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Tabs or music

#61
My point earlier was that you can't sightread anything in tab and expect to be playing that in realtime with others who may be reading as well - and not just for the rhythmic values. You'd still be trying to figure out where to put your finger for the 30th note by the time the rest of the cats had played the 300th note and closed the sheet and headed for the local watering hole.

Sure, at first one might want help to put the finger in the right place, but when I see a C and then an A just by all the patterns I have assimilated I can find several fingerings for A without usually having to think about it much. And I'm not even a very experienced reader on bass.
 
#62
caeman said:
I am not a good bass player. I just picked one up in August of 2008 to begin learning. I have been a drummer all my life. I never learned the letter notes. A and B's were a foreign concept to me. So, I have begun my learning with tab and it has worked for me. It isn't useless, it is a learning aid for we who want to play.

Did you learn to read before you learned to speak? Tab allows you to speak with the guitar.

By being able to sit down and PLAY, it keeps me inspired to continue learning. I find the tab useful for helping to learn simpler songs like church hymns, kids songs (my little boy likes my guitar) and such. I have progressed far enough that I have begun attending my synagogue's band practices with my bass to begin learning the music that I have only played drum set with to this point. All of the music is chord marked, no other notation.

I am not dismissing musical notation, but I would ask those that already knew musical notation to not denigrate tab to terribly much. It is a learning aid that some of us needed to get started. Now, if you never advance beyond tab, you probably really haven't learned anything.

Tab has been useful in helping me to learn harmonica, as well, but that is a subject for another forum.
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But - not be disrespectful - what you are saying is effectively "the blind leading the blind"...?

So you don't know how well you might have progressed if you had got a good teacher and learned to sight read from the start...?

Surely it's better to take the advice of good players who have progressed to a high level and not those who admit they are not good players...? :confused:
 
#63
Yes and no. Fret locations, yes (subject to the often undesirable constraints already mentioned); LH fingering and positioning, no. The larger point, as I know you know, is the argument that fret location is not the primary piece of information that notation should convey.
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I agree, although LH fingering can easily just be written above the note. Showing fretboard locations is far more easy to see on tab than having to clumsily write the string above all the notes. I was just countering onlyclave's assertion that there is NO rationale for tab. There certainly is some utility for tab, although as a complete package it is vastly inferior to standard notation, I agree. One thing that I've seen used that I quite like is something called note tab, where instead of fret numbers you write note names (upper case for first octave, lower case for second octave). That way you're training yourself to think in terms of music rather than patterns, and you have all the benefits that tab provides with regards to fingerboard positioning.
 
#64
Bruce Lindfield said:
Surely it's better to take the advice of good players who have progressed to a high level and not those who admit they are not good players...? :confused:
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My concern here is that much of the advice is coming from people who already knew how to sight read music, and thus, never had to use tab to learn. It is kinda like asking some one who has never ridden a motorcycle to teach you how to ride a motorcycle. Different players come from different backgrounds. If you've never learned notes at all, then having to learning to sight read first, to be proficient enough with that, and then to have to fumble around on the fret board might distract some would-be players from continuing.

Maybe opinions from people who knew no other instrument might be more...instrumental...to helping the OP. How did THOSE people become good?
 
#65
I started out with tabs as a youngin but pretty quickly started reading music. If you want to be a pro on any level and get paid to freelance, you can't afford to not read music. If you want to lead a band or even arrange/compose stuff, you will HAVE to learn. Not to mention, if everyone in a band can at least follow a chart, it makes rehearsals go a LOT quicker.

If it's a hobby and always will be, I wouldn't put too much weight on it. On the hobbiest level, I think it is a matter of just wanting to.
 
#66
oldscarrow said:
G'day
:help: a question for all those that have learned to play bass well.
If you consider yourself to be a good bass player,...could you tell me, did you learn to play bass by reading bass tabs, or did you learn to read music. And if you did learn to read music, are you a better bassist because you learned to read music, and any other comments are appreciated, (except for those that might be telling me I have this in the wrong section....get over it:spit:, I am still finding my way around this forum) to everybody else...thanks
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caeman said:
My concern here is that much of the advice is coming from people who already knew how to sight read music, and thus, never had to use tab to learn. It is kinda like asking some one who has never ridden a motorcycle to teach you how to ride a motorcycle. Different players come from different backgrounds. If you've never learned notes at all, then having to learning to sight read first, to be proficient enough with that, and then to have to fumble around on the fret board might distract some would-be players from continuing.

Maybe opinions from people who knew no other instrument might be more...instrumental...to helping the OP. How did THOSE people become good?
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But if you read the original post - he is asking those who play bass well - NOT those who don't...:eyebrow:
 
#67
caeman said:
My concern here is that much of the advice is coming from people who already knew how to sight read music{...}
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Well, I used to crap my diaper too, until I learned to use the throne-and-paper. So I don't understand your concern. I had to LEARN to read music just like anyone else would, it didn't just happen, and any relationship to tab is neither here nor there.
 
#68
Again, the quality of transcriptions is utterly unrelated to the difference between reading standard notation and using tablature. You can have awful and crappy transpcriptions written in standard notation and in tab. You can have accurate and useful transcriptions written in either medium. So, the quality of the tabs available on the 'net is divorced from the discussion of whether tab or notation is better for learning to play.

