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There’s a great many times where proper music notation is much better for the task at hand than tab. And that’s great. But tab definitely has its place and not just for people who ‘cant be bothered’ to learn how to read music.
As a wider point, ‘we’ve always done it that way’ is rarely a good argument for doing something in an illogical way.
Seriously: If you value it, take/fetch it yourself
Seriously: If you value it, take/fetch it yourself
When I’m sat at home wanting to know how to play a riff I heard on the radio and be playing it two minutes later....it’s hard to beat tab....assuming it’s correct
Conversely, tab is very convenient and quick and easy to learn (and I get the impression that there is a small amount of snobbery, not necessarily amongst those here, about this from those who don't approve of it) but there is a lot of stuff it doesn't have, most importantly the rhythm, note lengths and so on.
I understand music notation but I am not a "sight reader". But I appreciate the information it gives and for this reason I like to have both. If you are given tab alone you really need to hear it or be familiar with the song. But if you are given the standard notation too you can figure that out for yourself. Someone above said that tab is for music you know and standard notation is for music you don't know. I agree, although tab can be useful for those things you don't know to tell you where to play it on the fretboard.
Over the past 20+ years I've mainly read other peoples tab and almost never written down any notation, just read other peoples. If I've wanted to write a part down for myself, once I've worked out the part I tend to use tab as an aide memoir as I commit it to memory.
But I can do both (bully for me) so I have a choice. Violinists don't. Nor do most guitarists.
Seriously: If you value it, take/fetch it yourself
I'm not locked in here with you, you are locked in here with me.
Lets consider TOTP in it's heyday. The MU insisted on a live band and so video tape was the rarity unless a big star was No 1 and otherwise indisposed. So an American singer would fly across the pond with a file full of scores and at the BBC TOTP studios a bunch of fat balding talent (some of the blokes were dire looking too) would reproduce a hit single live that had taken days to produce in the original recording. Revisit some of those TOTP performances with a solo singer on stage and then listen to the single. Thats the power of musical notation.
I've heard first hand tales of these BBC session guys with the Telegraph/sun on one side of the music stand and the score on the owther. They could read from one to the other seemingly without difficulty. The Musical Director would count them in, they'd play, back to the newspaper until the next call.
I remember when I started gigging clubs in a covers band and the evenings Caberet turn would hand out sheet music for accompanyment (this still happened regularly in the 70s). I was buggered without a chord sheet and had to follow the keyboard player and listen for the changes while the turn battled on in spite of me. Since those days there have been fewer instances where as a guitarist being a reader would have helped, but also I wasn't offered the working situations where being a reader would have earned me money and respect (like it did for others). It's also probable that my playing suffered because of it and still does.
I'm a huge fan of the late Tommy Tedesco, legendary session guitarist who was alleged to be such a good sight reader he could read fly s#it. Tommy tells stories of being a poker player but also approaching his playing like that. Others would struggle with a complex piece and swear/bluster/apologise everytime they got something wrong. Tommy would bluff it and stay straight faced, by the time the orchestra had done 3 run throughs he had it down well enough and anyway he ensured the timing was as written and if some incidental notes weren't in there it went unnoticed by almost everyone, I think TT said he was picked up on it twice in his extensive succesful career. It is worth noting that Tommy is probably to this day the most recorded guitarist ever and he didn't take guitar seriously until in his mid 20s when he decided to stop working in an aircraft factory warehouse and learn the instrument and musical notation.
I should say 'I can't sight read' very well at all, but give me the part to take it away and come back tomorrow to play it for you (probably, but my playing styles are a bit limited). Conversly back in the day a single would be released hang about the chart for a couple of months and fade before a score was ever published, so being able to listen to and record Radio Luxombourg chart Sunday eve and learn the latest hits by ear was a skill very useful to me. But unless you are only ever going to play one small genre of music until it goes out of fashion, then the skill is worth aquiring imho. It opens doors to oportunities in life that you might not have envisioned so looking back I regret not having learned at an early age. I might still do it when I'm retired in a few years.
I'm not locked in here with you, you are locked in here with me.
Music is supposed to be fun, for most people anyway, and because the electric guitar is such a seductive thing there just has to be a quick and easy way to get the message across.
But I don't think there's an argument for developing tab, if you get to the stage where you feel you need to move on then it's time to put in some work and learn the common language that other musicians use.
I wish I had kept up with my sight reading, it's all very well to cite Paul McCartney, Johnny Marr, and many others as examples of successful musicians who never learned to read notation, but these are all people with a rare natural intuitive talent. The rest of us have to work at it.
You're right to say it hasn't developed, it's actually regressed, but as others have stated, it's used for very different purposes these days.
I and fellow lutenists used to share music which was almost exclusively written in tab and which we'd never heard before, it does work.