I really didn't want to do this - ask to transcribe

Wow! I can't help you out with this at all, but couldn't help myself from commenting on the song and the Magnus chord organ! That really takes me back. The girl I was "going steady" with at the time, had that record. I can remember my Dad buying a Magnus organ for us. Can't remember the name of the store, but that organ was sure cool!

but that organ was sure cool!

Wasn't it though! :D There was a G model and a C model. I still have a Beatles book for it (why, is beyond me). It's got the melody notes in standard notation as well as the numbers of the keys if you couldn't read music. And it's got the chord names in circles above the staff.

Try this:

E|-----------------0--8--5--3--|
B|----1--1--3--4---------------|
G|------------------------------|
D|------------------------------|
A|------------------------------|
E|------------------------------|

Try this:

E|-----------------0--8--5--3--|
B|----1--1--3--4---------------|
G|------------------------------|
D|------------------------------|
A|------------------------------|
E|------------------------------|

Brb, trying on chordbook.com...

Yep, that would be it. :D Thanks. Like I said, I hated to ask, but sometimes you get a brain cramp.

Boy, I really don't like tab for communicating stuff like this. All too often you'll get a result that's pitch accurate, but not very efficient. Better to learn to do it in standard notation, and then you can try it in different positions. And there are several better ways to do this.

For example:

-----------8-5---
---------5-----8-
-5-5-7-8---------
-----------------
-----------------
-
or...

-------------8------
---------------10-8-
-------7-8-9-------
-10-10--------------
--------------------
--------------------


or...

----------------------
----------------13-------
-------------------14-12-
-------12-13-14----------
-15-15-------------------
-------------------------


Thanks. I'll try those too. :D

On the subject of transcribing....but first let me apologize for A) changing the subject slightly, and B) telling you something you may already know.

While trying to transcribe a few riffs in Crystal Blue Persuasion, I discovered that Windows Media Player can slow down an MP3 to half speed or even slower without changing the pitch. Made transcribing a whole lot easier, at least for me. :)

Yep, Windows Media Player and Quicktime. I've been trying them. The problem with Windows Media Player is that it doesn't support MP4, which is what most iTunes are. QT does. Sometimes I can't find the folder or song for the iTunes MP4 to play in QT. So I'm stuck in those cases. I have a trial copy of Transcribe which sucks, imo. I just used QT to slow down It Don't Come Easy and found that the tab I had for the guitar intro was not quite right. It was missing a few notes. Sometimes I have really good arterial flow above the neck. :lol:

Now that I played the transcriptions Crow and Noteboat gave me, I see that I was doubting myself. If I'm not mistaken, the versions Noteboat gave me are pentatonics. And the irony is that I thought to myself maybe I should just try a C pentatonic since the song is in C and starts off on a Cmaj. Duh! :roll:

Nope, they're not the pentatonics. In fact, they're the same pitches that Crow gave you - as I said, tab can be pitch accurate and inefficient at the same time.

The pitches are C-C-D-Eb-E-C-A-G. It's just that you can play those pitches (in the same octave) on a lot of different places on the guitar. Each of the four versions in this thread are the SAME notes in the same sequence - so they're using the same scale.

Transcribing in standard notation would just leave the decisions up to the performer - it says "here are the pitches you need to play". Transcribing in tab makes an additional decision for you - it tells you WHERE to play those pitches. I see lots of tab that's 'accurate' (i.e., it gets the pitches right), but not 'good' (i.e. you do a lot more work than you need to). I was only trying to illustrate the difference.

I think one of the reasons TAB is so common is that it is accessible. It's made up entirely of characters on a computer keyboard. It's easy to type up in a text file (or in a forum post). I remember downloading guitar TABs from local BBSs, before the internet, when modem speeds were very slow.

I'm trying to imagine how I would include standard music notation into a forum post. I think I'd have to type it up in composing software, take a screenshot, crop it, upload the picture somewhere and then link to the picture with IMG tags. Is there an easier way?

btw, I'm not taking the stance that TAB > music notation. Just pointing out that it's an appropriate solution for communicating guitar music on a text-based forum.

