Standard notation vs tab- interesting vid

[vindibona1]

I came across this video and thought some might find it interesting. I have my own reasons why I prefer standard notation and support musicians learning to play using it, but Adam Neely has explained the differences in a succinct and interesting way.

[mr. beaumont]

The thing I like best about notation is that it isn't guitar centric. I can use it to communicate with any other player who can read it, on any instrument...we don't even have to speak the same language!


The thing I like best about tablature is that it IS guitar centric. It can tell me exactly where to locate the sound needed.

[JoeCharter]

I just watched this video and thought the analogy with words/grammar was completely irrelevant and beside the point. Overall the ideas expressed are biased, pretentious and simply incorrect. With all due respect, I think most of Adam's video content is semi viral crap disguised in intellectual garbage that is ultimately musically irrelevant.

Play more, think less.

[JoeCharter]

Originally Posted by mr. beaumont

The thing I like best about notation is that it isn't guitar centric. I can use it to communicate with any other player who can read it, on any instrument...we don't even have to speak the same language!


The thing I like best about tablature is that it IS guitar centric. It can tell me exactly where to locate the sound needed.

Totally agreed.

[vindibona1]

Originally Posted by JoeCharter

I just watched this video and thought the analogy with words/grammar was completely irrelevant and beside the point. Overall the ideas expressed are biased, pretentious and simply incorrect. With all due respect, I think most of Adam's video content is semi viral crap disguised in intellectual garbage that is ultimately musically irrelevant.

Play more, think less.

I think his presentation is meant to be entertaining but what he is presenting is factual. In essence, standard notation tells you what the music represents and sound like. Tab tells you (basically) HOW to play. WHAT EXACTLY DO YOU FIND INCORRECT OR DISAGREE WITH? Facts are difficult things.

[Social Exodus]

I can't read music, well very fast anyway. Certainly not sight reading and playing simultaneously. But I only use tab as a last resort because I learned most of the songs I know by ear. I hear the chords and licks, then replicate them or watch videos from TrueFire and YouTube.

At age 59, I doubt I have it in me to learn to sight read at this stage, though I readily admit it would be worthwhile to know.

Adam Neely's explanation makes perfect sense too, so now I feel worse for not knowing how to read better

[s2y]

I was always super slow with standard notation. I was somewhat proficient back in the day. I spent time working on it, only to never use it in a band setting. In the early 2000's, I found that it made indie bands angry if you could read music for some reason. LOL, I wish I were making that up.

These days I read neither. I've been working on my own material and have no charts because it hasn't been written yet.

[JoeCharter]

Originally Posted by vindibona1

I think his presentation is meant to be entertaining but what he is presenting is factual. In essence, standard notation tells you what the music represents and sound like. Tab tells you (basically) HOW to play. WHAT EXACTLY DO YOU FIND INCORRECT OR DISAGREE WITH? Facts are difficult things.

I disagree with everything. The entire video is garbage.

The analogy with phrases and random numbers is crap. Anyone who has used tablature extensively knows that phrases can easily be identified even with numbers. Tablature is not a bunch of random numbers. If you can relate shapes with muscle memory, you can relate numbers with muscle memory as well.

Secondly, both tab and standard notation tell you, as much as possible, how to play music. The information may be conveyed differently but they are both trying to achieve the same thing.

The graphical comparison starting at 4m20 is also complete garbage. As an experienced user of both notation systems, I can make musical sense of either chart.

Tablature is not helpful when you try to communicate with folks who don't play guitar. That is probably the only valid point -- but even that is biased as it assumes that people who use tab can't read standard notation.

I have been using standard notation since I was a toddler and tablature since my early teens. People who try to make a debate out of this topic are either inexperienced musicians who think it's cool to have an opinion or pseudo intellectual snobs who think they're too good to use tablature.

There's a reason why tablature has been used for centuries. It works.

[vindibona1]

Originally Posted by JoeCharter

I disagree with everything. The entire video is garbage.