And I stand by my assertion that tab is useful for people who don't really want to learn to play, but merely want to play. It contributes to the "trained monkey" aspect of playing an instrument instead of playing music on the instrument. And tangentially, that might contribute to the plethora of putrid tabs- people who only know tablature and are poor musicians to begin with come up with poor transcriptions and write them in the only medium they know. But don't confuse the bad interpretations with tab.

jte
 
#69
Real world example:

An electric guitarist/singer wanted to showcase some of his own songs at a local club. For these he burned a CD of his Garage Band recording, that had his guitar playing, and some simple bass and drum parts. He said, "Use this as as a guide to come up with your own hipper parts". OK. We listened and then began to work a few of his songs.

He also wanted to put a few covers in the set, so he brought over a Beatles piano score songbook (among others), and opened it up to a song. We were playing together the moment he counted off, me grabbing the decently-transcribed bass lines off the bass clef of the piano part. This got us happening very quickly and discussion then ensued on what could be altered, etc. Way quick because it was easy to communicate ideas.
 
#70
I did transcribe in TAB just today, by the way, to show an idea in the EFFECTS subforum, partly because the song was known to those who would be reading that thread, partly because TAB is easy enough to type in a forum without using external software and then inlining it as an image:

SWEET EMOTION

Posts #9 and #10...
 
#71
JTE said:
The reason tabs are so poor is because they are only useful up to a point. The point where a musician can do better on their own without them. I haven't used tab in years because not only do I not need them I can usually do a better job of figuring the song out myself. So what you end up with is a bunch of young inexperienced musicians trying to get some internet kudos and a plethora of bad tabs.
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#72
theshadow2001 said:
The reason tabs are so poor is because they are only useful up to a point. The point where a musician can do better on their own without them. I haven't used tab in years because not only do I not need them I can usually do a better job of figuring the song out myself. So what you end up with is a bunch of young inexperienced musicians trying to get some internet kudos and a plethora of bad tabs.
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Right, which I basically stated at the start of the thread. There are way more newbies making TABs than experienced guys, because experienced guys who've developed big ears have little use for TABS usually, and don't seem to feel any need to publish them on the internut.
 
#73
caeman said:
My concern here is that much of the advice is coming from people who already knew how to sight read music, and thus, never had to use tab to learn. It is kinda like asking some one who has never ridden a motorcycle to teach you how to ride a motorcycle. Different players come from different backgrounds. If you've never learned notes at all, then having to learning to sight read first, to be proficient enough with that, and then to have to fumble around on the fret board might distract some would-be players from continuing.

Maybe opinions from people who knew no other instrument might be more...instrumental...to helping the OP. How did THOSE people become good?
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I started on guitar, but the issues are really the same. I knew no other instrument before I started, had never read music. But I started reading standard notation (at an extremely basic level) at my first lesson, because that's how my teacher taught. For whatever that may be worth ....
 
#74
HaVIC5 said:
I was just countering onlyclave's assertion that there is NO rationale for tab. There certainly is some utility for tab, although as a complete package it is vastly inferior to standard notation, I agree.
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I take your point. Those more developed forms of tab sound kind of interesting, and indicative of ways tab could be done better than it usually is.
 
#76
Richard Lindsey said:
I take your point. Those more developed forms of tab sound kind of interesting, and indicative of ways tab could be done better than it usually is.
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But it gets to the point where you are spending a lot of time
"re-inventing the wheel" - whereas you could have been spending this time with the tool that has stood the test of time over centuries and does the job perfectly! :eyebrow:
 
#77
Passing bass notation over the net is pretty tricky if you don't have .pdf files and/or access to a scanner to scan the sheet music you have in your possession. Whereas tabbing out a song is relatively easy and can be done quite accurately. For example, the other week someone wanted to know the bass part to a System of a Down song that I know quite well. I figured it out by ear and tabbed it for the person straight onto the forum. It seemed to do the job from the feedback provided later. If they required notation, it could potentially be a longer process as getting the software (notation program) and writing it out, saving the file and then sending it can have a few problems, albeit minor ones. Having said that it would most likely be a more desirable outcome as those kinds of programs have both tab and notation (like "power tab", for example)

Not saying it's a better method, but it can be more convenient. Depends on the context and people involved, IME, IMHO.
 
#78
Bruce Lindfield said:
But it gets to the point where you are spending a lot of time
"re-inventing the wheel" - whereas you could have been spending this time with the tool that has stood the test of time over centuries and does the job perfectly! :eyebrow:
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I agree, and I still don't think tab is anything a bassist really "needs" to know. There are so many more important things, things that allow you to communicate with the rest of the musical world, and often seemingly not enough time to learn them in. But I thought HaVIC5 did have a minor point.
 
#79
I would say notation, however I learnt to play by ear and I dont know how to read music. Whenever I have written songs with bands and musicians we have written by playing together and talking about where we wanted the song to go or how the music should feel.

As many others have described if you want to read music and understand tone pitch rhythm and all else you can only write this with notation but this does not affect your playing ability. You become a good player simply by having a great feel and alot of hard work.
 

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