sorting notes and tabs

[OnederTone]

Just because you help me on a forum doesn't make you less a teacher.

 

[Ed Fuqua]

Just because you help me on a forum doesn't make you less a teacher.

So the answer is no.
OK, good luck with that.
Have a blessed day.

 

[wcnewby]

So the answer is no.
OK, good luck with that.
Have a blessed day.

Well Ed, it isn't out of stupidity I have chosen this path. I live in Northern wisconsin... lots of woods, lots of lakes... not so many music schools. There is one music store, 45 miles away from which I purchase books with DVDs, I watch youtubes, and I come here for advice.

I'm not against the idea of having a flesh and bones real world teacher, it just isn't very likely to happen where I live.

 

[SurferJoe46]

I recognize the danger of tabs, <snip>
We all start by tab, you have to.

Really?

I think that's terribly assumptive and drawing to it's own ponderous conclusion. I have never used tabs - have no need for them and personally, hold them in disdain as crippling and creatively limiting.

Plus you won't learn real world musical scores. I can't say I've ever been handed a sheet of tab for me to play a new song, by anyone.

 

[wcnewby]

So when you started playing, there was nothing to tell you where to put your fingers? And when someone said, try playing these notes over here, how did they do it. When I say C which one do you pick? Does it match the one I was thinking?.....Right...

So we agree, once you start playing tabs, and have no intention of learning music you are shooting yourself in the foot.

 

[905]

Just out of curiousity SurferJoe, when were you born?

I feel there might be a generational gap where some people have easy access to tab while some people learned how to read music before tab became popular.

 

[JimmyM]

I certainly learned to read before tab became popular, but there's no generation gap here...tab is to notation what...well...better not go there. Just let's say that while tab does tell you where to put your fingers, you're never going to get a real understanding of what you're doing through only tab.

 

[Kamael83]

Ok I know how you all hate Tabs...how stupid they are etc etc..
From my point of view: I never...studied music...had no idea about scales, modes, circle of 5ths etc... about 9 months ago I finally bought my first bass...I came back home, I Googled: Pink Floyd another brick in the wall part 2 bass tab and i started playing....

I also found loads of tabs that are simply wrong...off key and just ....terrible...Tabs that were like that partially...i managed to fix just by listening to the song (ear training no?)...?

Some tabs are (i think most of them) incomplete...usually they show you few common patterns in the song but no small dellicious fills etc....having a tab as a base I was able (in many situations ) to build something on it...

And also many times combining tabs (different versions of the same song) is fun at some stage....

Last thing: some tabs (dunno why) are written for one string...still can`t understand why people post something like that...anyway...transcribing tab written for one string..into something more comfortable is also a nice exercise for a NOOB like me....and forgive me but i find tabs useful!!
ps. while playing by tabs (for fun) i`m still focusing on music theory in my practice,.....

ps. how do you get music sheets ? apart from buying them...are there any websites with them like with tabs ? ))

 

[FretlessMainly]

So when you started playing, there was nothing to tell you where to put your fingers?

Both TAB and proper musical notation tell you where to put your fingers. THe primary differences between the two are:

1. TAB shows you string and fret pictorially but is more likely than not to be an incorrect representation of the piece of music in question.

2. Proper musical notation tells you what note to play and you associate that notation with your understanding of the fingerboard to play the correct note. Published music is more often than not going to be a faithful representation of the piece of music in question.

Theoretically, all you need to learn bass in conjunction with proper written notation is the position of one note on a staff and it's corresponding fingering on the bass along with the chromatic scale. All the rest can be figured out from there, you know, theoretically.

 

[SurferJoe46]

Just out of curiousity SurferJoe, when were you born?

I feel there might be a generational gap where some people have easy access to tab while some people learned how to read music before tab became popular.

1946 - Class of '64.

Ease of availability might be something to investigate here. Tabs are easy to find on line. Notation, not so much - at least for free.

But - and it's been said already -- that tab is usually incorrect of sadly simplified or incomplete.

Ya gotta remember that notation is primarily written for a keyboard - organ, piano, harpsichord, etc, and not stringed instruments.

The Treble and Bass clefs as normally scribed are for two hands, and we are only really concerned with the Bass clef anyway.

Still though ----- with an 88-string bass it might be important.

 

[wcnewby]

Maybe you folks are on to something with the newness theory... Since I just started, all my beginner books are new, and they all have tab in them. Well, except for the "slap bible" by Antony Vitti... At any rate, they put the tabs right under the notes so you can look down if you get stuck. The danger is that once you look down, you never look up because at that stage in the game it is easier.