The analogy with phrases and random numbers is crap. Anyone who has used tablature extensively knows that phrases can easily be identified even with numbers. Tablature is not a bunch of random numbers. If you can relate shapes with muscle memory, you can relate numbers with muscle memory as well.

Secondly, both tab and standard notation tell you, as much as possible, how to play music. The information may be conveyed differently but they are both trying to achieve the same thing.

The graphical comparison starting at 4m20 is also complete garbage. As an experienced user of both notation systems, I can make musical sense of either chart.

Tablature is not helpful when you try to communicate with folks who don't play guitar. That is probably the only valid point -- but even that is biased as it assumes that people who use tab can't read standard notation.

I have been using standard notation since I was a toddler and tablature since my early teens. People who try to make a debate out of this topic are either inexperienced musicians who think it's cool to have an opinion or pseudo intellectual snobs who think they're too good to use tablature.

There's a reason why tablature has been used for centuries. It works.

Saying something is crap doesn't make it so. Neely is right, that the way tab is constructed makes it nearly impossible to sight read. Conversely, the one point missing, that perhaps you might have used to support your argument, is that identical notes repeat all over the guitar and tab makes it easier to identify how to play something, much like pianists writing in fingerings in their music.

I can read tab, but because it represents positions rather than actual sounds it doesn't give me much if any musical information, particularly with non-standard tunings. And as Neely said, tab requires way too much cerebral thought in determining what the music might sound like. Even though standard notation too is only a skeletal representation of sound, it is much easier to previsualize the sounds because the sound representations are linear and always provide the same tonal information (as well as always providing representation of sound over time, something that only occasionally is represented in tab).

[pjmorley]

I've only been learning guitar for 16 months, but had a good knowledge of standard notation from high school (even though that was 25 years ago). I absolutely hate tabs, and a few months into learning guitar and finding so much stuff in only tab form I questioned if I had chosen the wrong instrument.

I played trumpet in high school, and was 1st trumpet in the school band for two years. Some of the easy stuff had fingering charts with the music and additional notes to assist in playing. That was a useful training tool. Past the beginning stage, though, it was my job as a player to figure out how I wanted to play things, when to breathe, etc.

The same applies to guitar - I will consider myself to be a guitar player when I can pick up any sheet music and figure how I want to play it and how I will achieve the desired sound.

Tabs are like training wheels on bikes-commonly used, make things easier for beginners, but ultimately of dubious use and they just delay the inevitable.

Of course some people add rhythmic notation and other enhancements to tabs in an attempt to make them more complete... which I find hilarious. Talk about fixing the symptoms, and not the problem!

Learning standard notation should be done as part of the beginning steps of learning any instrument, from day one. Any good music program will make this easy.

[Adam Neely is my favourite music geek. His video on the perceptual present and his answer to the consonance or dissonance of a perfect 4th are pure genius.]

[Scoobtay]

I come from a piano background so I am used to standard notation as well. However, stringed instruments have multiple ways to play the exact same note, so having the ability to peek at a tab to see what position that note is “meant” to be played in is often helpful.

There’s a video floating around of someone playing “wonderwall” 7 different ways through the neck of the guitar and they all sound the same, which would be a good argument for tabs vs. standard notation.

[TBman]

The video is laced with snobby garbage in my opinion. I can read notation from low E to the 5th fret A on the 1st string well. I can read timing signatures, understand durations and musical directions (usually). With all of the above I still "move my lips" so to speak when I read notation. If I played piano I'm 100% certain I'd be a lot better at it. Ok that said, fretted instruments require location information which notation just totally ignores. The whole notion that tab is inferior to notation is bull. Tab gives the fretted instrument player additional information that notation wasn't designed to give. Tab, by itself, trying to replace notation is annoying to me. To me the best world is notation with tab for position under it.

The whole conversation is elitist junk.

[mr. beaumont]

Well, if you do sight read, notation IS superior. That's just a fact.

