Opinions On Tab

[JEStanek]

Whether you read notes,

tab,

or none of the above,

it's better to play than not play!

The good professor speaks the truth here. I'll add, strictly for me, that I can best learn a song in TAB if I either a) already know the tune in my head b) am working with TablEdit and can play the song to hear it or c) have the notation to understand where the music is going. My particular weakness is I have yet to invest my brain time into knowing my fingerboard to turn the notes on the staff to frets on the fingerboard. I keep meaning to... But it is best to play.

Jamie

[woodwizard]

Whether you read notes,

tab,

or none of the above,

it's better to play than not play!

I like that quote. We must play on!

[Jim Bevan]

I can read notation just fine, always could, and I may be the only one here who can't read tab, but I do understand its appeal: standard notation is based on the keyboard's layout (or vice versa), and works well for any diatonic instrument (like wind instruments, where the simplest fingering yields a major scale). But on a stringed instrument, it doesn't make a lot of sense. Take a bass: your first note is an E, your second note is an F, your third is an F#?? Why isn't it a G? What happened to E#? There is a real logic behind musical construction, which is why, on a stringed instrument, pattern-oriented thinking like Ted Eschliman's FFcP has such strong appeal. Tab is going to hang in there strongly until someone comes up with a system of notation that incorporates key signature-based harmonic structure with the fretboard's logical layout.

[ralph johansson]

How many feel as I do that learning to play an instrument by tabliture is going down the wrong path. I have seen so many newbies lose interest because their teacher has insisted they learn to play by tab instead of learning to accompany themselves. I feel that tab leads down a one way street that never encourages improvisation and it takes all of the "artist" out of the equation and makes it more like learning how to use a tool instead of a an extension of yourself. So.... you learn how to play the melody of say....The Old Home Place in the key of G and at the jam they kick it off in A. Where's the tab for that ?

I did a little searching on the topic. The most perverse thing I found was about a teacher who insisted on his student learning tab instead of exploiting her reading ability.
When asked why the teacher answered that tab is the accepted mode of notation in the Bluegrass world. BS - the accepted mode, of course, is no notation at all.

The true dividing line is between an ad hoc approach, using tab to learn specific songs in specific fingerings (often not optimal)
on a specific instrument, on the one hand, or a generalistic, theoretic, approach of learning music along with the chosen instrument, on the other hand.
There seems to be lot of the first approach these days, as exemplified by excerpts
from "instructional" videos on YouTube.

By way of comparison, I know many jazz saxophonists. All of them read SN, in fact
grand staff, and all of them play the piano. Keyboard harmony is essential to understanding your place in a group context and understand harmony from the bottom up. I can't see how tab for mandolin could possibly illustrate these principles.

Guitarists are a bit better off, because of the range of their instruments (covering all of grand staff),
yet many of them know a lot of chords and virtually no harmony - as a result of relying on tab and chord tables. Some people are blessed with huge ears; they can
learn just about anything without the aid of notation; we ordinary clods have to rely on that device. If, I say if, we want to learn music.

[ralph johansson]

I just don't understand this. All you have to do is listen to music on your iPod or home stereo or computer, hear something you like and and learn it by ear. If you do this a lot it gets easier and easier. It now takes me about a half hour to get a fiddle tune under my fingers at a slow pace and I am no great player - I'm a real intermediate hacker struggling to find my way. I know people that do it after one time through (amazing but true). The best part is that most people find they remember the tunes they learn by ear much better than tunes they learn from the written page.

I agree Jamie for some folks tab is fine. But, if you want to be able to sit down with people and play tunes together then you MUST develop your ear and get to the point that you can play along with something you have never heard before. You need to hear the chord changes and have a pretty good idea what the chords are going to be.

There isn't always an aural source for pieces you want to learn. Also, in the realm of show-tunes and standards, if your only source is a jazz interpretation, you would like to know what's being interpreted. I wouldn't use Miles Davis as a source for My Funny Valentine
(I did learn it from a record, I believe one by Barney Kesssel). A couple of years ago I wanted to work up Missouri Waltz,
which I had heard exactly once on radio, decades ago. I had the chords down and most of the melody. I could have been content with my own "variation" but I much preferred to know what the actual meldoy was, so I googled

[ralph johansson]

around a bit and found a score. I still don't play the song as written but at least I know where and why my version differs from
the original. There are many other songs I wouldn't even know about if relying only on my record collection.

[Mandophyte]

As a musical starter at 58 and having to learn some method of reading tunes I settled on notation as I considered it told me more and I didn't need to buy mandolin specific tab books.

That said I bought The Mandolin Picker's Fakebook and discovered that it is completely tab, although it doesn't say so in any sales pitch or either of the covers, so I had to buy The Fiddler's Fakebook which is by the same author and has more tunes in notation.

If you're a tab player and would like to try learning notation see Joe Carr's Learn to Read Standard Notation for the Mandolin in 2010 at Mel Bay's Mandolin Sessions (Feb-March 2010).

