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One of the best jazz guitarist I've ever seen is a guy named Tony Gaboury who teaches at Berklee. He once told me that he didn't know how to read tablature. I was surprised to hear this but he was not kidding. I tried to explain it to him but he was still very confused. I have never open another tab book since he told me that.
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03-29-2011 10:58 AM
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matt.guitarteacher
Good philosophy you have. I find difficulty motivating most of my flamenco students to learn to read. There are hardly any famous flamenco players that can do that, so it doesn't seem important to them. Of course they all like the tab. I have yet to find a method that will encourage them, because there are hardly any flamenco music books that don't use tab, and they don't come to me to learn to read music.
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I think tab is great to get you going, but you should quickly disregard it. It can easily become a crutch, and IN MY OPINION is the reason you can jam with a guy on a tune and then get him to a jam session and he's crap because he has no ears. This is really a radical change in the past guitarists had some of the best ears around because we tend to learn from trying to play what we hear on the radio in the first place, as opposed to classical musicians who are learning from paper from the get go and get serious ear training once they've mastered fundamentals of their instruments( I played violin in 5th grade we had no ear training the whole year in any direct way, we played lullabies, which are great ear training, but it's so abstract...we got none of the 'i play this note at the piano, you play it back to me until the next year and half later).
I use tab now frankly when I'm lazy and don't want to take the 10 minutes to figure a song out. I used to use it exclusively and after some embarrassing musical situations I abandoned it completely, did intense ear training and swore, if I couldn't figure it out by ear I'd just keep trying. I can figure most songs out by ear, even complex tunes, especially melodies...still working on harmonies(complex ones that is)....I figure out the entire Firebird Suite finale in one go! A year or so ago, I would have wasted a day on google looking for tab or sheet music.
The learning curve is steep but if you train your ear, it will become faster than any visual aid.
And if you're going to put music on paper in front of you and take the time to read it first, learn to read music. That will help you.
In my opinion, tab is only really used for music you should be able to play by ear.Last edited by ejwhite09; 03-29-2011 at 11:56 AM.
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Personally I agree. It just seems easier to read sheet music on instruments other than guitar, even if it's not impossible. Personally I don't think there's anything wrong with it, and I often find it funny that people hate on those who use tableture because it's "lazy" despite the fact that tableture is just another way to learn music.
Nowadays music has become more of a classroom grade than an artwork, and even less of a form of expression (sorry I'm not great at explaining this) but Personally I do not think it's terrible to use tableture. Just like any form of sheet music or any form of reading, it is a language. It may not be universal, but it makes it easier to understand guitar regardless, not to mention it really isn't cheating as it was the first form of "sheet music" for guitar to begin with. (Theres some forums and historical research on this elsewhere on the internet).
I also think it's great that you use both. Having the ability to use both can help transpose and set up songs with more people than just yourself.
Personally I'm having a hard time picking up sheet music because it seems so jumbled compared to what I'm actually playing on guitar as guitar and drums are my first instruments and I've almost always learned songs by ear or with help, but I'd like to as it can serve as another form of communication between other musicians to help make even better music or learn more complicated pieces.
It's great to see that other jazz artists can see the difficulty and it's relieving as I've actually been called lazy for using it.
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Bump
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How frowned upon is using guitar tablature?
It's irrelevant who 'frowns' on it. Who cares? It's a tool. If it's useful, use it.
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I frown on it but that's mostly because my eyes are failing.
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German organ tablature is fun.
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Old thread.
Simplest reason to not rely on tablature for jazz playing is that it flat out doesn't exist for SO MUCH of this music. Because it's not guitar centric music.
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Go to 1:12 of this video... Perhaps a bit tongue in cheek.
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Verheyen is recommending what in the lit biz used to be called a commonplace book.
On the other hand, his "tab is for pussies" is the rough equivalent of "keeping your journal in English is for pussies--real men write in Latin."
