Just curious... Can anyone here sight-read tab?

[rtslinger]

As most have said and I agree they use the tabs to learn the line and possible fingering suggestions but,
unless I know the song, I can't play cold like I can sight reading a piece of music I have never played or even heard before. Though most tabs are simple in their creation, I have found some where a person has really taken the time to even include double stops and ghost notes to try to convey the feel of the piece, it will not work as well as the ability read notations on a music staff.

 

[Altitude]

Advanced tab skills like sight reading seem to me an odd place to develop expertise.

Sort of like becoming really, really good at checkers.

 

[XLunacy]

You guys keep saying "tabs don't convey any information about rhythm or note duration" but they absolutely do, if done properly, as demonstrated above by @nnnnnn.

Unpopular opinion: I find (properly written) tabs superior to standard notation and easier to sight-read, because they tell you exactly how the piece is supposed to be played, not how it should sound like.
They convey more information, because everything you have on a standard notation sheet, you can have on a tab, but definitely not the other way around.
This comes at a cost : you don't really get to choose the fingering on the spot (open string ? 5th fret of the string above?), unless you change the tab obviously, or if you're proficient enough to sight-transpose it
Hybrid notations exist, in which the tab is a suggestion of how to physically approach the piece ; these should make everyone happy.

 

[N4860]

I can sight read tabs if they are notated well, even if they are for tunes I'm not familiar with. It's not a skill I purposefully tried to develop, just happened over time from using tabs to learn complicated tunes. As others have stated, plenty of tabs do show rhythm, note length, articulation, etc. You just have to know where to find them.

 

[dbsfgyd1]

I was born in the 50's was a teen in the 60's and grew up reading standard notation. Took formal guitar lessons until I went to college. Got a music degree, played semi-professionally (mostly trumpet) for a lot of years. I could read standard notation to the point where I could do a (not too complicated) legit gig with my trumpet and read it cold and play the concert without rehearsal (lovingly called a "show and blow"). I get hired on occasion to play bass (typically musical theater) because I can read standard notation. Other gigs come because I have enough theory and musical experience that I can do something with lead sheets.

Tab??? PAINFUL to try to read. When I need a bass chart I try to find ones that have standard notation while I do appreciate those that have tab attached for helpful position hints. With tab I see no relation between what's on the tab and what it's all supposed to sound like. Sometimes the tab notator tries to help with the rhythm and sometimes that complicates things further. Lately the charts I'm finding are tab only and take a ton of effort to decipher.

I have to imagine that some here. can sight read tab, but personally don't know anyone that can. If you're here raise your hand, and if you can give me any tips on how to "here" the music from tabs and learn to be more proficient with it, I'm listening.

I grew up reading standard notation since I was elementary school and prefer it much over Tabs. My general take is Tabs are a great way to learn songs you know pretty well, or have the song there to work with.

For me trying to to do a “Show and Blow” on something I’ve never heard before at the downbeat, I’m not so sure I’d even take the gig. As you know, SN all you need is the tempo, the downbeat and you are off and running.

 

[kerryg]

Funny, I’ve made my living on sightreading gigs for 40 years and still consider myself a mediocre sightreader (you only need to spend a little while with violinists to see where that bar is set).

My objection to investing a lot of energy learning tab is it’s like learning Conversational Sanskrit: you are learning a language which rules out the possibility of communication with any but a tiny subset of available partners (in this case, limited to other bassists that read tab).

I wouldn’t say that “defeats the purpose” of language (learning a language has other benefits, there’s a lot of great bass literature in tab, sometimes specific fingerings can be really useful), but I learned so much of who I am musically from studying the vocabulary, the musical minds, of other instruments – phrasing from Trombone études, line from the Omnibook and Joe Pass’ guitar method, Bach cello suites etc.

I’ve certainly got no problem with a language that lets bass players communicate in detail, if it weren’t for the word “only” added into the sentence.

