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I have been reading notation for decades - but I have noticed that TAB is becoming the preferred style of manuscript.
Perhaps it is just the inability to change (or reluctance to change), but I can't hear TAB in my head the same as I can with notation.
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05-23-2026 06:08 AM
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Tab isn't meant for the purpose of audiation, it's to spoon-feed guitarists where exactly to put their fretting hand. If something is only tab then I agree that's a problem, even if the rhythmic notation is included. But if the staff notation is there, it's not a problem if tab is also included, IMO.
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Tab has a very noble history, and shouldn’t be summarily dismissed. Not only was it the notation of choice for the entire history of the lute (save for one composer, Perrine, who published a lute book in notation - which nobody bought, so it was never repeated). Even the very chromatic fantasies of John Dowland were notated in tablature. This was acceptable because musicians in those days actually used their ears to decide when voices should stop.
And, yes, the venerable Johann Sebastian Bach used keyboard tablature when he was running out of space on a page!
My experience as a teacher taught me that there are two types of tab reader: one who understands music, notices voices, notices when the tab number is on the wrong string, etc, and one who knows nothing about the workings of music, and will repeat a mistake ad nauseum just because the tab tells him where to put his finger.
So, for a broadly-educated musician, there is nothing wrong with tab, indeed I often use it even though my standard-notation reading (in treble and bass clefs) is just as good. But not everyone who uses tab understands the workings of music.
Ultimately, a mastery of both is required these days, certainly for jazz musicians. I see no reason why a creative musician, composing and performing their own music, need ever learn any notation system.
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Oh, by the way, surely I’m not alone in hearing a tab score?
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Early on (which is to say, a half-century ago), I learned all the fingerpicking tunes I didn't figure out on my own via tab-centric books, mostly from Oak Publications. And since most of us in the folkie world were trying to play what we'd heard on records, the crucial questions weren't "what are the notes" or "what is the melody" but "where do I put my fingers," the oddities of, say, Stefan Grossman's charts (which early on didn't deal with phrasing at all) weren't deal-killers. Though I did have enough standard-notation knowledge to find tabs that included the note tails and observed measure lines helpful with tricky passages. Happy Traum's charts were very good for capturing phrasing.
For most folk-based guitar tunes--and particularly for those not in standard tuning--tab is the most direct way to represent the actual fingering--blues, obviously, but also Piedmont styles. I've spent a lot of time with Hawaiian slack key, which starts off with a half-dozen common tunings out of the fifty or so that George Winston identified. Decent tab and a clear exemplary recording are the essentials for learning slack key. (And traditionally, the music was transmitted directly--watch, listen, and imitate your grandpa or uncles or aunties.)
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I read standard notation. For most of what I do, I vastly prefer it to tab.
That said, tab definitely has it's uses. Tab can communicate exactly how a passage was played instead of leaving it to the player to figure out. For example, I once had to read a big band arrangement of Reeling In the Years, which included the original guitar solo. I read it, but it didn't sound much like the original. That really required playing it the same way to take advantage of open strings and so forth. Tab communicates that more efficiently than standard notation with little numbers.
If you recall the Stones' song This Could Be The Last Time, try to figure out how to get the lick to sound right from standard notation.
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Yes. Tab is in a certain respect unambiguous which can be important for aspects of technique.
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I’m not actually very good at reading Tab tbh. Which is interesting, because it does mean you can lose the skill a bit if you focus on notation exclusively. Which I’m fine with.
Tab is good if you want to tell people where to put their fingers. What it doesn’t do is tell you which fingers…
It’s interesting that when I post my fingerings that seem perfectly playable to me in tab, some people complain that they can’t play them. Which I think points to the fact that actually people need to stop asking other people to tell them where to put their fingers as technique is somewhat diverse in jazz. At some point you really do have to become a musician and start making that call yourself
And that’s true of both reading notation and learning music by ear.
Unless it’s Allan Holdsworth and there’s literally only one way to play it and that is with spider fingers. And if you don’t get teh Tabz you spend six months feeling like someone at Bletchley Park decoding Engima, and tbh that’s the situation anyway because much the tab on the internet is garbage and bet you any money the transcriber has never played it up to tempo. Then six months in, you randomly see Deryl Gabel do it in a video that inexplicably didn’t show up in your search and he’s selling the tab. And then you think ‘six months of my life man!!’ and then feel you must cling to the belief that doing this is has somehow made you a better player because at least he uses the same fingerings for the fast bits. Even though you still can’t really play it.
Sorry that one got out of hand
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There’s the sort of thing in written guitar charts where someone writes an arpeggio and there’s no clue given as to whether you should play it as a melody or letting the notes ring into each other.
Originally Posted by rpjazzguitar
Of course there’s notation conventions for that sort of thing but the non guitarist arranger probably won’t know them.
On the other hand it’s somewhat the same for tab. Sometimes you just have to listen to the thing.
It’s one reason why guitarists aren’t expected to sight read music theatre pads in the same way as horns are, even in the land of sight reading bravado that is London Town. You have prep time.
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Btw I’m interested to know - was tab in widespread use between the baroque era and the guitar magazine era of the 1980s on? It doesn’t seem to appear much in older books.
