OLGA Blue Ribbon Campaign

Some of the OLGA sites have been forced to close by a threatened lawsuit from EMI Publishing. Follow this link to find out more.

Quelques sites d'OLGA ont fermés à cause d'une menace d'EMI Publishing; l'histoire de la fermeture est disponible en français.

The On-Line Guitar Archive is a collection of chords and tablature for thousands of songs. It also contains lessons, chord charts, software, information on building guitars, and many links to other guitar-related Web sites.

Read the copyright notice before viewing any files, as it explains the restrictions on the use of the materials. OLGA is not responsible for what you do with the files that you take from the archive.

OLGA has many "mirror sites" around the world; click on the table below to visit one of them. If you need more information, check the Frequently Asked Questions at the bottom of this page.

FTP sites: WWW sites:

To search for a specific song, use one of these WWW search forms:

Inside OLGA

Most of the files in the archive will be found in the directories a-z and 1-9; they are organized according to the first letter/number of the band's name or artist's last name, but OLGA also contains a number specialised directories, dedicated to classical music, acoustic guitar, praise songs, country music and ChordPro formatted songs (the classical, acoustic, praise_songs, cowpie and chordpro directories, respectively.)

Jan-Erik Schuch maintains the ChordPro archive, which contains most or all of the songs in ChordPro format that are in the main archive at OLGA, and about 2000 others as well.

Cowpie is a separate archive for country music maintained by Greg Vaughn (cowpie@olga.net) that has been merged with OLGA in the cowpie directory.

The collection of praise songs is maintained by Benson Trinh (btrinh@msn.com).

OLGA also has a number of files with bass guitar tablature in the general archive - check the BTAB.INDEX at the top level to see what's available and where the files are. We hope to make the bass archive a separate entity very shortly.

OLGA also contains directories of television, film and musical soundtracks as well as children's, christmas, and irish and other traditional songs. These can all be found in the m directory, under misc_soundtrack, misc_christmas, and so on.

One document to keep on your person at all times (probably on a disk - you'd have to kill lots of trees to print it!) is the FLAT.INDEX. This file can be found at the top level of the archive and lists all of the files currently available. This is handy to have if your access is not perfect or you wish to limit your time on line, since you can quickly check to see if the file you want is in OLGA.

A summary of the structure of OLGA can be found in the OLGA README file.

Frequently Asked Questions

  • I have a bunch of chord and tab files that I want to contribute to OLGA for all the world to see. How can I do that?
    At the minute, due to the forced closure of the Nevada site by EMI, we are no longer accepting submissions. When another base site becomes available, we will be accepting files.
  • I tried to access one of the OLGA sites, and it said there were too many users already accessing the site. What should I do?
    Try a different mirror site. One of them is bound to be open.
  • I downloaded a file, but it mostly just looks like a barbed-wire fence with numbers stuck on it. What is it?
    That's tablature, a wonderful system of writing down music for stringed instruments. If you're new to tab, read Howard Wright's guide to reading and writing tablature. If you are looking at a chord file, and don't know how to form the chords, check out the various chord dictionaries in the resources/chart_docs directory at at site. With the chord dictionary at eMedia, if you have a Java-enabled browser, you can hear the chords too!
  • Okay, I read Howard's tab guide, and now I want to write down some tab. Do I need any special software to create my own tablature files?
    A lot of people use ordinary word processors or text editors to write tablature, but there are also a number of chord and tab utilities for various platforms. These utilities can be found at any of the OLGA sites, in the resources directory.
  • What do I do about files that end in .Z or .gz?
    Some of the mirror sites compress their files to save space, and the compressed files have a .Z or .gz suffix. Read the document on how to deal with compressed files.
  • I'm using Microsoft Windows to access the Internet. Whenever I download a file with the .crd suffix and then try to open it, Windows thinks the file belongs to the Cardfile accessory. What's the deal?
    The .crd files are really just plain text. Read the document on how to deal with Windows Cardfile to get everything straightened out.
  • I don't have access to the World Wide Web. (Okay, I actually do, or I wouldn't be reading this.) But my sister and my brother-in-law don't; they only have access to FTP. How can they use OLGA?
    OLGA is just an FTP archive; your Web browser may even be getting the files via FTP. So Webless people should have no trouble at all. They should connect to olga.net with their FTP client, and read the file called /pub/guitar/.message; it will give them the URL's of all the OLGA sites, which they can print out for future reference.
  • My mom and dad don't even have FTP; they just have e-mail. Can they use OLGA?
    Yes! They can use a service called "FTPmail." Send them a copy of our document about accessing OLGA via e-mail.
  • Do you guys have a list of other guitar-related Internet sites?
    We have a page with links to other Internet guitar resources. You can find almost anything through the indexes listed on that page.
  • Who runs OLGA?
    Most of the archive work was done by Cal Woods, but we have a little committee of Internet-literate guitar players -- "The OLGA Grunts" -- who make decisions, write the "help" files, design the Web pages, etc. For more information, you can read all about who we are.
  • What if I still have a question?
    Queries, as well as comments and error reports, should be addressed to guitar@olga.net. They should never go to the sysadmins of any site. Requests for songs not at OLGA should be made in the guitar.tab newsgroups. We will not send out files - you just have to learn how to use the Web, FTP, etc.

    Please send any comments/corrections/additions about this page to webmaster@olga.net.

    Last updated: 11:16 AM, November 8, 1996
    The OLGA Grunts