 

[J Stutheit]

I was born in the 50's was a teen in the 60's and grew up reading standard notation. Took formal guitar lessons until I went to college. Got a music degree, played semi-professionally (mostly trumpet) for a lot of years. I could read standard notation to the point where I could do a (not too complicated) legit gig with my trumpet and read it cold and play the concert without rehearsal (lovingly called a "show and blow"). I get hired on occasion to play bass (typically musical theater) because I can read standard notation. Other gigs come because I have enough theory and musical experience that I can do something with lead sheets.

Tab??? PAINFUL to try to read. When I need a bass chart I try to find ones that have standard notation while I do appreciate those that have tab attached for helpful position hints. With tab I see no relation between what's on the tab and what it's all supposed to sound like. Sometimes the tab notator tries to help with the rhythm and sometimes that complicates things further. Lately the charts I'm finding are tab only and take a ton of effort to decipher.

I have to imagine that some here. can sight read tab, but personally don't know anyone that can. If you're here raise your hand, and if you can give me any tips on how to "here" the music from tabs and learn to be more proficient with it, I'm listening.

I played in a guitar ensemble in high school made up of about 60 kids playing steel string guitars and all of our music was tab, transcribed by our teacher. We played classical music from Bach, Vivaldi, Mozart, etc... The tab was written the exact same way notation is, but with tab as opposed to notes. The tab written this way included time signatures, quarter, eighth, sixteenth notes, rests, and every other musical symbol you would find in typical sheet music.

Our teacher did it this way because our generation is full of kids who read tab fluently, like I can, and gave us access to music we never could have played otherwise since none of us have ever learned notation. Our group gained a lot of national attention and the biggest of event of my high school music experience was being invited to the All Northwest Strings Competition in Portland, and receiving the highest rating, while competing against classical symphony orchestras.

So in answer to your question, yes, I can sight read tab fluently and could step into a group and play most things up to tempo, and musically correct in a first attempt.

This is of course depending on the quality of tab. Just numbers on a page don't make this possible, but if the tab is transcribed and formatted as actual music then it is pretty easy.

All that being said, I can't read a lick of notation and wish I had pursued that skill when I was younger, as I think it would have improved my understanding of music in a helpful way.

 

[Kevin Hailey]

I’m trying to imagine a conductor reading an orchestral score where the string parts are in TAB!
Or try giving your tab part to a saxophone player.
Or try transposing a tab part.
Or try doing harmonic analysis.
There are good reasons why this notation system is never used in professional situations.

 

[chazolson]

Tab sucks for so many reasons; perhaps the greatest is the amateurish way most people “tab out” a song. 90% of the tab online is wrong, IMO.

 

[kerryg]

Tab sucks for so many reasons; perhaps the greatest is the amateurish way most people “tab out” a song. 90% of the tab online is wrong, IMO.

So is probably 90% of the notation.

(There are actually websites dedicated to rating professionally transcribed, published Steely Dan books according to their accuracy; the majority are bungled approximations).

This is more to do with the skills and standards of the person doing the transcribing than the language.

 

[BarfanyShart]

How can one sight read tab? There is only very vague rhythmic information present in tab. I think tab assumes that you have heard the song before, and are likely listening to it and transcribing as you go - so that's just not sight reading. Tab is more like a transcription aid than anything else. I occasionally look at tab when I am trying to work something out, but I find more often than not the tab is wrong, incomplete, or just harder to follow and more confusing than doing it by ear.

 

[salmon256]

When tabs have rhythm I do kind of consider it reading in a way, but it has nothing to do with the notes and to do with practicing counting. However as I started to learn standard notation also coming from a background understanding it already, I sooo much prefer musical notation, I hate books that combine both tab and notation together since my eyes will wonder to tab as starting with it. I do wish there was more standard notation books maybe I'm just looking in the wrong place, I also have started to use my ear and logic of the fretboard compare to when I use to just memorize tabs.

 

[JimmyM]

I played in a guitar ensemble in high school made up of about 60 kids playing steel string guitars and all of our music was tab, transcribed by our teacher. We played classical music from Bach, Vivaldi, Mozart, etc... The tab was written the exact same way notation is, but with tab as opposed to notes. The tab written this way included time signatures, quarter, eighth, sixteenth notes, rests, and every other musical symbol you would find in typical sheet music.

