[charles Tauber]

Originally Posted by TBman

...piano music, as I call notation without tab...

Music scored to be played on a piano is typically written in two clefs, a bass clef and a treble clef. Music scored for the guitar is almost always written in a single treble clef.

If one handed a piano player music scored for a guitar and told him or her that it was "piano music", the piano player would probably just shake his (or her) head and mutter under his (or her) breath something unkind regarding one's level of musical knowledge.

...isn't as helpful as notation with tab underneath and insisting that only notation be learned without tab is sort of silly only because more information is a good thing, not a bad thing.

In its day, the lute was more commonly played than any other (Western) instrument. Music for the lute was almost always written down in tablature. Given the complexity of some lute music, it was a challenge to accurately notate it.

If you have every tried to arrange/transcribe music written for the lute, you'd appreciate the difficulty of the process since to do so, one must know the tuning of the lute - it wasn't universally standard - and "calculate" what each note is in the tablature. To do so, you must recreate the landscape so that the map - the tablature - that tells you where to go has some reference.

There is the same problem with guitar tablature. Suppose you write a duet for guitar and, say, flute or voice. If you score the music in guitar tablature, it will be essentially useless for the flute player or singer. By contrast, if you scored it in standard music notation, you could give the music to any other musician in nearly any other instrument and they could play it - probably sight read it. It is like giving someone a printed story that is written in an unknown language: the person reading the story has to know the original language for the story to be intelligible.

For example, the G note that can played on the 1st string, 3rd fret can also be played 8th fret, 2nd string and of course the 12th fret, 3rd string. Any guitarist with any sort of experience will know from the context of the other notes where it should be played. However, tab tells the player immediately where the note should be played.

And, there's the rub. Welcome to classical music and classical guitar. The "right" place to play a particular pitch is part of what is involved in creating an interpretation of the music one is playing. Each of the three G notes you mentioned has a different timbre. A player might purposely chose to play the note in one place rather than another due to the timbre of that note and how he or she wants that note to sound, or, perhaps because of the difference in "approach" - what comes before or after that note.

Take the open first string, the note E. It can also be played as a fretted note on the second or third string. Suppose that is a note in a melody. You might want to add vibrato to that note. You might want to add glissando (slide) to the note. You can't do either of those with the open string. To do so, you'd have to chose one of the other options. Suppose you wanted to add vibrato to the G note you mentioned. Playing at the 3rd fret, first string, won't allow a lot of vibrato: it is too close to the nut, making the string behave more stiffly. If you wanted a strong vibrato, you'd probably have better success playing it at a higher fret on a lower string.

This is part of what make the guitar unique compared to many other instruments - that a single pitch can be played in more than one place, with more than one sound and expression.

If you have tablature that says put your finger "here", the player will have the added step of having to first figure out what note that is. If it is standard musical notation, the player already knows that. Extend that to multiple notes at the same time (e.g. chords). When one is well versed in theory and sight reading, one can immediately identify the chord allowing one to substitute a different chord for that one, or a different inversion, or different voicing.

If two people of equal skill and experience learned the same piece and one learned with notation only and the other learned the piece with notation and tab, could a listener tell the difference? No of course not.

Maybe, maybe not. Tablature tends to teach players where to put their fingers while not "informing" them of the larger musical picture. It might be that the player who learned standard music notation tries different fingerings, different voicings that the person who only reads tablature - and where to put one's fingers - might not.

In the end, it is about music and the playing and understanding thereof. There is an entire world of music out there that isn't available as guitar tablature. Why limit oneself? Do you want to be a musician who's instrument is the guitar or do you want to be a guitar player? They aren't necessarily the same thing.