Then, all the songs you look for on line are written in tab, and you could get used to playing music that way.... What I have done is stopped looking at the tabs and it has forced me to remember the notes.

Another book I have is "Bass" by Gary Turner and Brenton White. With this book you get a DVD that shows all of the exercises being played... There is a window with the plucking hand, one with the fingering hand, one with a guitar neck that has dots that light up where you put your fingers, and at the bottom a scrolling scale that has all of your tabless notes. There is a line in the middle, and as the notes scroll past the line it lights up. Very useful for forcing yourself to read notes...

 

[wcnewby]

Okay, so I've been studying my notes in my starting book, got learned... I've been playing from a starting slap book as well. Both of these have tabs under the music so it is easy to figure out where they are playing the pattern on the neck. I feel good enough about reading my notes to pick up the "slap bible" by Antony Vitti. I have had it for a while, but wanted to pick up my skills before trying his stuff. He doesn't include tabs...

So, exercise one... simple octaves. I know octaves by feel, I use them in finger exercises, I can walk them up and down in sixteenths for short periods, eights are no problem at all.
The notes are all octaves... so

High E,D,C#,C,lowB,C#,D,D#

I dorked around for a half an hour trying to figure out how to play this quickly and was failing miserably. Then, I took out this piece of plexiglass I recreated my neck on, and started looking at the notes. I saw that this entire thing could be played easily on the third and first string... super easy actually. I transcribed the notes into tab, after which the progression was totally obvious and I was able to play the piece.

I know that I need to know my notes... I also know that I need to know my neck. The thing I see is this. I can remember tab easily enough to play it fast. No matter how well I learn my notes, there will always be decision making as to where I should play that note, which will slow down your playing until you have a piece memorized. I am not able to memorize the piece until I understand the pattern.

Summarized.... If I memorize E,D,C#,C.... It does me no good on the neck because I have to choose where to play it having this memorized won't help, whereas knowing where to put my fingers to get that progression quickly is critical.

I'm not trying to be a jerk.... I am trying to understand the animosity that people have for tab. It makes some people really crabby, but the more I learn of notes, the more I see that the tab people have a point. Up to a point....

 

[Gaius46]

Okay, so I've been studying my notes in my starting book, got learned... I've been playing from a starting slap book as well. Both of these have tabs under the music so it is easy to figure out where they are playing the pattern on the neck. I feel good enough about reading my notes to pick up the "slap bible" by Antony Vitti. I have had it for a while, but wanted to pick up my skills before trying his stuff. He doesn't include tabs...

So, exercise one... simple octaves. I know octaves by feel, I use them in finger exercises, I can walk them up and down in sixteenths for short periods, eights are no problem at all.
The notes are all octaves... so

High E,D,C#,C,lowB,C#,D,D#

I dorked around for a half an hour trying to figure out how to play this quickly and was failing miserably. Then, I took out this piece of plexiglass I recreated my neck on, and started looking at the notes. I saw that this entire thing could be played easily on the third and first string... super easy actually. I transcribed the notes into tab, after which the progression was totally obvious and I was able to play the piece.

I know that I need to know my notes... I also know that I need to know my neck. The thing I see is this. I can remember tab easily enough to play it fast. No matter how well I learn my notes, there will always be decision making as to where I should play that note, which will slow down your playing until you have a piece memorized. I am not able to memorize the piece until I understand the pattern.

Summarized.... If I memorize E,D,C#,C.... It does me no good on the neck because I have to choose where to play it having this memorized won't help, whereas knowing where to put my fingers to get that progression quickly is critical.

I'm not trying to be a jerk.... I am trying to understand the animosity that people have for tab. It makes some people really crabby, but the more I learn of notes, the more I see that the tab people have a point. Up to a point....

Believe it or not it becomes much easier with practice.

Give it enough time and you'll find that you can scan a piece of music and pretty quickly be able to figure what position(s) make the most sense to play it in. But it requires time and practice. I try to make it a point to read and play something I've never played before every day - even if it's only 8-12 bars.

 

[tZer]

Finding a teacher would be a huge help.

Practicing music is an instrumentally agnostic act. When you practice reading music and playing any instrument, you start by sitting down and looking over the music. You look at the key signature, time signature, style/tempo indications. You look at the notes, the bars (measures) and start to plan out your attack.

This includes jotting down your own personal notes - like "shift to 5th fret here". There are not rules that say you cannot annotate your music - and if you are like most musicians who have reading music as a fundamental part of their process, annotating sheet music is a given.

Tabs are definitely the 'Cliff's Notes' of the music world and are a means to an end - and many people thrive as players using tabs - but tabs do little to further your reading skills. It's literally the equivalent of some writing student complaining that novels are too long and as long as they get the highlights and can parrot back some pre-fab conclusions drawn by "Cliff" - isn't that enough?

