Originally posted by Dave Grossman
Just throw some duct tape over the tab parts. 
Believe it or not, I am actually considering doing this. My wife is an "Office Depot" addict, and she uses this stuff called "Post It correction and cover-up tape". This stuff comes in various widths, and the widest of them MIGHT be wide enough to cover up the TAB parts. It bothers me not a whit that there is a popular edition out there which includes both SN and Tab. But it absolutely BURNS MY *SS that there doesn't seem to be a SN only version on the market.
Yes. Definitely. That is an art in an of itself. For many bass lines, it is not difficult to do this and even do it on the fly. Try doing it for a Bach Fugue though. You will quickly realize that the complexity of the music requires much more thought about how to best express a phrase. The arrangements I have been working on for the past 6 years or so have been reworked many times. Every time I play a piece I think of a new way to play a line using different finger positions. Eventually, my transcriptions settle into something that remains more or less static. If I did not have a reliable way to document my finger position decisions, I would undoubtedly forget them if I put the work down for a while. For me, tablature has allowed me to work on much more music than I would have been able to without it. I can put a piece down for a long time and come back to it without losing the finger position info that I spent so much time on. It would be extremely difficult to notate this information on staff notation. I have seen various methods for doing this but nothing that is as precise as tab.
I agree, and yet still disagree. I agree that it is important with complex music to be able to notate fingering/position choices. Anyone who has ever prepared a "concert music" recital knows that this is an integral part of the preparation. Where I start to disagree is with the TAB part...if someone with bigger or smaller hands, or with different aesthetic/stylistic tastes than me is preparing the tab, then it really doesn't do me that much good.
As an example - back in college (both undergrad and grad) I majored in theory/comp with piano as my principal instrument. My piano teacher (the best teacher I have ever had, bar none, BTW) was about 5'1" and maybe 100lbs, and I was 6'2" and 185 lbs. She could stretch for a 9th, and I could stretch for an 11th. Many of her fingerings were not ideal for me, and many of my fingerings were impossible for her. She insisted that her students work from Urtext editions whenever possible, and that each student must determine how the music was to be fingered based on BOTH physical and musical considerations. Any music that already had an editor's fingerings on it was NOT encouraged, and if that was all there was, I was under strict orders to disregard the editor's fingerings (and all other editorial markings as well). I thought then, and still think now, that this part of my training - the PERSONALIZING of every piece of music I played - was one of the greatest educational experiences I have ever had.
While I admit that all the TAB is really doing is giving another person's viewpoint on these issues, I feel strongly that students should be given a piece of music as a CLEAN SLATE, and learn to make their own personal decisions about technique and musicality every time they play. Given the choice, I would ALWAYS prefer to have an Urtext edition than to rely on what some editor I know little about has had to say about it, even in those cases where I happen to agree with most of the editor's decisions.
.......{Edit}...........
It's the content of the music that counts. The notation system is almost incidental. Is a blind musician any less of a musician because they can't read notated music?
- Dave
)... it is however not an excuse for NOT learning standard notation... like, why settle for the second best?
and still give the same amount that tab gives. shoot, that gives me an idea...
