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  #31  
Old 02-01-2010, 12:32 PM
Minotaur Minotaur is offline
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Thanks Rick, I bookmarked it. I'll fidoodle around with it. I'm sure it supports bass lines, so I could start with that for simplicity. I tried using Powertab a long time ago but didn't get the hang of it. Maybe I didn't try hard enough. I' like to take my cheat sheets (Words docs that are a combo of chord sheets, 6 line tabs and my own notes) and make more professional looking notation/tab hybrids.
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  #32  
Old 02-01-2010, 12:36 PM
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Brent Hutto Brent Hutto is offline
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There are two kinds of people who play guitar music. There are musicians who happen to be playing guitar at the moment and there are guitar players. In many cases, members of one group are fundamentally unable to understand things from the perspective of the other. Some of the rather bloodyminded statements posted in this thread betray that lack of perspective.
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  #33  
Old 02-01-2010, 01:00 PM
mesa mesa is offline
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Originally Posted by rick-slo View Post
Plenty of this available for free these days.
For instance http://www.acousticpower.com/
.............and also generous members of this forum like Rick, mmmaak, GraceGuitars and many others.
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  #34  
Old 02-01-2010, 01:04 PM
Minotaur Minotaur is offline
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.............and also generous members of this forum like Rick, mmmaak, GraceGuitars and many others.
Yes, something Cotten said to me about that sort of thing when I first joined. But I'll leave it at that.
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  #35  
Old 02-01-2010, 01:20 PM
DupleMeter DupleMeter is offline
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Originally Posted by mmmaak View Post
Here are two of mine (different transcriptions):






Notice the hybrid notation in the lower row. Of course, there is a limit to how much information it can impart (on its own) but I think it is quite sufficient for most players.
Now that is pretty good TAB - though I would never have known that the first A- (C6 without the 5, maybe? sounded like A- to me) chord was a dotted half and not a dotted quarter without the notation. Which brings me to my point - if I need the notation anyway...why bother with the TAB? It's just one more staff to have to read.

Then in the 2nd example bar 4, the upbeat of 1 - in the tab it's just an unconnected 8th note flag coming from those 16ths. The TAB confuses me because I can't instantly see the note that you expect me to play on that upbeat...whereas the notation above, again, tells me everything I need to know - faster with less confusion.

I guess I just don't get it. Maybe I'm slow...maybe I've just spent way too much time working on music with sheet music in front of me. The notation makes instant sense to me the TAB takes me extra brain power to decipher. it doesn't "click" with me.

I truly apologize if I've offended anyone - or have come off as narrow minded. I just don't get it (obviously).

BTW - mmmaak, I particularly liked those examples - I got to the last bar of each and wanted to hear the rest. Nice work.
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  #36  
Old 02-01-2010, 02:13 PM
larryb larryb is offline
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My first instrument was piano and, therefore, learned notation. I can't say that I ever became completely fluent in being able to read complex pieces on the spot without struggling. Then when I first learned guitar as a kid, it was all standard notation. Years later (move the clock 35 years forward) and I was introduced to tab, I first poo-pooed it as something for people who can't read notation. But over the years, I have come to really appreciate tab and it has unquestionably helped me progress as a guitarist. Now, when I am reading something that contains both tab and standard notation, I almost don't even distinguish one for the other. I have to admit that my eyes go straight to the tab, but at the same time I'm looking at the key and time signatures. Also, as I'm reading the tab, my eyes are darting up at the notation. Sometimes after trying to go through the suggested tab version and struggle with it, I rely primarily on the notation to diverge from the tab. So, I would have to say for me, tab and standard notation form a complete package that unquestionably help my playing more than if I relied on either one alone. But I also have to admit that without the tab, it would take me longer to learn a new tune, simply because of the endless options for playing the same note on the neck. With piano, it's a completely different scenario.
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  #37  
Old 02-01-2010, 02:42 PM
bouwman bouwman is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by CottonPickin View Post
I can't convince myself to devote any time to learning tabs, it just really irritates me.
What is there to learn? Its completely straight forward, before i bought my guitar a friend told me to start with tab because it was really easy, so i did.

I spent two minutes (or probably less) reading about which string applies to which line and that the number represents the fret and then i was off.