[Bertram Henze]

Playing by ear and by tab/notation is like talking and reading. Most of us are able to talk without reading the words, and most are able to read a book without talking, or read a paragraph to someone else. If any of these options is missing, it's considered a serious handicap.
Why should music be any different? Take a look at the Song-a-Week group here on the Cafe: The threads start with notation of some kind (mostly ABC) and go on to show everybody's audible interpretation, often played without looking at notation any more.

[Jock]

Playing by ear and by tab/notation is like talking and reading. Most of us are able to talk without reading the words, and most are able to read a book without talking, or read a paragraph to someone else. If any of these options is missing, it's considered a serious handicap.
Why should music be any different? Take a look at the Song-a-Week group here on the Cafe: The threads start with notation of some kind (mostly ABC) and go on to show everybody's audible interpretation, often played without looking at notation any more.

My take exactly, I'm not a fluid notation reader but I get by and consider it as essential a tool to learning new stuff as the ear is. It's often said that there are many inaccuracies in tab/notation, IME there are just as many to be picked up by ear.

[Rex Hart]

All very good comments and I can see both sides.I am not talking about general notation, and I guess my original post was fairly weak on the point I was trying to get across. In my experience, I have seen many potential players lose interest because they were taught by tab which meant all they were able to do was play the melody, and it became self defeating for them because they were never taught to go beyond that point. I don't thik I am alone on this, but except for my own private practice time, the joy I get is from playing with other musicians and bouncing off one another. I know in some cases this is not possible, so maybe tab could be useful in that instance. The thing I see is what a previous poster stated; you can become so addicted to it that you can't seem to improve beyond that point unless you start playing by ear or standard notation.

[CES]

I have a similar problem as Jamie...I want to learn how staff relates to my fretboard, but just haven't made it too far past open strings, yet. I still see treble clef and think in Sax fingerings...

I find it very difficult to sight read an unknown piece of music and make it sound "right," particularly in genres where improv both with the melody but also rhythm are the norm. I once saw the standard notation for one of Billie Holliday's songs, and it was ridiculously simple. BUT, she didn't sing it simply, that's for sure. My reading of the notation was nothing like her melody. Notation is much better at relaying how the music should sound than tab, but there's still something lacking there. Truly, I need some combination of notation/tab (I play by the tab but refer to the notation for rhythm, meter, etc) and ear to get most songs correct when I'm learning.

I do think notation is superior to tab, but tab is very usable, especially for poor fools like me who try to play multiple instruments and don't want to learn 3 fretboards. The instrument specificity of tab is its strength, but also its weakness, I think.

[AZStu]

Playing by ear and by tab/notation is like talking and reading. Most of us are able to talk without reading the words, and most are able to read a book without talking, or read a paragraph to someone else.

That's the best analysis I've seen (or heard!) yet.

[JonZ]

Refreshing, without all of the extra calories!

[Tom Haywood]

Piano training gave me certain disabilities for learning the guitar, which tablature is a great help in overcoming. Oddly, tab for the mandolin winds up being a crutch for me and is actually more difficult than notation to read while playing. Weird. All of it is useful for muscle memory training and getting the fingers to do automatically what the brain is thinking or feeling.

[Rob Gerety]

This thread has me thinking a bit on this whole issue. Perhaps my feeling that the way to learn is by ear is a little overstated. I am thinking about this from the perspective of a person learning to play music - not a truly advanced player. I do believe that if you want to get to the point that you can play with other people and contribute in a meaningful way to the music making, you have to spend a LOT OF TIME playing by ear so that you can hear chord changes and know what is going on in a tune you many not know well. But I also admit that if you are just memorizing a melody it really doesn't matter so much how you do it. Personally I think it is better to do it by ear because it helps develop your ability to hear intervals and chords changes and such.

But I guess what I really mean is that if you want to learn to improvise on the fly - playing melody lines and breaks, or even just chords - it seems to me that you really have to start playing music that you have not memorized - and without any printed page in front of you. You have to develop the ability to listen to what is being played, identify the key, find the chords and then find the chord tones and/or useful scales. Ultimately I think many of us want to get to the point that we are as fluent on our instrument as we are speaking or singing. Making music on your instrument and finding notes becomes totally unconscious at some point - like forming words when you engage in conversation. This is my ultimate goal - I'll probably never achieve this goal, but I am fairly confident that I never will never make progress toward this goal unless I spend a lot of my time playing things that I am not reading and that I have not memorized.

As Bertram points out over at the Song a Week group the tune of the week is made available to everyone in written form of some kind. Many use the written music to learn the tune. But not everyone. Even though the written music is available I never look at it except maybe to clarify a really tough spot. I find a nice clean recording of the basic melody, learn that by ear, and then sometimes try to develop some embellishments such as double stops and slides and the like.

[JeffD]

But not everyone. Even though the written music is available I never look at it except maybe to clarify a really tough spot. I find a nice clean recording of the basic melody, learn that by ear, and then sometimes try to develop some embellishments such as double stops and slides and the like.

You are discussing the realtive virtues of written music, whether its tab or not.

