macashmack

Well, for learning all the notes on the guitar, reading notation is more beneficial than tab IMO.

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Modes and scales are intelligent and useful. Start learning them. Seriously.

food1010

True, but that's not the point. He did say guitarists should know standard notation as well, but tabs are more applicable for guitar (especially if they specify note duration).

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Hail

you shouldn't use either. your exercises should be within a musical context.

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Sleepy__Head

Depends what kind of guitar music you want to play.

You want to play Tárrega? Learn to read music.
You want to play AC/DC? Tab is your friend.
You want to play Hank Williams? Stick to chords.

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HotspurJr

You know what? I don't think even this is true.

Once you get good at guitar, tabs are incredibly tedious to use compared to notation. The advantage of tabs - the only advantage, really - is that tabs are designed for the way beginners and intermediates think about the guitar.

That's how beginners thing, really: playing guitar is about a series of finger positions. But that's not how good guitarists think about it. Good guitarists think about playing guitar as a series of sounds. The finger-position part is entirely subconscious.

And that's what notation does, that tab doesn't. A well-trained musician can look at notation and hear the sound of the piece in his head.

Yes, notes appear more than one place, but the question of where to play it is not really the sort of thing that good musicians worry about. If it matters, notation can, actually, incorporate that (yes - there are standards which indicate playing position for guitar!) but the simple truth is that when a guitarist is trying to "play what they hear" they don't worry so much about where their hand goes. They just play it. (And, strange as it sounds, yes, notation is really about playing what you hear - albiet in your head).

And if they decide they'd rather play it somewhere else, they play it somewhere else. Yes, there are differences in timbre between positions, but if you have the track to listen to, those will be obvious, and if you don't, why does it matter? (And really, even with tab that indicates timing, good luck playing it WITHOUT listening to it first. Can anybody do that? Can anybody site-read tab cold?)

Notation isn't terribly important for a guitarist, true. On the other hand, it's not like tab is!

Tab is a tool for beginners whose ear isn't well trained enough to play things they hear yet. Notation is a system for recording music on paper.

Sleepy__Head

Actually - sort of in support of your point - the reason it matters is that if you have a choice of playing a tune higher up the neck on a lower string, or lower down the neck on a higher string the higher string will tend to sound thinner than the lower string and you can use this to either add extra edge to something you're playing sul pont, or extra warmth to something you're playing dolce.

In the great guitar music -vs- tab debate there's also the matter of communicating with musicians who aren't guitarists (and no, I don't mean drummers*). Plonk some guitar tab in front of an oboe player and ask them to transpose the music to their instrument and they'll have the devil's own job doing it if they don't already play guitar. Give them guitar music in standard notation and they'll be able to do rather more easily.

People can sight-read standard notation cold - you're required to do that for your examinations. You'll probably make quite a few fluffs depending on your ability and the difficulty of the piece but on the whole you should be able to get through it. And the ability to sight-read like that is pretty-much taken for granted in orchestral musicians. My old teacher was of the opinion that - on the whole - guitarists are ****ing terrible sight-readers because they don't tend to play with musicians who aren't guitarists.



I'd question that. Both are systems for recording music on paper and there are numerous examples of different kinds of tablature - lute, harp, harmonica to name a handful. What tablature requires is that you know something about the instrument in order to be able to translate the written music into sound. Standard notation, OTOH, can be read by anyone who has learned it without having had to learn anything about the instrument the piece was written for. I have literally no idea how to play a flugelhorn, for example, but I can still read flugelhorn music written in standard notation and sing the tune to myself.

As for the 'where do I put my fingers when I'm reading music' debate: Initially you learn to put your fingers in the easiest places on the guitar (towards the nut end of the guitar); later you learn that some of those notes occur on other strings and that you have a choice about where to put your fingers. This can cause some confusion initially, especially when sight-reading, but when it comes to interpreting a piece and making it your own it gives you choices over timbre that are not possible on, for example, keyboard instruments.

* and no, I don't mean "drummers aren't musicians" either.

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diddyman99

Thats a great way of doing it! ^

technical death

I bought a few tab books which made me want to learn to recognize WHERE on the fretboard I was supposed to put my fingers. Looking back it seems silly...

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Sleepy__Head

If it's any consolation my guitar teacher told me 'learn the fretboard' for 7 years. Now I don't have a teacher I've spent a good 6 months learning the fretboard. How stupid do I feel.

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limescout

I don't think I ever intentionally set out to memorize note locations on the fretboard, it just came to me from playing experience. If you spend a lot of time sight-reading music, it will become automatic pretty quickly.

One thing that got me going when I first started was using distance away from notes I knew to figure out notes I didn't know yet. Like, if there was a piece where I had to play a D followed by an F#, and I already had my finger on the 5th fret A string, I would think, "Ok, f# is a major third up from D" and I would play the major third up, 4th fret D string. When I came across those notes enough, the next time I saw the F#, I wouldn't have to think of it a 3rd away, it had become muscle memory

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bondmorkret

A mixture of lots of different approaches really. Started with octaves and such, then memorised the notes, then applied different scale patterns across the neck, then consolidated the whole thing!

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D..W..

One thing that always helped me is to, when you come up with a riff, figure out the notes in that riff. For me memorizing in a scale is just tedious, so I used things that I would remember. This helped with ear training too (because then I knew that the third note in that riff was E. I knew the note and knew and what it sounded like in context, thus I could come closer to naming or singing the note when needed) I liked to write it out in sheet music afterwards but that's not really as important, was just kind of an exercise. I used a lot of refference points to figure out what the notes were- for example 7th fret on the A string is E (on any string except the B string the 7th fret is the octave of the string before it), thus two frets up would be F#. Eventually you don't even have to think about it.

Hail

i never said tablature is better, but 99% of guitar music won't have notation available, so if you want to have a way to learn it, you'd have to transcribe it yourself - and at that point, you already know it by ear, so you can hardly say you learned it by way of notation.

but that being said it's always better to transcribe anyway.

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