you can transcribe the tabs yourself if you simply watch his live videos; each video center on one song and how to play it. Visit Justinguitar.com, click on the “songs” tab on the left, and then scroll down to the songs list. “Wonderwall” is near the bottom.

Nailguitar.com is another go-to source for live video tutorials on playing songs. “Wonderwall” gets presented for you in a nice 10-minute video by contributor Andy, who tells you up front that the song has a challenging strum pattern and difficult rhythm that can make it a hard one for beginners, but that he offers what he promises to be “the easy lesson.” Watch his video and decide for yourself.

Tababunga.com is a guitar-tabs-sharing site that has so far managed to steer clear of trouble from the record execs. Visit its home page, type “Wonderwall” into the search engine on the top right-hand side, and you’ll get both Wonderwall Guitar Tabs and an instructional video on how to play them. The video is a concise 8 minutes and has a very easy-to-follow instructor walking you through each chord and the strings you play to form it.

Billy Joe Armstrong’s mournful ode to his father, who died when Billy Joe was a young child, “Wake Me Up When September Ends” neared the top of the charts in Australia, Great Britain, and the United States shortly after its release in 2005.

Four Septembers have come and passed since, but you’ll still find guitarists everywhere paying homage to the hit song by obtaining and learning the Wake Me Up When September Ends Guitar Tabs. YouTube has more than 100 videos submitted by guitar enthusiasts who not only mastered the song, but wish to show the world that they have done so.

Some of these videos are merely live renditions put out there for your viewing and listening pleasure. But others are thorough instructional videos in which the guitarists speak to you, the viewer, and show you how you would play “Wake Me Up When September Ends” fret by fret and chord by chord.

Jorgenolla is one such contributing guitarist. In his 6-minute video, he first plays the song for you. Then the camera moves in for an extreme close-up of his fingers on the guitar strings. While the viewing is in this mode, Jorgenolla plays the chords slowly enough for you to observe where he places his fingers to play the tune. You might need to play this back a few times, but as long as you’re observant you’ll get the hang of it.

You’ll want to have the Wake Me Up When September Ends guitar tabs on hand for you to practice with when you’re not in front of your computer. If you watch any of these how-to videos, then all you need to do is transcribe the frets and chords as the guitarist is playing and re-playing them. This is assuming, though, you know guitar tabs cold dish and won’t have any problem writing out in tab form what you’re hearing; most novice guitarists don’t.

Andrew Bagchi of Rocktoons.com makes the transcribing a little easier for you. In his video, which also runs on YouTube, he plays the song slowly, and the graphics display the corresponding tab to each fret and chord as he plays.

In addition, you can look around for sites that will present you the Wake Me Up When September Ends guitar tabs in complete sheet-music form, all pre-written and ready for you to download, print, and use. Ultimateguitararchive.com and tababunga.com are two great sites for this.

Eric Clapton’s riveting acoustic ballad “Tears In Heaven,” which mourns the death of his then-four-year-old son, Connor, has been making eyes well up and hearts swell all over the world since its rise in 1992 to the number-one spot on the American adult contemporary chart.

Clapton actually stopped playing the song in 2004, but aspiring musicians everywhere have taken up the song in his place. This you can tell by the profusion of Web sites that distribute Tears in Heaven guitar tabs.

Tears in Heaven guitar tabs made an early arrival on the Ultimate Guitar Archive site, which uploaded them in mid-2001 (the Ultimate Guitar Archive site was less than three years old at that point).

Guitar-music-theory.com, an online distributor of free guitar lessons and tablature, has an especially detailed demonstration of the Tears in Heaven guitar tabs. The site’s nine-minute video gives you an exact, chord-by-chord walk-through the intro, refrain, and conclusion, and everything in between. The guitarist explains which strings to play open, which strings to play together, which frets to hold and which fingers to hold them with, and more.

If you’re sharp at reading sheet music, then you’ll find magic-tab.com helpful. It’s got video displays that play a song and then run images of the corresponding sheet tablature as the notes play. “Tears in Heaven” is one of the thousands of songs in its online library.

Still-life sheet tablature still has a valued place in the lives of most musicians. And there is plenty of that to be found if the song in question is “Tears in Heaven.” Guitar Tabs Universe has 21 versions of the tabs for this song. Some versions are more intricate then others; a couple of them have fewer guitar riffs or skip the intro, while others are more comprehensive. It depends how much time you’re willing to put into learning it. Also, it matters whether you’d be playing solo or with a backup guitarist (or guitarists).

MXtabs has 15 different tabs versions for the song—somewhat fewer than Guitar Tabs Universe, but impressive all the same. Each one is submitted by volunteer contributors. As with Guitar Tabs Universe, some tabs are very simple and only cover a few chords, while others go further into it. Scrolling through a few will give you a full flavor for the song and how it’s played. Notes in each one’s margins will guide you as you’re learning them.

Any anthology of modern guitar history would surely need a page or two about Neil Young in order to call itself complete. Having twice earned a nomination to the Rock ‘N Roll Hall of Fame during a career that spans more than four decades and a multitude of musical genres—folk, country, alternative, and grunge, among others—he has made his mark on the contemporary music scene many times over.

Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder both counted him as an influence. Their mutual emulation of Young’s guitar work is why Young, not Cobain or Vedder, has been called the “Godfather of Grunge.”

Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Blind Melon, and Phish all likewise emulated Young’s willingness to speak out on major political and social issues. Dave Matthews is yet another member of the Neil Young fan club, as can be evidenced by Matthews’ emulation of Young’s music styles and the Dave Matthews Band’s occasional covering of Young’s songs.

With major stars like these drawing inspiration from Neil Young, it should come as no surprise that droves of amateur guitarists incorporate Young’s music into their guitar play. YouTube’s ever-growing video library has more than 220 video demos of Neil Young Guitar Tabs submitted by contributor guitarists.

Many of these are quite extensive. Canadian contributor Saskstrum, author of guitar Web site saskstrum.com, has a four-part video series teaching the tabs to Young’s “Old Man.” Australian guitarist Justin Sandercoe, of justinguitar.com, teaches viewers how to play “The Needle and the Damage Done” over the course of a 7-minute conversational video.

Sandercoe’s site laments that he no longer can post guitar tabs per se—not Neil Young Guitar Tabs and not anyone else’s—due to legal notices from the Music Publishers Association ordering him to remove any and all tablature from his site on grounds of copyright law. But his demo videos are just as good as written Neil Young Guitar Tabs, and significantly more viewer-friendly, so despair not. And as his site also notes, there is nothing to stop you, the viewer, from transcribing the tabs yourself from his videos.

A volley of other contributors have posted shorter videos on YouTube. You’ll find various demos of “Long You May Run” by Bill Brown, Nils Lofgren, and Marty Schwartz. Their videos each run from 4 to 6 minutes. Raskali takes you through “Old Man” in a 4-minutes video. Take another 4 minutes and you can watch AZCharlie play “Harvest Moon.”