Here is an aspect not as yet mentioned. I use notation to remember tunes. I've been to many jams where I hear a tune that is new to me. I can by now learn it by ear, but as soon as I get home, (or back to the campsite or the hotel) I write it out in notation, to jam it in my brain and to have it for later. When at a jam where I haven't time to learn a tune by ear (it goes by too fast or I wasn't paying attention), my digital recording tune sucker gets it, and then back home I play that back and write the tune out.

I have several notebooks of tunes I found this way, most are probably in some tune book I as yet don't own, or perhaps I haven't found it in the yards of tunebooks I do own, but in any case I have tune, and can get it back into my fingers when ever I desire.

Now I have a great memory for tunes as it is, but probably a lot of that is because I have gone through this procedure, and also because I can mentally relax and not be afraid of forgetting a hard won tune.

Remembering the names of the tunes - forget it. The wiring to that machinery has become lose.

[ralph johansson]

Piano training gave me certain disabilities for learning the guitar, which tablature is a great help in overcoming. Oddly, tab for the mandolin winds up being a crutch for me and is actually more difficult than notation to read while playing. Weird. All of it is useful for muscle memory training and getting the fingers to do automatically what the brain is thinking or feeling.

Could you explain the first sentence? I'm convinced that my ear for harmony - spacing, voicing, voice leading, inversions, etc. - would have profited from some keyboard training. That would have been of great help for me, esp. on the guitar. However, thanks to my reading ability (I can read grand staff and knew soprano clef before I even started playing)
I can still get some ideas from piano scores. And one important observation is that you don't need that many notes in
your chords.

[Bertram Henze]

One thing to add: Written music has accents and dialects.

For the genres most of us play, tab/notation is meant to be a minimum guideline rather than something to be taken literally. The tunes at thesession.org, for instance, are mostly just a basic melody without any ornamentation - every musician is supposed to add that himself. Playing these tunes exactly as written sounds clean but uninteresting. There is a certain percentage of the music that is always learnt by ear because it never appears in the notation.

The great surprise comes when a classical musician, coming from a world where they write everything down, meets a folk musician. My daughter (tenor sax) looks at my snippets of sheet music while I practise and says "why, this is not what you play", and I say "yes it is". Some time ago, three classical violinists appeared at our pub session, laid sheet music on their table and started a set of reels - it sounded like Paganini with Parkinson's disease, and I'll never forget the expression of pity on everybody's faces.

Bottom line: there's reading and reading, depending on what purpose the music was written for.

[Coffeecup]

I use notation to remember tunes. I've been to many jams where I hear a tune that is new to me. I can by now learn it by ear, but as soon as I get home, (or back to the campsite or the hotel) I write it out in notation, to jam it in my brain and to have it for later. When at a jam where I haven't time to learn a tune by ear (it goes by too fast or I wasn't paying attention), my digital recording tune sucker gets it, and then back home I play that back and write the tune out.

That's the approach that I take, it works well for me. People have different learning preferences - if a visual learner can see a "picture" of the music it makes memorising it easier. Relating that to the original question; TAB might show the fingering but it doesn't give me a picture of the tune. Where I find TAB useful is in explaining specific fingering when various options are available. For example is it preferable to play part of a tune in first position or from the seventh fret?

[fishtownmike]

I'm ok with tab. i see no problem with someone learning this way. I have over the years used my ear, tab and standard notation to learn songs. Why not use all the tools available if it helps to make you a better player. I kinda think its snobbish to think whatever way you do it is the best way and only way it should be done. .

[Rob Gerety]

I kinda think its snobbish to think whatever way you do it is the best way and only way it should be done. .

This comment is uncalled for.

[Randy Smith]

If someone plays an unrecorded tune or a tune they've written, I tape the tune and then notate it while learning to play it. In a sense I have to learn a tune by ear in order to write it down. Perhaps I could do all of this with tablature, but I'd have a harder time trading mandolin tabs with fiddlers who don't read mando tab. I have learned tunes from mandolin tabs but am a lot more comfortable with notation.

Occasionally I'll learn a tune by ear and then write it down, but I'm being lazy about this. Sometimes if I've learned a tune by ear I put off writing it down and then just forget to do it.

What's handy about notating the tunes is that in just a few years, when I've forgotten a tune even exists, I can discover it again while thumbing through a notebook. I could also get out all the cassettes and find the tune that way, but looking through the notebooks is easier. It takes only a minute or two to rememorize the tune.

For me notation is a more convenient writing system than tablature is, and though I learn by ear as well as by notes, notation is a really helpful memory jog. And my memory needs to get to the YMCA these days.

[Rob Gerety]

What I have been doing is to make a short recording of the tune (or copy an existing one) and put it in a folder on my computer (or on my iPod). I just have to listen to the tune for a few bars and it always comes back.

[jimbob]

If it weren't for tabs, I wouldn't have been able to learn the banjo or the mandolin. I sucked at music theory and while I know both treble and bass clef from my piano and trombone days, I think tab is easier to learn from. I know that having a commanding knowledge of the instrument's fretboard would be best, I think tab is a good shortcut for many of us. I think someone said earlier, it's a good additional tool for learning.

[Ron Hale]

This comment is uncalled for.

I disagree. You conveniently left out the leading portion of his comment, which puts this phrase in proper context.
I think he hit the nail on the head.

Ronnie