Free Guitar Lesson on Guitar Tab Pros and Cons
Should Musicians Learn to Read Tabs for Guitar or Musical Notation?
Jun 14, 2009
Reading guitar tab has become so popular that many guitarists rarely run across guitar music written in standard notation. This popularity isn’t undeserved.
Guitar tab is an amazing tool for musicians who are teaching themselves to play, musicians who prefer to play by ear, and musicians who’d rather enjoy the fun of playing an instrument than take time to study reading sheet music. Still, tab does have its drawbacks as well.
What Is Guitar Tab?
Tabs are a popular way for guitarists to read and write music. The six lines of a staff written for guitar tab are a visual map of the guitar’s strings.
Guitar tab has six lines because a guitar has six strings. Tab for another string instrument will have a different staff based on the number of strings that instrument has. A staff written for banjo tab for example, will have five lines, and a staff for ukulele tab will only have four.
Numbers along the staff indicate the frets where guitarists should place their fingers. These along with a few tab symbols and letters are all guitarists need to know before tackling a song.
Pros of Learning to Read Guitar Tab
Because this means of transcribing music is so pictorial, it’s quick to learn and easy to sight read. Many musicians are intimidated by sheet music but completely comfortable with tab.
Secondly, because tab is so popular, almost any song a guitarist wants to play is just a few clicks away on the internet. Online tabs may differ slightly when it comes to a few symbols, and they’re not as clean or easy to read as tab in a music book, but they’re free and can certainly be a good starting point for learning a song.
Cons of Learning to Read Guitar Tab
One of the biggest drawbacks when it comes to figuring out a song written in tab is the lack of a way to demonstrate rhythm. Tab shows guitarists which chords and notes to play but gives no indication how long each should be aloud to resonate before playing the next.
Tab writers have experimented with ways around this fault. Some leave longer gaps where notes are held out and some use the stems of notes from sheet music on numbers to designate their length, but as of yet, there’s no standard solution. For this reason, most tab readers find it handy to be familiar with a recording of the song they want to learn before picking it out on their own.
Another drawback for beginning guitarists is the fact that tab shows which fret should be pressed, but not by which finger. For this reason, it’s a good idea to learn a core group of popular chords and practice the hand positions first. This way, guitarists will recognize the numbers forming a chord and automatically know where their fingers should go. Some tab is helpful in that chords are listed above the staff to aid in sight reading.
Another drawback stems from the fact that tab is so popular and written by just about everyone. Variations have crept into the notation and may be confusing to a beginner reading tab from several sources across the web. For this reason, some find it helpful to invest a few bucks in a songbook with common tab throughout to get them comfortable with the system.
Though guitar music written in standard notation addresses these drawbacks, it comes with its own set of limitations. Ultimately, guitar tab is an incredibly useful tool for guitarists. In a matter of minutes, it can open a world of songs from pop to folk or jazz to country.
If a musician’s goal is an education or career in the music field, he’ll need to branch out and learn to read sheet music at some point. If he’s content playing the guitar for his own personal pleasure though, tab may be all he’ll ever need. To get started, here are pointers for learning to read guitar tab and notes on the tab symbols that musicians will encounter.
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