I invite Verheyen to keep a musical journal of Hawaiian slack key ideas in standard notation.
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I have just returned from a voyage to the real world. The people there think writing jazz down as notes on a stave is just weird. They say you cats should be memorising and improvising.
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I frown more upon people resurrecting 12 year old threads.
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I got tired of saying anything about it, because it happens almost every day here. New users show up and read threads on what interests them without bothering to look at the dates on them.
Originally Posted by David B
As for tablature, it's too hard for me to read, so I just ignore it. Others can use whatever they like, it doesn't affect me. It's all in what you've practiced reading.
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What's wrong with resurrecting old threads? When does a thread expire?
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How long is a piece of thread?
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Given there are often at least three different ways of playing the same thing on guitar and it can be important in technical, mechanical terms which of the ways you play the line, tab is very useful for communicating the unambiguous way a line is to be played. OK, you can say what position and fingering something is to be played on staff notation, but I still think such things are more clearly shown on tab.
Maybe someone upthread already made this point, if so sorry.
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Tablature is like reading one letter at a time. With standard notation you can read phrases or groups of notes similar to reading a complete word or sentence.
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To play devils advocate why couldn’t you do that with tab?
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Yeah, I do think tab is useful for teaching students where to put their fingers which is sort of important sometimes. Originally Posted by James W
I don’t like to be told where to finger things when learning music. Unless it’s really flipping hard and there’s one good way to do it. Even Classical guitar music can be a bit irritating in this respect. Treat me like a grown up!
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I think Tab has its place. I notice it most often in trying to nail the sound of specific licks. Sometimes the fingering that is needed to get the right sound is far from obvious. The Rolling Stones This Could Be The Last Time is a good example.
Last year I subbed in a big band which surprised me with an arrangement of Reeling In The Years, which I had heard but never played. The guitar lick was written out. I played it but it didn't really sound right.
Later, I watched a youtube video on it and realized that to get the right sound, you had to finger it the original way. Tab would make that easier than trying to put in little numbers in circles on a standard notation chart.
It comes up in Guinga's music. He has a book out in standard notation. It works. But it takes me quite a while to decode the string and finger numbers. Tab would be quicker.
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From my perspective both standard notation and Tab are in the same category: scores, not ears.
Tab does have one honest use in teaching; if the student does not read music or know the fingerboard or some momentary confusion, the teacher can VERBALLY state an array of coordinates (string, fret) to explicitly communicate series of pitches (line or phrase) or sets of pitches (chords) at a deconstructed level (sans rhythm). But, as a teacher I would never mention "Tab" and never show it written - only voice its elements as needed to direct attention on the finger board at certain moments.
I do frown on Tab generally because the result does not sound right, especially now days with computer generated Tab scores from isolated guitar tracks. When one learns the tune from listening to it as recorded, the guitar is within the mix of the rest of the band. Some of the little ghost/grace notes, and other things are masked and not heard, so not included in the tune learned by ear. But the track derived Tab will have those sub-audible extras, and the Tab reader will include those. Tab won't indicate leading lagging, beat width, and some other things (but neither will standard notation in spite of rhythmic info, maybe more so these days attempting to derive jazz scores through computer methods).
Both standard notation and Tab also may cause the "precedence anomaly" in which the musical status established in order of importance is superseded by a status established in order of learning... that is to say, unless one deliberately learns the most musically important parts of the score first, then their supporting parts, then the remaining fill, what happens is serial leaning into the score, starting again to make it further into the score each pass... by the time the end of the score is learned it is the least well known, the beginning the most played and well known. This lends the learned whole piece a gradient of diminishing confidence that starts off high and monotonically falls lower and lower throughout the performance.