I will go and learn standard notation more thoroughly eventually though, and to be fair i love numbers and i find that they make huge sense to me.
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  #38  
Old 02-01-2010, 03:13 PM
JoeCharter JoeCharter is offline
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Tablature is not a marginal thing. A significant proportion of guitarists use it.

If you like tabs, use it. If you don't like tabs, skip it.

All of the issues and reasons invoked in this thread to not use tabs are invalid. All of them.
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  #39  
Old 02-01-2010, 05:07 PM
wcap wcap is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Minotaur View Post
Now, that is definitely NOT what you find on the internet! Internet tabs are what I was referring to as not providing any kind of timing, tempo or rhythm structure. Yours are what you find published and for-pay on musicnotes.com and sheetmusicdirect.com, and in books. I'd call those a Rosetta Stone of sorts. Written one way to help you understand another way, like the original RS found in Egypt.
Several wonderful web sites, each with just a ton of great tablature in TablEdit format:

http://www.frettedinstrumentsnyc.com

http://dirk.meineke.free.fr/

http://www.herso.freeservers.com/tabs_and_midis.html

At the rate that I learn things, there are several lifetimes worth of music on each of these websites!

And if you don't want to use the tablature, TablEdit allows you to just view and print the standard notation alone.
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  #40  
Old 02-01-2010, 06:28 PM
wcap wcap is offline
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Personally, I'm really envious of people who can sit down with new music and just play it, fairly well, and up to speed, pretty much the first time they see it. My wife and kids can do this on a variety of instruments, such as piano, flute, trumpet, etc. (They tend to be terrible at playing anything by ear though, which sometimes frustrates me, since we can't jam together unless their parts are all worked out and written down).

I feel seriously handicapped by not being able to sit down with music and just play it on guitar. As has been noted already, most other musicians don't understand or have patience for guitar players who have to have things as tablature. At church, music is not in tablature format, etc.

But for complicated fingerstyle pieces, good tablature is almost like having an experienced player giving you a lesson, since it can guide you on good fingerings that you might not have come up with yourself (especially when you are first starting out with guitar).

This matter of showing the fingerings is even a bigger deal on 5-string banjo (which is my background). Tablature is a huge deal for banjo players, not because banjo players are fundamentally lazy or less musically sophisticated, but because fingerings are everything on banjo. Yes, fingerings are important on guitar too, but not to the same degree. Read on....

On banjo the intervals between the strings are small, and the fifth string is the same note as the first (once you get past the fifth fret on the first string), so most notes on banjo can be played in 5 different places. In fact most notes can be played easily in 3 different positions without even moving your left hand (not, say, three different G's in three different octaves, which can be played easily on guitar from one hand position, but literally the same exact pitch on three different strings without changing left hand position). This means that there is a bewlidering number of different ways that one can play a given sequence of notes. Some are physically impossible, of course, while many are possible but awkward, while a few are elegant and facilitate the smooth streams of notes that banjos are so ideal for playing. On banjo, knowing what the notes are is just the beginning. Knowing how to play those notes efficiently and smoothly is the bigger challenge to master.

For a beginning banjo player tablature is invaluable in helping to understand how to work out fingerings. For an advanced player, tablature is invaluable for documenting how to play a piece. There are banjo arrangements that I have learned in the past (some of them even my own arrangements) that I have gotten rusty on from not playing them for some time. Sometimes I find myself playing such pieces on autopilot, where my fingers start reaching for notes automatically (because I know the sequence of notes and intuitively know my way around the banjo fretboard, at least in certain keys), but not using the fingerings that I had worked out and learned before, and the whole piece crashes when this happens. And sometimes I have one heck of a time reconstructing the fingerings that worked before, even though I know exactly what notes need to be played - and if I never wrote it out as tablature it can be like starting over from scratch. Sometimes you can't get there from here...you really need to map out the stream of notes very precisely and carefully and play them with precisely the correct fingerings or you won't be able to continue on fluidly and smoothly to the next phrase.

This is all true for guitar as well, but guitar gives you fewer logical, playable options for workable fingerings for a given sequence of notes, so I view tablature as being just a bit less essential on guitar (even though I find it very useful).

When I feel inadequate due to my dependence on tablature, I take heart in the fact that I have good company. Bela Fleck, who is undoubtedly one of the greatest banjo players ever, apparently does not play well at all from standard notation, and when he learned the classical pieces for his wonderful CD "Perpetual Motion" (he got a Grammy for best classical recording for one of the pieces on this CD) he had to create tablature and work out the fingerings very carefully before he could make headway in actually learning the pieces.

