In another thread, people are telling the OP to stop working with tablature learn how to read music.
When I read tablature:
G------------------
D------------------
A------------3--5--
E---3--5--3--------
I see the following:
G, A, G on E string
C, D on A string
I also look at the note lengths in the sheet music above the tablature.
Now can someone explain to me why that is worse than standard sheet music?
Tab is one of several methods one musician uses to convey information to another. A willingness to share helps us all to grow as musicians. As an ancient Sumerian proverb goes "If someone knows, why wouldn't he tell?" There is nothing wrong with tab. Compared to other forms of musical notation it is rather limited but then Tweeting is rather limited compared to writing the Great American Novel, isn't it? That does not make it either useless or dangerous. It is what it is and if it works for you in your situation and meets your present and future goals then knowing tab and nothing else is fine really.
If you are young and intend to work as musician as a life long career then you really need to learn to use ALL forms of musical notation that are in common use. The ability to converse in many musical languages will serve you well professionally. At least on occasion it will be the difference between getting the job and being passed over. If you are or intend to be a pro then you should not be asking this question, you should be learning all the relevant notational systems and becoming fluent in them! If you are an old guy like me, playing in a church band, and tabs are working well for you then no need to change. Obviously a lot of people on TB will be somewhere between these two extremes and should go with whatever best serves them. In my case I rarely get much value from those exceedingly rare written out bass lines that I do get on occasion since I generally feel like copying what I hear on the recordings by ear results in a better bass line than any fully written out bass line I have come upon yet. But I can get some useful information from standard musical notation even when it is intended for other instruments so I prefer that to chord charts. I have never yet been given a tab to work from. But there are times when I would be delighted to get a written out bass run in any form, tab included, since it can be hard to figure out what the bassist on a recording is doing in a dense wall of sound.
One also should keep in mind that standard notation PLUS tab can be better for a bass player than either alone. For a lot of instruments, the clarinet I played for years in school bands is one, standard written notation tells you EVERYTHING you need to know to play a piece since once you see the pitch to play the fingering is locked in. This is not so for stringed instruments since a given note can be found in several places on the fingerboard in most cases and the optimum place to play it depends on the notes you need to play before and after it. If you are given a part in standard notation you will have have to work out the best fingering for it on your own, even a recording cannot tell you that. A video might but who ever shows the bassist in a video, am I right!? A WELL DONE tab will give you a place to start with the fingering while the standard notation gives you the notes and rhythms to play. You may use it verbatim or you may choose to modify it, but a well done tab will augment written notation quite nicely. A brain dead tab will only tell you what notes to play and leave you to figure out on your own a practical fingering approach for the piece as a whole but in that sense it is no worse than standard notation which leaves you in the exact same position as long as both are accurate.
Are tabs inaccurate? Well, they can be. So can standard notation. Our church choir recently sang a couple of pieces from Handel's Messiah and I had to make some corrections to the score in pencil in the bass line on one of them. And this on a piece that is well known and hundreds of years old!! The value of any specific example of any written notation is only as good as the skill and dedication of the person who transcribed it. Errors in tab notation do not prove that it is useless, they only prove that there are tab authors you should not trust. If they wrote out parts in standard notation they would look more authoritative because we all assign more authority to standard notation but they would be no more trustworthy!
If you are happy with the notational system that you use and can find all the music you need in it then keep using it. If you really need to change then you don't need us talking heads on TB to tell you to change. You will be frustrated by the limitations of what you are using now and that will motivate you to change in a way that we never can.
