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Tabs=Bad. & No, This 'Isn't' in the Wrong Category
- Thread starter Fendbassfan
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That's kinda impossible when you're on a gig where you've never heard the stuff you're playing before. One of the many great things about reading notation is that you can play exactly the right notes at exactly the right time in that situation - if your reading is good enough.
Something else I've noticed lately, is that singers are taking lessons to learn songs exactly the way they're done on the recording. A lot of vocal teachers use the backing track to show land-marks for singers in the song. If you change those things the singer can actually be thrown off and lose their harmonic center fairly quickly. It'd probably not be as big a deal for rock music or some of the fast stuff but for ballads you usually have to be bang on or the singers have a heck of a time.
...and you just don't want to mess around with a singer who does ballads... or it'll be your last gig with them...
But back to the topic... sure sheet music is a "crutch" I'll give you that... but it's required if the band is playing something they've never seen or heard before - which is pretty common in modern music.
+1 to most of this. Although I don't agree 100% with #6 (but I don't 100% disagree either).
I stand corrected - sort of. I didn't consider outside my own experience. I'm not hired as a fill-in or hired gun. i work with the same group (basically) for years,, and if we cover a tune, we "fix it" how we want it to sound (and I'm sure how the composer wishes he'd written it!!). Every tune has hooks that make the song, but there's also alot of homogenizing that goes into recording a song that really wants to comes out of its shell when played live. But yes, if I'm called to back Faith Hill, I'll play every note as written, just so she doesn't have to vamp while I shred!
when you tab, you tab alone. nobody but guitarists and bassists use tab. you will never get a sheet of tab on a gig unless you're in a rock band where nobody reads and there isn't a keyboard player. i read regular notation constantly on my gig. without knowing how to do it, i would have no gig, and neither would a lot of musicians i know. reading is the key to getting the higher paying local gigs.
Or if the band is more than a drummer, bass player, guitarist and possibly keyboard player. I can't imagine a large band or orchestra whose members eschew reading music.
Personally, I;d have to say tabs can be a great learning tool. When I go to look at a song, it gives me fret and string position and order. Some have rhythm, but it's usually more awkward. So I have to figure the rhythm out by ear. It's slightly less work than learning the entirety by ear, but still more work than reading standard notation, which is most useful when you haven't heard the song you're supposed to be playing. So I'd say tabs can be used to learn quite a bit too. Especially some of the ones that are a little off, as long as you don't take it as fact. They leave enough of a framework to give you an idea of where you're supposed to be playing, but you're on your own with the details. It's a good jumpstart into ear learning.
Bingo.
Need to learn 30 cover songs by next weekend to play a one off $100 gig? Tabs are great because - fast, available, and cheap.
never used a tab in my life to do that and i do it fairly often. i suppose you could, but i'd rather use my ears and make notes to myself using notation instead. tab actually complicates things for me in those situations, because you get so little actual musical information.
That's exactly why I said they should learn to read in the first place. Musical tastes change and one day you might want to play Bass for a Big Band or Jazz quartet. You ask for the sheet or bring your Real Books with you.
+1, totally agree with this. Learning to read sheet music is very good because it gives you more understanding of rhythm and forms of notation that directly relate to sound. It generally opens up your understanding of what music is, and will definitely be useful at times in your musical life.
That said, being able to sight-read isn't a must as there are many musical situations in today's world that will simply never call on it. It's a great skill, but for most "modern" musicians I would recommend spending that time learning other facets of music theory. Generally I would say that having the ability to at least read sheet music (both clefs) at a slow pace is something all musicians should learn, along with learning other theory fundamentals like scales, modes, intervals, etc. You can then spend the time practising sight-reading from there if that's what your musical field calls upon.
sight reading skill is what develops when you spend a lot of time working on your reading. you can't help but to get better at sight reading if you do regular reading enough.
- Apr 1, 2000
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Oh yea, I agree, sight-reading basically just means that you can read sheet music at the same speed you can play. Again, not always necessary because in most gigs you should be playing the music from memory; even in big bands and orchestras at least some of the music should be memorised so that it's not so robotic IMO. But in rock, metal, blues, country, jazz, etc the musicians are playing from memory AND by ear, so you just use whatever you want to be familiar with the music (I think tabs are great, but use them in conjunction with sheet music wherever possible because they have limitations).
That's why I say, get some sheets and a book or two (or better yet, a good teacher) and learn how to read sheet music. It'll help you to understand things later on, then if the day comes where you actually do NEED to read sheet music in a band, you can just sit and practice it to get where you need to be rather than have to learn it all from scratch.
My opinion on music theory (which includes sheet notation, but not tabs) is that one should learn the basics of everything, and then focus on the parts that they find the most useful and spend more time practising those things. But always keep familiar with those fundamentals because you never know what you'll need.
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