This all being said, I REALLY want to get better at sight reading standard notation on guitar.

Last edited by wcap; 02-02-2010 at 03:02 AM.
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  #41  
Old 02-01-2010, 06:40 PM
fingerstyleguy fingerstyleguy is offline
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I teach and read both. Standard notation is the great way to understand rhythm. Tab is great when you are learning tunes in non standard tunings otherwise you would have to learn to read for each tuning. If you have the standard notation above the tab it is a great reference point for rhythm while using tab for finger positions.

Transcribing by ear although time consuming in my opinion however is the best way to develop your playing skills and ear.
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  #42  
Old 02-01-2010, 06:46 PM
raptordigits raptordigits is offline
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We are all on the Internet. I can read both but find way more material via Tab. A hundred times more and MUCH more variation, creativity, etc. Tab can be written by great grandma waiting for the cookies to bake or a 13 year old bursting with energy.

There is hardly a piece I need 'the flavor' for via notation that I don't find on Youtube. I search the tune and...voila... a dozen versions or more played via guitar... or any other instrument from kazoos to grand pianos.

As for not learning tab...fine, stay ignorant. It took me all of 5 minutes to read tab...it's art, not rocket physics.

I started out with notation 40 years ago, but today much prefer the tab when both are present. Much of the music printed pre-internet was stifling and full of atrophied dead brain cells from students bored to death reading music put in a notation straight-jacket.
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  #43  
Old 02-01-2010, 07:48 PM
stuartb stuartb is offline
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Originally Posted by Laird_Williams View Post
I'd be careful of such generalizations. I am a huge fan of using standard notation and I teach my students with that as the primary tool - but tab has a significant amount of utility.

As for the "a lot of times it's inaccurate" statement - yes, the tabs you download for free from the internet tab sites often contain errors and omissions. If these people were doing things in standard notation, there would STILL be a lot of errors and omissions. That has nothing to do with the expressiveness or accuracy of the notation. It is a reflection of the transcribers who are producing the transcriptions. Same goes for some of the poorer-quality books out there.

And just what is "accurate" when even the guy who wrote or arranged the song never plays it quite the same way twice anyway? And aside from some questionable sources - just what is it about tab that is inherently inaccurate?

As for, "it's not thorough" - it can be extremely so. Again, don't confuse tablature in general with ascii-tab that you find on-line.

Both tab and standard notation carry information that the other does not. When I do transcriptions, I always do both. "Here is something that is pretty close to the way I play it, and this will give you a start" is the theme. I also use the richest options for tab. I have the rhythm in the tab, and the articulations. In fact, I have everything that is in the standard notation except that the notes on the staff are replaced by frets on the fretboard. It results in some redunant information, since much of the same information is carried on both staves (tab and standard) - but that actually eases moving your eyes between the two.

Finally - when you get into playing in 5 or 6 different tunings - getting to know the fretboard well enough to site read from standard notation for every different tuning is pretty daunting. Put your guitar in AGCGCD and site-read a piece written for that tuning sometime by just using standard notation. There are a few folks here who could do it. The rest of us, even those who have decades of experience reading standard notation, would have a lot of trouble with that. I started on classical music 37 years ago and am very comfortable with standard notation when in standard tuning - and I am getting there with DADGAD. But I use about 8 other tunings.

Not to mention standard notation's complete lack of graceful and easy to see way of supporting things like playing in 9th position yet using open strings at the same time, or having a legato span 3 notes, but NOT apply the legato technique to the middle one of the three, which manages to be stocatto because it is being played on a different string than the other two surrounding notes (Michael Hedges did this kind of thing all the time).
Very interesting points. Thanks for your post.

I'm trying to determine what skills I need (four years of playing behind me, lots of practice, mostly tab, taught myself how to read standard - read it for a few songs).

I find this discussion very helpful.

Stuart
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  #44  
Old 02-01-2010, 07:53 PM
mmmaak mmmaak is offline
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Originally Posted by DupleMeter View Post
Now that is pretty good TAB - though I would never have known that the first A- (C6 without the 5, maybe? sounded like A- to me) chord was a dotted half and not a dotted quarter without the notation.
Compare bars 1 and 3. The shorter stem denotes a half, the longer stem a quarter.