Well - it all depends on context, doesn't it.

If you are serious about being able to read music - and be fluent - you need to give yourself permission to go slow - make lots of notes and practice a LOT. That requires self discipline and patience. If you do that everyday, you will very quickly see why leaning on tabs only slows your progress.

There is nothing to stop you from sitting down with a piece of sheet music and writing in your own fingerings and other notes meant to help you play what's written. The more you do it, the more familiar you will become with what a fifth looks like when written and know what it means, musically speaking - and finally, how and where to play it on your instrument.

 

[wcnewby]

Finding a teacher would be a huge help.

Practicing music is an instrumentally agnostic act. When you practice reading music and playing any instrument, you start by sitting down and looking over the music. You look at the key signature, time signature, style/tempo indications. You look at the notes, the bars (measures) and start to plan out your attack.

This includes jotting down your own personal notes - like "shift to 5th fret here". There are not rules that say you cannot annotate your music - and if you are like most musicians who have reading music as a fundamental part of their process, annotating sheet music is a given.

Tabs are definitely the 'Cliff's Notes' of the music world and are a means to an end - and many people thrive as players using tabs - but tabs do little to further your reading skills. It's literally the equivalent of some writing student complaining that novels are too long and as long as they get the highlights and can parrot back some pre-fab conclusions drawn by "Cliff" - isn't that enough?

Well - it all depends on context, doesn't it.

If you are serious about being able to read music - and be fluent - you need to give yourself permission to go slow - make lots of notes and practice a LOT. That requires self discipline and patience. If you do that everyday, you will very quickly see why leaning on tabs only slows your progress.

There is nothing to stop you from sitting down with a piece of sheet music and writing in your own fingerings and other notes meant to help you play what's written. The more you do it, the more familiar you will become with what a fifth looks like when written and know what it means, musically speaking - and finally, how and where to play it on your instrument.

Agnostically speaking, if the end justifies the means, then the players of tab are equal to note players if they can reproduce a series of notes with equal quality... bearing in mind that I am not diminishing the importance of reading notes.

Being a writer, I see the parallel that you are pointing at. You can't take the meter of a poem and slap any word into it expecting a song to happen. That would be like taking 500 pounds of ground beef and trying to make a cow with it.

If all you can do, musically, is reproduce stuff that has been written in tab for you, it is clear that you are in a different skill bracket than a person who can compose and write music. That much would be obvious to anyone.

What would be damn handy is a form of notation similar enough to notes not to mess with note players that contained the information found in tab. Like if the vertical line of a regular note in regular position had the number of the string on it, and the dot part of the note was a number that indicated your fret. Some sort of morph like that would allow more information to be contained in the same amount of space.

 

[tZer]

Agnostically speaking, if the end justifies the means, then the players of tab are equal to note players if they can reproduce a series of notes with equal quality... bearing in mind that I am not diminishing the importance of reading notes.

Being a writer, I see the parallel that you are pointing at. You can't take the meter of a poem and slap any word into it expecting a song to happen. That would be like taking 500 pounds of ground beef and trying to make a cow with it.

If all you can do, musically, is reproduce stuff that has been written in tab for you, it is clear that you are in a different skill bracket than a person who can compose and write music. That much would be obvious to anyone.

What would be damn handy is a form of notation similar enough to notes not to mess with note players that contained the information found in tab. Like if the vertical line of a regular note in regular position had the number of the string on it, and the dot part of the note was a number that indicated your fret. Some sort of morph like that would allow more information to be contained in the same amount of space.

To be clear, I said instrumentally agnostic - it doesn't matter what instrument you might play, music is music. If you try to think of music only in the context of a single instrument, you go on to demand things like the language be re-codified to suit your limited scope. The answer to such a demand is obvious - tabs.

OR - if you really need to use an instrument as a reference point, at least use a piano - IF you are trying to learn about music and not just how to play bass parts.

In jazz you have simplified charts that use chord symbols or roman numerals. Even within the context of traditional musical manuscript there are short-cuts, abbreviations and other simplifications that are designed to make life easier on the players.

Imagine if every player in the orchestra got the entire score and had to find their own instrument's part within the context of the entire symphony...

But the fact remains - and I believe you ironically stated it yourself - that there is a perfectly functional way to describe music in writing that pretty much tells all musicians exactly what they need to know about how to play it - it's called standard musical notation.


Yes, I understand the value of tab when it comes to a means to an end - and yes, I have even used a tab or two in my life like when I was trying to learn "The Rain Song" on guitar, for example - an instrument that I was not totally savvy.

