The cursed blessing of tabulature

Wow, this is a pretty good conversations with good points by all.

"In the past two years I've met two guitarists, both males in their teens, who learned solely through tab. They both looked like 'good' guitarists. They could each play 100 or more tunes note for note. I'm sure they impressed their friends.

Neither one knew the name of a single chord, or a single note on the fretboard. It was all just numbers to them."

That absolutely shocks me. :shock:

But I completely disagree that using tab alone will have a negative effect on actual musical development.

A lack of knowledge of standard notation might seriously impair your job prospects, but needn't impair your musical development.
We disagree on the first point. I have seen people's career aspirations destroyed because they did not read standard notation. It's actually a rather common event, sadly.

As for the second statement, if being a musician means nothing more than the prosaic idea of someone who plays an instrument, then you are correct. If however, you mean having proficiency in the skills of musicianship, then you are wrong by definition.

Wow, this is a pretty good conversations with good points by all.

"In the past two years I've met two guitarists, both males in their teens, who learned solely through tab. They both looked like 'good' guitarists. They could each play 100 or more tunes note for note. I'm sure they impressed their friends.

Neither one knew the name of a single chord, or a single note on the fretboard. It was all just numbers to them."

That absolutely shocks me. :shock:
I watched John Mellencamp Unplugged the other day and he claimed not to know chord names and was asking his band which fret number the capo went on, because of it. yet he's done quite well and produced some lovely pieces of music IMO
Whereas I only read tab yet I know what an A chord is amongst others

Standard notation is instrument agnostic, and therefore, is a universal language.
Tab is instrument specific, and lacks any utility in communicating with musicians of other instruments.
Why is so much sheet music for modern pop & rock styles written for piano as solo instrument, even for songs that originally had little or no piano? And even if I can read SN, it seems very common that neither the bass clef nor the treble clef from piano music give sufficient detail to recreate the guitar parts. I can get a general framework from the notes, but where do I go from there?

But I completely disagree that using tab alone will have a negative effect on actual musical development.

A lack of knowledge of standard notation might seriously impair your job prospects, but needn't impair your musical development.
We disagree on the first point. I have seen people's career aspirations destroyed because they did not read standard notation. It's actually a rather common event, sadly.

As for the second statement, if being a musician means nothing more than the prosaic idea of someone who plays an instrument, then you are correct. If however, you mean having proficiency in the skills of musicianship, then you are wrong by definition.

No - I'm not sure we do disagree regarding careers, I too have seen careers suffer from the lack of reading skills. Which is what I said in my end statement about job prospects.

As for the other point - I assume you mean that the possession of a high degree of musicianship requires the ability to read standard notation. By 'definition'. Again we're into the field of semantics - there are musicians all over the world who undoubtedly have a high degree of musicianship yet don't read our western notation system.
Anyway, I based my statement on a friend of mine, who is a greater and more knowledgeable musician than I'll ever be, yet unlike me doesn't read notation or even tab - he's blind.

Why is so much sheet music for modern pop & rock styles written for piano as solo instrument, even for songs that originally had little or no piano? And even if I can read SN, it seems very common that neither the bass clef nor the treble clef from piano music give sufficient detail to recreate the guitar parts. I can get a general framework from the notes, but where do I go from there?

I think that general property of material produced by music publishers is in part due to market forces -- piano players buy sheet music, guitar players, since they can't read it, don't.

But I also think it's a bit of laziness on the publishers' part. They're providing a song approximation more often than a performance score. The latter is much harder to do, generally has much higher license fees, and, due to complexity, is that much more expensive to proof read.

So, because most consumers aren't interested in paying $5 per song, they get a lower level of precission.

Anyway, I based my statement on a friend of mine, who is a greater and more knowledgeable musician than I'll ever be, yet unlike me doesn't read notation or even tab - he's blind.