Quote:
Originally Posted by DupleMeter View Post
Then in the 2nd example bar 4, the upbeat of 1 - in the tab it's just an unconnected 8th note flag coming from those 16ths. The TAB confuses me because I can't instantly see the note that you expect me to play on that upbeat...whereas the notation above, again, tells me everything I need to know - faster with less confusion.
The "missing" tied note is not a shortcoming of the hybrid system. I actually opted for the program to hide them, as it made the tab much more readable (although in this case reference to the upper staff is needed). I can always choose to display it, based on the tune.

Quote:
Originally Posted by DupleMeter View Post
Which brings me to my point - if I need the notation anyway...why bother with the TAB? It's just one more staff to have to read.
Well, I suppose you don't, but my guess is that the vast majority of us do not have the time or motivation to learn how to read standard notation fluently. It takes quite a good understanding of the fretboard and a mental map of where all the pitches are located, which brings me to my next point....

Take two simple pitches, G3 and E4. The thing about the guitar (and other fretted instruments) is that they can be played at multiple locations on the fingerboard: xxx0x0, xx5x5x, x[10]x9xx, [15]x[14]xxx, among many others. In tab, that information is available immediately. In standard notation, the string numbers have to be indicated (usually in circles, I think?) *and* the player has to have enough familiarity with the fingerboard to know where G3 and E4 lie on each string. That's quite a task for many of us without proper (formal) musical training!

I personally can read standard notation, but only around the 5th fret or lower. Would I like to learn the fingerboard in standard notation? Sure, the more skills the better! But as it stands, unless I play classical repertoire or start being a session musician, I have no real need to do so. I'm not particularly concerned if the note I'm playing is a G4, or the 1st string, 3rd fret (unless I'm writing out chords, in which case I *do* need to know)


Quote:
Originally Posted by DupleMeter View Post
BTW - mmmaak, I particularly liked those examples - I got to the last bar of each and wanted to hear the rest. Nice work.
Thanks! The first is pending permission from the original artist (I always try to ask before sharing). The second has been generously made available by Larry Pattis (a member here). Click the link in my signature if you'd like to see the transcription in full

P.S. I hope you didn't play the second example in standard tuning. It's DADGAD!!

EDIT: Which actually brings up another point I'd forgotten to mention. How do players who use standard notation handle alternate tunings? And just to be clear, I'm not insisting one system is better than the other. I have learned to love both, and hopefully my students can benefit from that.
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Last edited by mmmaak; 02-01-2010 at 08:02 PM.
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  #45  
Old 02-01-2010, 08:01 PM
Laird_Williams Laird_Williams is offline
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Originally Posted by DupleMeter View Post
Then in the 2nd example bar 4, the upbeat of 1 - in the tab it's just an unconnected 8th note flag coming from those 16ths. The TAB confuses me because I can't instantly see the note that you expect me to play on that upbeat...whereas the notation above, again, tells me everything I need to know - faster with less confusion.
Part of the reason for your confusion is, again, it is about the quality of the tab transcription and not the limitations of the notation. The piece is clearly multi-voice in the standard notation - but that is not called out in this particular tablature rendering. The transcriber chose to show the standard notation multi-voice, but not the tab. This may be a personal style thing - and it might not bother a lot of people. It would bother me. If I have a multi-voice piece - I tab it that way.

Quote:
Originally Posted by DupleMeter View Post
I guess I just don't get it. Maybe I'm slow...maybe I've just spent way too much time working on music with sheet music in front of me. The notation makes instant sense to me the TAB takes me extra brain power to decipher. it doesn't "click" with me.
"I don't use tab and I get on just fine without it, so I don't see its value, so i don't get it, so i don't bother to learn tab, so i don't know it, so I don't use tab..." seems a tad circular. Sounds a lot like the arguments sometimes presented here and in other forums against learning standard notation.

If you knew tab and notation pretty well equally, I have pieces transcribed where you would almost certainly want to work primarily off the tablature. You would almost-certainly play the piece oddly - if not outright wrongly - if you relied on standard notation alone. You would play the right NOTES - but that is not all that qualifies as playing the music properly. That is a necessary condition - but not a sufficient one. I also have peices where the standard notation is more than enough information.
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