Hello all! I wanted to give all who are interested a heads up on a new Finn guitar site I'm creating.

A couple Frenz, including myself, started to form a site similar in concept by committee, but unfortunately it stalled and died (as many committee projects do). I thought about this for awhile and decided to take the reins and make a site myself.

I'm doing this for a few reasons. The main reasons (which are selfish, I know) are to learn web design, and to get myself playing more guitar and transcribing songs.

Aside from that, there isn't really a dedicated Finn guitar site that I'm aware of. There are plenty of tabs out there, but to reach them you need to navigate through pages of generalized Finn sites. My site will be tab-dedicated, and the tabs will be accessible in about two or three clicks of the mouse.

Also, I'm simply not satisfied with many of the Finn tabs floating around on the net. Some are just plain wrong; others are mostly correct, but use incorrect chord names/spellings (Am6 when it's really F#mb5, for example), or different chords than used by the actual Finns in performance.

My goal is to present tabs which are as accurate as possible, most of them transcribed from live Finn performances, video if possible.

I also plan to offer bits I haven't seen at all on the internet - the solo acoustic introduction Neil favors on "Fall At Your Feet," or the acoustic solo line he often inserts in "Distant Sun," for example.

The site will offer tabs for Neil's solo work, Crowded House, Split Enz and the Finn Bros. I may be looking for outside contributions, especially for Split Enz as I only own one of their albums.

You can check the site out now in its fetal state: www.finnfrets.com

In the next few weeks it should really solidify. It will look much snazzier, with plenty of good Finn pics/photos, and the tabs will be offered in (monospaced) html format with page breaks for good printing.

I will post again when the site is fully operational - just wanted to share my enthusiasm for this project. Thanks for reading!

Wow, sounds like some hard work Slowpogo, good on ya, really looking forward to seeing it develop. Good luck with it all

That is awesome! Fabulous idea! I've bookmarked it already. A lot of people will really appreciate this site, I'm sure

Good on ya mate.

Can play quite a bit of Finn stuff on guitar already, but gonna seriously learn a few songs on electric piano soon too - err.. once i have the cash to buy one!!

Looking 4ward to the site developing.

Excellent -well done -keep it up!

Good luck with this. I play piano as well as guitar, and have found the guitar tab sites realy helpful for putting together piano parts. The more accurate the tabs the better.

One other thing you might consider (although I know you are doing this off your own bat, so don't feel you have to do anything) but it relates to Neil's writing. There have been a few very interesting chats on Frenz about his chord construction, chord progressions and so on. One of the most useful thing I have found when trying to learn his pieces is to understand the choices he has made when putting together his songs. Some of the chord progressions aren't at all obvious. So many pop songs use a basic I, IV, V progression, and in Neil's case it can be hard to work out what key the song has settled in. So anything on song construction would be great.

other than that - good luck with the thing. I'll be checking up regularly.

If you need a hand with any of them, or want to use my Enz tabs, you're more than welcome

Joe

Thanks everyone for the positive comments! Nigel, your post is interesting because I have in fact considered adding short "Analysis Essays" on certain songs..these would cover the form, harmonic structure, and other songwriting stuff.

It might be a great idea to invite others to contribute their thoughts or own essays on Neil's songs (in a music theory-type vein).

Camus, thanks for the offer. I've got most of the Enz big hits transcribed, but I'd be grateful for any of the more obscure tracks if you have them.

The site is basically all constructed - well enough for now, anyway, I will continue to tinker. I'm just working on getting the songs from my head to the computer. Once I have a decent number done I will put the site online, which should be within a week or so.

If anyone has any specific requests of songs they'd like tabs of, just let me know and I'll try to get to those next. Thanks!

Mental Notes, Second Thoughts and most of Dizrythmia are in the split enz forum, any others I can do no problem.

Hi Slowpogo,

This is also something we tried to do back on TITM around 2000 or so - PG was rooting for us, although it never took off, we never got a response/proper permission from Neil's office, and I didn't want to do it without that.

I still have most of the original files - Some of the tab work was Joe's (Camus), a lot of it Marck Bailey's with corrections by myself, and some of it was from other people.