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Christian, at the end of the baroque era two things happened relevant to this discussion:
1. The lute died out. By this time most lute music had been using the French tab system, or, as in Italy, the “upside-down” guitar tab system had been replaced by figured bass, as the role of the lute (now archlute) had changed.
2. The 5-course baroque guitar became the 6-course guitar. The 5c guitar had re-entrant tunings (for instance the third or fourth course would be the lowest, not the fifth course) and in such circumstance tab was definitely the best way to notate the music. The 6c guitar, on the other hand was tuned from low to high, the same tuning we use now, and there was less of a need for tab as the music did not exploit the peculiarities of the reentrant system.
The above is a rough outline, as there were outliers here and there doing other things, but this was the general movement. Both Sor and Aguado started their guitar-playing life with the 6-course guitar, which remained popular in Spain, but when they emigrated to France, the 6-single-string guitar was more popular. The extra low E string was found to be useful when it came to accompanying singers, providing a stronger bass, so the whole conception of the instrument changed.
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Christian: The Oak Publications books I learned from date from the early 1960s--Jerry Silverman's Folksinger's Guitar Guide, Pete Seeger's How to Play 5-string Banjo, and such--all included tab. By the time I sold my first article to Acoustic Guitar in 1992, the standard for how-to pieces was tab plus a cassette of the tune in question, and the magazine's music editor would turn the tab into standard notation. I suppose those who could do so sent in notation as well as tab, but I wasn't among them.
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I've had a few students who read more easily with Tab than with standard notation.
Some people can't learn a tune without having a version with Tab.
There is a lot of "information' in the Tab notation...I don't use it much.
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Thanks for the info Originally Posted by RLetson
Christian: The Oak Publications books I learned from date from the early 1960s--Jerry Silverman's Folksinger's Guitar Guide, Pete Seeger's How to Play 5-string Banjo, and such--all included tab. By the time I sold my first article to Acoustic Guitar in 1992, the standard for how-to pieces was tab plus a cassette of the tune in question, and the magazine's music editor would turn the tab into standard notation. I suppose those who could do so sent in notation as well as tab, but I wasn't among them.
Google AI tells me that these were exceptions to the general style of guitar books. I obviously have no idea if that’s correct or not.
I do have a 70s Django book that adopts a convoluted system using chord boxes instead of tab. Which made me think that it wasn’t in widespread use back then.
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No, they were the rule, not the exception, in the 70's just about all the blues and folk music instruction books included tablature, I still have a few of Stephen Grossman's books. Originally Posted by Christian Miller
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TAB is indispensable for rock and pop guitar. Where you play the notes is just as important as the notes itself. If you know you know.
For jazz TABs not needed I think. How you choose to play Donna Lee on guitar is totally up to you and will not affect the tune.
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Exactly: Played. Past tense. Originally Posted by rpjazzguitar
The entire raison d'être of tabulature is to convey how someone else did something previously. It is an historical document of something that already took place.
That someone else may be another performer, and the tab is a transcription of something they played on a recording or live performance...or, that someone else may simply be the copyist who prepared the tabulature for your consumption.
But it is not designed to convey musical ideas that haven't yet been audiated.
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I still have my first guitar instruction book from 1955 somewhere--a Hy White Guitar Method and Song Folio. It was very, very basic, clearly aimed at strumming, and used chord diagrams (and photos of left-hand positions), strum slashes, and standard notation of the melody. No tab necessary because it was all about rhythm accompaniment for singing. (My teacher did not, as far as I knew, play guitar--she was the junior-high music teacher, reaching down to a sixth-grader.)
When I got at least semi-serious about playing a few years later, I just bought sheet music for individual songs or folios that included guitar chords. And when I got more ambitious, it was the Oak fingerpicking collections with tab. And Stefan Grossman's Kicking Mule LPs used to include a booklet with tabbed-out transcriptions.
There were certainly instruction books that didn't use tablature, but those were aimed at players who could read standard notation, and they clearly weren't for me. My learning path was entirely via song acquisition--and remains the core of my activity to this day, though I've picked up a good bit of technical understanding along the way. (And I haven't used tab much for the last few decades, outside of dealing with slack-key.)
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Ethan Iverson on guitar tab
Idle Sunday Thoughts - by ETHAN IVERSON
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Thanks for this. There’s some low effort content for me this week. Originally Posted by pcjazz
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As I get better at reading I vastly prefer notation over tab.
At the same time if notation has tab below I find I am not using the fingering from the tab.
Me: “Like, why would you play that there, man.”
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Did you see this footnote to the article? -- The Secret History of Guitar Tab and Its Role in Guitar Learning - Premier Guitar Originally Posted by Christian Miller
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That’s a useful article from Mr Kaiser. Originally Posted by Mick-7
Basically unusable website on my phone though. Holy crap.
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Personally, I think that tabs are for those who don't know the notes or don't want to know the notes.
This is a kind of facilitation for musicians who are not fluent in notes.
I know that some outstanding guitarists also have training materials in tabs.
I think Frank Gambale has Guitarpro files in his educational offert.
And very well.
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