Now, I could have taken the long road and sat there with the sheet music or learned it by ear - but really, I just wanted to play that song - I wasn't a guitar player - and the easiest and fastest way to get there was a tab I found in Guitar Player...

On a side note - the fact that Jimmy Page uses an interesting alternate tuning really does throw a monkey wrench into the 'learn by ear' mix... I had a lot of it by ear in standard tuning already - but found many of the voicings sounded nowhere near as chimey... But I digress...

Tabs are fine as long as you aren't really trying to learn about music. How to read is one thing. How to interpret and analyze it is another. When it comes to the rules or science and math of music, the existing codec really works well.

It gets said time and again here. People who learn to read music and understand theory rarely regret it.

Approaching music from that perspective makes instruments irrelevant to a certain degree. You start looking at the whole thing in terms of harmony, melody, rhythm, meter, phrasing, dynamics - and then to what instruments best serve the needs of the music.

 

[Febs]

What would be damn handy is a form of notation similar enough to notes not to mess with note players that contained the information found in tab. Like if the vertical line of a regular note in regular position had the number of the string on it, and the dot part of the note was a number that indicated your fret. Some sort of morph like that would allow more information to be contained in the same amount of space.

Once you become familiar with where the notes are on the neck, you will realize that the dot part of the note already contains that information.

 

[Gaius46]

What would be damn handy is a form of notation similar enough to notes not to mess with note players that contained the information found in tab. Like if the vertical line of a regular note in regular position had the number of the string on it, and the dot part of the note was a number that indicated your fret. Some sort of morph like that would allow more information to be contained in the same amount of space.

I also play guitar and it's common for guitar transcribers and composers of learning material to note positions (i.e. a V over a bar where they want you to play at the 5th fret) on scores. Going further many composers or transcribers write detailed fingerings on scores. For example a "1" next to a note would mean hold down the note with your index finger while a "i" over the note means pluck the string with your index finger. From that information it's easy enough to figure out where the person putting the score together wants you to play.

In the bass world similar types of notations exist.

For learning it's okay but honestly I agree with tzer the quicker you get into the habit of doing it yourself the better off you are. My experience has been that I often prefer different fingerings than what the transcriber used and doing your own annotations and fingerings helps you understand the song. Also part of the creatively interpreting what's written includes deciding which "D" note to play. An open D sounds different from the D that's 5th fret on the A string.

 

[Marty Forrer]

The old chesnut.
NOTATION IS FOR MUSICIANS... TAB IS FOR MONKEYS.
Tab is of no musical use whatsoever. By using Tab you are not getting note values and rests, you are not learning the notes on the fingerboard, you are not learning music. A monkey will learn to play bass if you show him how to and where to stick his fingers. This is exactly what Tab does. It has no musical merit whatsoever. You want to learn songs? Fine, that is the quickest path to becoming a bass player in a rock, country or blues band. But learn them by ear. You will get good pause button chops, but most of all you will be developing your recognition skills, and some degree of ear training. Tab will not give you this.
When I learnt, there was no Tab, we used to put a vinyl record on the turntable and play a phrase over and over until we could figure it out. Within 18 months of picking up the bass I was in a fulltime professional rock band.
The more you do this, the quicker and more proficient you become at it. Tab will not do that for you.
When you want to delve into jazz, you will see how utterly useless Tab is.

 

[tZer]

NOTATION IS FOR MUSICIANS... TAB IS FOR MONKEYS.

But learn them by ear. You will get good pause button chops, but most of all you will be developing your recognition skills, and some degree of ear training...
...we used to put a vinyl record on the turntable and play a phrase over and over until we could figure it out.

Man - I learned my first few RUSH songs using the needle-drop method... I didn't think twice about it and got really good at flipping that tone-arm lever.

When I finally integrated a tape deck into my stereo system (man, it's funny how old-fashioned that sounds!) - the pause, rewind routine was heaven-sent! Additionally, that little half-push the FF while it was playing to hear where parts changed - priceless...

Digital music has made it SO MUCH EASIER to learn by ear, there's no reason anyone should have any troubles. If they do, we should sit them down in a room with a turntable, some vinyl of Yes and tell 'em they can't leave until they learn 'Roundabout' or 'Heart of the Sunrise'...

When you want to delve into jazz, you will see how utterly useless Tab is.

That's the nut. Jazz is where learning Music (capital 'M') shines. It's one thing to use sheet music to learn a part in a symphony - the same part, over and over again - no variation, no individual interpretation - nothing but regurgitation - but jazz starts with learning 'the part' - then throws that out the window and says, "OK, that's where it started - where are you going to take it?"

Find me a tab system the helps you do that, I'll convert.