When I listen to learn a new tune, I start with the most important musically significant peaks, then work my way down through the supports, then the filler. Kind of like a receding flood where the various higher elevations poke through the surface earlier. This allows one to play and perform the thing sooner, since the more musically important the part the more familiar I am with it, and the parts I may not know yet are the trivial filler that I might just as well leave out for space. This also helps grasp and remember the song form, since I have a natural topographic profile of the form with respect to the peaks. And I won't be trying to play the hidden stuff that only is heard in isolated studio tracks being fed through a computer to derive a guitar "score".
I can't be the only one here that hears "the sound of Tab learned guitar" (and frowns).
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Generally, we learn things that are useful to us and avoid things that get in the way of doing the things we want to do. For people who want to play by ear or by imitation, musical scores are not useful; they require a lot of learning that does not deliver results. Tabs provide answers to questions like "How did he do that?" They solve problems and allow the player to play.
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This is a bit off to the side, though it occurs to me after reading the previous two posts: In folk-derived or -adjacent traditions, especially those that depend on non-standard tunings, tab delivers information that standard notation would struggle with. I usually mention Hawaiian slack key at this point--there are dozens of tunings, some designed for specific songs. In the Celtic-rooted world, DADGAD has become a kind of standard, but even Pierre Bensusan, who uses it for just about everything, included tab in his first book.
In fact, for the styles that might be called "guitaristic" (blues, Piedmont, slack key, Merle Travis-Blind Blake-Gary Davis style thumbpicking), tab is probably the best way to notate the kinds of effects that characterize those styles. Even the techniques that make gypsy jazz sound like itself might be harder to account for in standard notation than with tab.
For those of us who came to guitar via folk music, the question often was, "How do you get that sound/play that lick?" And before the Oak Publications books, you got to the answer by careful, repeated listening and (often approximate) imitation. (See Pat Donohue's "Stealin' from Chet.") I recall that in one of Pete Seeger's very early instruction books there was an illustration of how to use a ruler to lift the record player's arm up to facilitate repeat play of a single passage. Those Oak books came out of that kind of ear learning, often supplemented by direct observation of the original player (e.g. Stefan Grossman's lessons from Rev. Davis).
Jazz culture has different roots and routes, makes different demands, and has different conventions for talking about music. When I sit in with my boppish friends, I'm the only player in the room who can't read standard notation or comfortably talk about harmonic structures (beyond key and some chord spelling), and it shows.
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What I have noticed over the years is that I find mistakes more often in the TAB, where the standard notation is correct. I am referring to sheet music of arrangements that have standard notation and the TAB below it.
To me, there are several ways to learn music that divide into 3 basic regions: standard notation, TAB, by ear, and being shown visually (i.e. watching somebody play it). There may well be more, but these come immediately to mind.
I don't see the point of eliminating any of them, though we each might favor one approach over another.
For me, since I can read, seeing notation allows me to see how the music is put together. I can readily see the chords, arpeggios, etc because I know what I am seeing. TAB just doesn't carry that kind of information for me.
On the other hand, if done correctly, TAB allows one to quickly play something new. With standard notation, I have to work out how I will finger it based on what came before and where I am going next because with the guitar, there are usually a couple of ways to play the same note. Sometimes, it is obvious how to finger a passage and in other cases, not so much.
There is a lot of good music that only comes in standard notation. I have some volumes of fingerstyle jazz arrangements from a guy in South Africa that are only in standard notation and a set of 6 volumes of solo jazz guitar arrangements from Japan that are also only in standard notation.
So, in a sense, TAB only can limit the scope of what is available to the player. For some, that won't really matter. For me, it is always interesting to explore how other people chose to play a given tune.
The Japanese books I mentioned have explanatory text about how the arrangements were put together. I finally have an app on my phone (google translate) that I can take a snapshot of a page from within the app and it will give me enough of a translation to understand what is being said. I can read standard notation, but not Japanese.
My reason for playing stuff from sheet music is to explore and learn and that is what my post here is pointing to. With that in mind, I see value in TAB and standard notation as well as by ear and watching somebody else play it.
Tony
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