Touché !
:lol:

LaRS

Apart from that, it's pretty easy to turn most pop songs into easy solo piano arrangements, doing the same for soloar is much harder. You can write the left and right hand pretty independantly for piano whereas you really need to think about what you're doing when you're writing for guitar to prevent impossible/too diffiicult arrangements. The harder it is, the less people can play it, so less people will buy it.

Anyway, I based my statement on a friend of mine, who is a greater and more knowledgeable musician than I'll ever be, yet unlike me doesn't read notation or even tab - he's blind.

My favorite guitarist is Django Reinhardt. His third finger and pinky finger of his left hand were fused together and partially crippled in a fire when he was a young man.

He became a world famous guitarist, and is rightly considered one of the all time greats with some very non-standard techniques.

However, I would be very remiss in thinking "Well, Django didn't ever use his third or fourth fingers and he was a great guitarist, so I don't need to either."

Someone able to overcome a handicap to excel is not evidence that whatever skills are impossible to that person due to their physical condition are therefore unimportant.

Nexion - before someone else points it out - it is obviously possible to learn whole songs even with tab... - but I see your point excactly: it's very easy to get a "hey, I can play this, and I can play this too, and this..." approach to the playing. Kinda like it's too easy. Since the "standard notation" discussion has taken off in an unexpected direction - I'll rather say that learning songs by ear requires far more work, and therefore (may) gives something more than reading tabs.

Lars
I didn't say it was impossible to learn an entire song through tabs, I just said I never did.

I was just trying to show how difficult it was for me to learn how to play guitar only using tab. Hoping to help somebody else stray from making the same mistake that I did that wasted 7 months.

However, I would be very remiss in thinking "Well, Django didn't ever use his third or fourth fingers and he was a great guitarist, so I don't need to either."

Very remiss indeed :D

It seems to come down to definitions. For me Django was a superb musician, despite the fact he couldn't read - for you he was a superb guitarist, but not a good musician.

Nexion - before someone else points it out - it is obviously possible to learn whole songs even with tab... - but I see your point excactly: it's very easy to get a "hey, I can play this, and I can play this too, and this..." approach to the playing. Kinda like it's too easy. Since the "standard notation" discussion has taken off in an unexpected direction - I'll rather say that learning songs by ear requires far more work, and therefore (may) gives something more than reading tabs.

Lars
I didn't say it was impossible to learn an entire song through tabs, I just said I never did.

I was just trying to show how difficult it was for me to learn how to play guitar only using tab. Hoping to help somebody else stray from making the same mistake that I did that wasted 7 months.

Nexion - sorry, didn't mean to ascribe to you a view you do not have. In fact we agree :)

and WOW! 85 replies and 1079 views in 4 days to my intial post sharing my loose and unstructured thoughts on tabs.

LaRS

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This has to be the most quickly replied post ever. I'm saddened by Mellencamp's lack of reality and I love his music. Too weird.

I don't think it's quite fair to label non-readers as non-musicians. A musician is someone who plays or creates music. The Beatles did not read and they certainly wrote a massive volume of terrific music that stands to this day. I am sure they learned to read to a degree over time, but they didn't starting out and have said so many times.

And guitarists, especially Rock guitarists are at a slight disadvantage. When I started playing, you couldn't find Rock notation for guitar. I mean ZERO. No tab either. All the songbooks had piano music with the chord symbols above. That is what you had to go on. Just starting, I tried to read this music and realized immediately it was written for piano. And the chord symbols don't really show you what a guitarist is doing. You can be playing a lot of different things in D, but the music just showed an open D chord above the notation. So for me at that time, learning by ear was the thing to do.

There was plenty of notation for Classical and Jazz, but I was not really interested in those styles at that time.

It is better today, you can find tab with the notation above. And this is really helpful for someone like myself. I will use the tab to see which D chord is used (there are many you know), and primarily use the notation to read time. So this is a good combination.

But I still learn 90% by just using my ear. It is hard to change after many years of playing this way.

But to say that non-readers are not true musicians smacks of snobbery.