You've got the process down, tummai. Using Finale I can cut just one step - I can export a page as a graphic. But you get the whole page, so you then have to crop, upload, and link.

On the other hand, it's pretty tedious to type out all the hyphens to create tab lines, preview the post to make sure you counted right... since this example isn't rhythmically complicated, a Finale transcription would have taken just ten clicks of the mouse - eight for the notes, one to turn on the flat, and one to turn it back off (or eight for the notes, one to select the E to flat, and the flat icon - still ten clicks). So the extra steps to do standard might actually take about the same effort.

In the earlier days of the internet and computers, I would sometimes find other musicians on BBS systems who would share standard notation files through text. It's a bit more tedious than tab to type out, but you can still get the idea across. Like regular standard notation, it has the advantage of being a graphic representation of the notes - unlike regular standard, it's not so easy to read, and clefs are a pain:

-e-

--- -e-
e
T --------------------------------
R be ne
E ----------e---------------------
B e e
L --------------------------------
E
C --------------------------------
L
E --------------------------------
F


Nope, they're not the pentatonics. In fact, they're the same pitches that Crow gave you - as I said, tab can be pitch accurate and inefficient at the same time.

OK, gotcha. The shape resembled a pentatonic box. I'm not too swift with pentatonics. I never got my head wrapped around them since I'm pretty much only rhythm. I liked it because it was a good finger exercise for getting into pentatonics, which is something that probably won't kill me.
The pitches are C-C-D-Eb-E-C-A-G. It's just that you can play those pitches (in the same octave) on a lot of different places on the guitar. Each of the four versions in this thread are the SAME notes in the same sequence - so they're using the same scale.

Yes, I caught that. It was a "D'oh!" moment. :oops:
Transcribing in standard notation would just leave the decisions up to the performer - it says "here are the pitches you need to play". Transcribing in tab makes an additional decision for you - it tells you WHERE to play those pitches. I see lots of tab that's 'accurate' (i.e., it gets the pitches right), but not 'good' (i.e. you do a lot more work than you need to). I was only trying to illustrate the difference.

And I saw that. The versions further up the fretboard were a little more than I could handle because I am using the acoustic guitar for this. Something that made a lightbulb turn on in Crow's version was that instead of using the open E string I slid up to the 5th fret of the B string, then reached with my pinky to the 8th fret of the E string. So yeah, decisions, decisions.

This may be a no-brainer to you guys but it's actually a good little lesson for me. :)

You've got the process down, tummai. Using Finale I can cut just one step - I can export a page as a graphic. But you get the whole page, so you then have to crop, upload, and link.

Someone tipped me off to an open source program that lets you drag a box on your screen and take screenshot snippets. Takes the cropping step out of the process. I tried it today and it worked great. It's called Greenshot. ( http://getgreenshot.org/ )
On the other hand, it's pretty tedious to type out all the hyphens to create tab lines, preview the post to make sure you counted right...

I agree. Copy/paste helps here but even then it's still tedious.
In the earlier days of the internet and computers, I would sometimes find other musicians on BBS systems who would share standard notation files through text. It's a bit more tedious than tab to type out, but you can still get the idea across. Like regular standard notation, it has the advantage of being a graphic representation of the notes - unlike regular standard, it's not so easy to read, and clefs are a pain:

What do the letters mean? e = eighth, b = flat, n = natural? That's a workable solution for BBSes I guess. Back in the day, did you find yourself picking up a pencil to copy from the text file to a real staff?

Yep, that's exactly it - you don't get any duplication of letters for note values until you hit the sixty-fourth note. And yes, I'd often just write the stuff out on staff paper. Of course, we had plenty of time to do that.... I remember upgrading my 300 baud modem to a Speedstream 1200 when that came out - that really cut down the phone bills.

For the youngsters, 1 baud = 1 bit per second; 1 bit = 1/8 of a byte; 1 byte = 1 keyboard character. My 1200 baud modem would transfer a 20kb file in a little over 2 minutes. Everything got sent directly to the printer, because my hard drive (the biggest available at the time) was just 20MB.

I put that first system together using mail order parts. It was cheaper that way - it only cost $6000. Ah, those were the days!