If you PM me with an email address, I'll email you a zip of all that I have. It's got some neat things besides the text files, gifs of the album covers in a few different sizes etc.

Nice to see something like this get off the ground.

Again - Any help I can offer/corrections etc, more than happy to.

Regarding legalities and such, I actually first contacted PG about this site a while ago, maybe 1-2 years ago. Of course life got busy suddenly and the project was sidetracked..but at that time Peter did forward my email to Neil's office (I was kind of shocked he did that) and someone there responded that Neil said he had no problem with it.

So, even though it has been awhile since that happened, I feel pretty confident that I won't be getting any ominous emails from Neil's publishing company. If I do it will be a shame, lots of hard work for nothing, but I'm going to just go for it...there are several sites out there that host Finn tabs and have for a long time, so hopefully finnfrets will be left alone as they are.

i love the way it looks so far. can't wait til it's done. good job and thanks!!

I second Nigel's post, as a slightly trained (but lazy about practice) amateur musician, I often have a hard time putting my finger on what make's Neil's songs so unique - I can hear it, but I can't explain it, so I would love to see all y'all's thoughts on that. I know there's a wealth of knowledge here on Frenz, I've always enjoyed reading the threads that dissect the songs.

quote:

Originally posted by hexed:
I would love to see all y'all's thoughts on that.

"All y'all's"?
I thought you were from Evanston, Hexed?
(just teasin' ya )

Great work Slowpogo!

Tracy

A southerner by birth (Georgia) Tracy! Sometimes southernisms are so much more succinct. Would've taken a few more words in Yankee speech, so I reverted!

Great idea! I'll go and check the site out as soon as the beta problems have been resolved, but I'll gladly put up a link to your site from Finnatics.

However...

quote:

This page is designed for Mozilla Firefox - get it here

This you should maybe reconsider. Dividing the internet community by browsers has been one of the truly evil ideas that Microsoft had introduced into the 'net world. Those who (like myself) use and support the Firefox shouldn't fall into the same traps. Don't you think?

The site should *work* fine on other browsers (ie Internet Explorer 5 and up), it just won't look *as* good as on Firefox.

As far as finnfrets goes, the main issue is that IE doesn't support "fixed positioning," so everything on the screen scrolls, where in Firefox you will get cool 3D effects as content scrolls behind the title bar and menu.

I agree it's no good to promote division, but it's not the same as when Netscape was the main competition to IE...they used different proprietary standards, so you basically needed to write two websites, one for each of them.

Firefox is not a proprietary alternative, it just lives in the present and supports current standards, unlike the outdated relic that is Internet Explorer...Firefox is faster, smaller, more secure and more stable. It's a 2006 BMW next to Microsoft's 2003 Hyundai. So if I can promote its use in some (very small) way I'm happy to do so, as there's no good reason not to be using it.

I hear the next version of IE, to be included with Windows Vista, will basically be a complete rip-off of Firefox (which is open source of course).

But anyway, yeah, enough of that...I am making sure the site will work on IE. But I will be very interested in hearing about any issues people with other browsers have and will try to accommodate them.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: slowpogo,

don't mean to be greedy but what about the songs that got booted off one nil?

Slowpogo, it is possible to include a 'hack' in your code to make fixed positioning work in IE6. I won't go into it here as it's a bit off topic, but a little Googling should find some info.

Your site is a great idea - only wish I could play some Finn songs - could you single out any easy ones?

I was planning for this site to be launched a few weeks ago, then I got a job (it started as an unemployment project to keep me busy ). So I've had less time lately.

But I'm back on track with it now, hopefully not too much longer. Thanks alucidor, I'll see if I can find that "hack."

"Better Be Home Soon" is one of the easiest ones to learn, though it does use some barre chords..."Angels Heap" is also pretty easy, along with "Weather With You."

Yeah, I do plan on adding a sort of "Odds and Ends" category to catch the one nil tracks, unreleased tracks, b-sides, etc. But first I want to get 5 or so songs done for each and every album, which is close to happening. After that I will add 3-5 songs per week, so in a few months it should be pretty well stocked with tabs.