Our teacher did it this way because our generation is full of kids who read tab fluently, like I can, and gave us access to music we never could have played otherwise since none of us have ever learned notation. Our group gained a lot of national attention and the biggest of event of my high school music experience was being invited to the All Northwest Strings Competition in Portland, and receiving the highest rating, while competing against classical symphony orchestras.

So in answer to your question, yes, I can sight read tab fluently and could step into a group and play most things up to tempo, and musically correct in a first attempt.

This is of course depending on the quality of tab. Just numbers on a page don't make this possible, but if the tab is transcribed and formatted as actual music then it is pretty easy.

All that being said, I can't read a lick of notation and wish I had pursued that skill when I was younger, as I think it would have improved my understanding of music in a helpful way.

And for that reason alone, I think your teacher did you and your class a major disservice. Not too late to learn it, of course, and I am sure you all did very well, but the whole point of a teacher is to teach you what is needed to hang in a pro situation, not cater to the whims of students who groan at the idea of learning how to read music.

 

[kerryg]

I’m trying to imagine a conductor reading an orchestral score where the string parts are in TAB!
Or try giving your tab part to a saxophone player.
Or try transposing a tab part.
Or try doing harmonic analysis.
There are good reasons why this notation system is never used in professional situations.

Sure. And of course probably 99% of the planet’s music doesn’t occur in professional situations.

That’s just the distorted lens we professionals tend to carry with us and examine music through.

 

[BarfanyShart]

I think that piano tab thing that runs like a Guitar Hero game is kind of a neat learning tool. I guess Rocksmith is kind of like that, too, but I've never used it. I'm not knocking anything people use to do the music they want to do, and I think people having new ideas is generally a good thing. But, there isn't really anything that fully replaces learning standard notation.

Standard notation gives you so much information in concise, low-resource package. The notes, the key, the dynamics, the meter, and (most importantly) the overall structure of the song - and most of the time you can condense all that down to a single page or less for any given song. Learn notation, not because it is the only thing worth knowing, but because it is the best thing to know.

 

[JimmyM]

When tabs have rhythm I do kind of consider it reading in a way, but it has nothing to do with the notes and to do with practicing counting. However as I started to learn standard notation also coming from a background understanding it already, I sooo much prefer musical notation, I hate books that combine both tab and notation together since my eyes will wonder to tab as starting with it. I do wish there was more standard notation books maybe I'm just looking in the wrong place, I also have started to use my ear and logic of the fretboard compare to when I use to just memorize tabs.

I once heard from a book writer that guitar books with tabs and notation grossly outsell books without tab. Pretty sure it was Roy Vogt who told us that but I can’t remember for sure.

 

[JimmyM]

Sure. And of course probably 99% of the planet’s music doesn’t occur in professional situations.

That’s just the distorted lens we professionals tend to carry with us and examine music through.

To that, I say “so what?”

 

[LowActionHero]

I can if it's not crazy fast.
I used to be able to sight read standard music for saxophone or percussion, but not bass clef or even guitar.

I have a goal to learn bass clef eventually

 

[BarfanyShart]

I can if it's not crazy fast.
I used to be able to sight read standard music for saxophone or percussion, but not bass clef or even guitar.

I have a goal to learn bass clef eventually

It's funny because I had been reading music since age 5 (piano and saxophone), but I struggled sight reading on bass because I taught myself bass; looking at guitarist's hands in rock bands, and reading chord changes for jazz. I didn't really get the hang of sight reading bass until I was thrown into a pretty demanding college orchestra freshman year - pretty much a sink or swim situation.

 

[salmon256]

I once heard from a book writer that guitar books with tabs and notation grossly outsell books without tab. Pretty sure it was Roy Vogt who told us that but I can’t remember for sure.

Oh yeah I believe it. On Amazon or any book review you either see people piss that it's doesn't have tabs or vice versa haha! But I imagine putting tabs in the title or advertising will attract a lot of people. Just look at the RHCP bass books, all are tab same with the guitar one, they advertise being both and like you said it def sells more with tabs and it's understandable why it's done.