You can physically see the melody rising or falling in pitch...you can see, almost instantly, scalar passages, or notes separated by certain intervals just by the vertical space between them. It's not elitist to simply state what notation is better at.

Tablature fits into a very specific niche...but it's a great niche, a very useful one, for communicating exact ideas on a fretted instrument.

In the end, I see it as a both/and proposition, not an either/or.

[JoeCharter]

Originally Posted by vindibona1

Neely is right, that the way tab is constructed makes it nearly impossible to sight read.

I respectfully disagree. The main benefit of tab is it allows people to learn quickly -- as Neely himself suggests when he said he used tablature for teaching beginners.

Besides, if you ask any user their main reason for using tablature, all will answer that it allows them to learn something quicker/easier.

Originally Posted by vindibona1

Conversely, the one point missing, that perhaps you might have used to support your argument, is that identical notes repeat all over the guitar and tab makes it easier to identify how to play something, much like pianists writing in fingerings in their music.

On this we're in agreement -- but I don't understand how this is a negative point? I don't see anything wrong with using a method that is clearer and quicker to interpret. Additionally, while identical notes repeat all over the guitar, they do not sound the exact same -- so tablature can potentially be more accurate in portraying the original intention of the composer in terms of tone/colour.

Originally Posted by vindibona1

I can read tab, but because it represents positions rather than actual sounds it doesn't give me much if any musical information, particularly with non-standard tunings.

No offense intended -- but you don't see much musical information with tablature simply because you are probably not used to it. Music is music, and I (like many others) can imagine a tune very easily using tablature. I would even say that, generally speaking, tablature works much better for most pop guitar music.

As for alternate tunings, if you spend enough time on a given tuning, you will hear the music as you read the tablature.

Originally Posted by vindibona1

And as Neely said, tab requires way too much cerebral thought in determining what the music might sound like.

Any decent musician who has spent a fair amount of time with tablature will disagree with this.

And any decent musician who is able to sight read standard notation will admit that it's one heckuva challenging skill to acquire. In fact, only the very best musicians can sight read a serious piece of music at a decent speed.

Originally Posted by vindibona1

Even though standard notation too is only a skeletal representation of sound, it is much easier to previsualize the sounds because the sound representations are linear and always provide the same tonal information...

I don't agree or disagree with you here -- but keep in mind this is one opinion among others. Some people think it's easier to visualize standard notation, others think the opposite.

There's no point in trying to dismiss tablature as it is useful to so many people and has been used for so long. The arguments that are raised against tablature are all invalid.

Should people learn standard notation? Absolutely.

Should people understand what they're doing regardless of notation? Absolutely.

Should people dismiss tablature because of Neely's arguments and some others expressed in this thread? Absolutely not.

[Rmz76]

Originally Posted by JoeCharter

I just watched this video and thought the analogy with words/grammar was completely irrelevant and beside the point. Overall the ideas expressed are biased, pretentious and simply incorrect. With all due respect, I think most of Adam's video content is semi viral crap disguised in intellectual garbage that is ultimately musically irrelevant.

Play more, think less.

I think there is an interesting thing to be learned here for beginners. The video does a good job explanation advantages to musical score over TAB for real time use. I think his intent is to inspire bass players (his channel is bass guitar focused) to learn to sight read and why it's not remotely the same as TAB.

But he doesn't do enough to explain the short comings of standard notation for guitar players (again his channel is for Bass guitar so this may be an unfair critique). With acoustic guitar I think for many performances the nuanced dynamics of rhythm playing by the performer if absent, would separate an acceptable performance from a truly great one. Standard notation doesn't offer the means to document those nuances very well.

I've read the biographies and auto-biographies of my guitar heros. Outside a few learning to sight read on some other instrument prior to guitar, most can't (or couldn't for the ones no longer here),

Their playing doesn't come from a page of music but from within. An understanding of the meter and chord progression from memorization and then the ability to add unique dynamics and improvisation throughout.