Tabs and sheet music versus ear and feel

[metropolis_4]

There are so many things humans have invented to save time, and tabs are one of them. They're simply a way of notating how music is played, but only for guitar. I see nothing wrong with not being able to read standard notation, as long as tabs exist.

I see nothing wrong with it either as long as it's not hindering what you want to accomplish as a musician. I am glad I can read SN though because the ability to do so is required for the type of work I most love to do as a musician. I wouldn't be able to do what I love today without the ability to read SN.

Tab is really just a different language, and it only really saves time if you've spent more time learning to read it than learning to read SN. It's sort of like if I were a native Italian speaker and I was trying to read something in Japanese it would be more difficult and I would read much slower. It would save me a lot of time to just read it in Italian. But if I were a native Japanese speaker it would be far easier for me to read it in Japanese.

It's all because of what we've spent our time practicing and learning. I know many musicians who can read SN as effortlessly and simply as if they were reading a childrens book. For them tab would take more time and be more complicated to read.

 

[Eagle]

You need to use your ears and read music, no verses here. Almost as stupid as "bend verses slides".
Here's a classic for you;

How do you stop a guitarist playing?
"Put sheet music in front of him/her."

 

[AFKAEjay]

There are so many things humans have invented to save time, and tabs are one of them. They're simply a way of notating how music is played, but only for guitar. I see nothing wrong with not being able to read standard notation, as long as tabs exist.

It's like, in my field, the old argument of whether a carpenter should know how to read a framing square in order to cut rafters. The goal is getting the roof framed in as short a time as possible, and if that means using a calculator to provide the necessary info to get the job done, I'm fine with that. Plus, it moves a tradesman through the ranks faster. Granted, if your calculator breaks, you can't do the job, but that argument applies to so many things these days, of which there's always a temporary work-around, so it really isn't a good one.

At the end of the day, it's just a communication tool, of which, imo, we have better ones for guitar. EVH couldn't read music, and we all see how that turned out.

In my mind the only good usecase for tabs is when specific fingering is important.
all else….what seems to be “the fastest” way…is really a method that draws you to handle the guitar like a typewriter you push buttons on in the right order.

it should be about creating sounds that have a certain value within the musical context. (Boils down to do/re/me/fa/so)
Standerd notation forces you to at least know the notenames, find them on the neck. Hopefully you are aware of the degree the note is within in the key. That trains your ear for recognizing those degrees…and therefore your ability to improvise.

Tabs…one of the worst thing that happened to guitar education…I say burn them all ;-)