Tab vs. Notation
Is Tab Ruining Guitar Education?
In the past few decades tablature has become a dominant method of conveying written guitar music. To some guitarists it's a huge innovation, a simple way to show put musical ideas on paper without the complexity of learning to read classical notation. To others it's a step away from all that is good in classical music education. Recently I participated in a blog that discussed this question. The paragraphs that follow are the text of my entry in that blog edited for context.
Tab is neither evil nor good in my opinion, it’s just another way of representing the characteristics of a song in written form. Chord diagrams are another way of conveying musical information, shaped notes are another form (used mostly in singing during religious services) and classical notation which has great acceptance, especially in classical music. Each has their own characteristics, strengths and weaknesses.
Notation developed as a way to convey musical ideas in a time when there were no other ways of recording songs. If you wanted to hear a Stephen Foster song at the time of its composition you would have to either hear it played by an orchestra (which used a notated score) or buy the sheet music and take it home and play it for yourself. Notation in its best form conveys a great deal of information about a song and can even contain guidance for volume, changes in tempo and feel, along with all of the information to plot the timing and pitch of every note sounded in the song. I see written notation as being very similar to a computer program in that it can be thought of as a list of instructions, all of which take place at a specific time. I’ve both transcribed music and written computer programs and I believe that the two skills are almost identical and operate upon the same principles.
While classical music education demands reading as an essential skill it is not strictly necessary to read music in order to understand music. Two of my favorite guitarists did not read, Django Reinhardt and Wes Montgomery. One of my favorite Jazz bassists is a fellow named Paul Warburton and even though he plays some very harmonically complex music he does not, to the best of my knowledge, read music. When Bill Evans decided to take up Jazz piano he had to go beyond his classical training and learn “how music works”, the interrelationship of harmony, melody and time. While his classical background gave him literacy on the subject and the discipline of classical technique gave him an advantage in putting his music onto the piano’s keyboard he could have played from manuscript forever without having to really understand music itself.
The advent of recorded music set in motion changes in how music was taught however and changed things however. Piano rolls may have been even more important that wax cylinders in the beginning but as recorded music evolved one thing stayed the same, musicians used recordings as a way to copy and learn new songs. Copying is not unique to recorded music, folk and Gypsy music was frequently taught by demonstrating the song to a student repeatedly until the student could play it from memory. Of course such a method has significant risk of the song becoming corrupted over time as it is passed from musician to musician all the while compounding its errors. While recorded music had some impact another development undermined to some extent the necessity of detailed arrangements written in notation.
Changes in Music Itself Lead to
Changes in Notation
By the mid 20th century amplification made smaller ensembles feasible and arrangements became less and less formal. When Charlie Parker’s “Scrapple the Apple” was notated the bridge consisted only of chord changes, there was no proper melody although many a player has copied Parker’s solo from the original recording. Reflecting upon that fact speaks volumes in my mind. A new way of conveying music had come into existence, a hybrid of notation, improvisation and possibly copying from a recording was called for if you wanted to play “Scrapple” and do it justice. At the same time Country, Blues and Rock & Roll all made use of the small ensemble concept relying upon parts that involved a degree of improvisation over a set song structure.
Soon after first learning to play guitar my father bought me sheet music and I learned to play songs I had never heard before by deciphering them from notation. I also noticed that I could learn to play pop songs that I was familiar with by reading the chord diagrams and playing the rhythm parts. This was in fact a hybrid of reading and playing by ear. Chord charts have been decried for years as the downfall of guitarists by some folks, persons that feel it lowers the bar too far and allows the uncommitted to play without investing the time to learn notation. Then tab came along and an entirely new generation of guitarists had yet another option that didn’t involve reading notes.
Predictably, tab has plenty of fans and plenty of critics. It is still relatively new as a generally accepted media and some examples I've seen seem to stray pretty far from the tab I’ve seen in commercially produced songbooks. For the most part I ignore tab but I have snuck an occasional peak when I was trying to discern the fingering for some particular passage. This actually points up one of tab’s greatest strengths, along with its greatest weakness, that fact that you are relying upon the interpretation of the person that wrote the tab. Tab has unveiled fingerings to me but it’s also shown me examples of fingerings that are poor practice at best, impossible at worst. The value of fingerings in tab is completely dependent upon the accuracy of the tab arrangement. There have been times that I’ve shaken my head in wonder at the misbegotten fingerings in tab that has crossed my path and I think that this is one of the greatest dangers of tab, it can spread bad technique like wildfire.
All forms of written out music are dependent upon the accuracy of the transcription. Even in classical notation mistakes are not unknown and commercially produced chord charts can be so bad that they ruin a song completely. These problems pale in comparison with some tab examples I’ve seen on the Internet. When Hal Leonard, Mel Bay or Cherry Lane Music publishes a song they have a reputation to protect and they will strive for accuracy. Such publishers also have a lot of experience and know the pitfalls of transcription; they are bound to have a pretty decent ratio of success to failure. When someone publishes a bit of tab on the Internet they may be trying to do good, but if they are less than completely accurate they can cause a lot of problems. More than once I’ve seen a good, accurate arrangement challenged because it didn’t agree with a bit of anonymous tab.
Another Path
A few years back I was practicing music along with a couple of friends. The grown daughter of one of them came by and wondered aloud why everyone in the room had chord charts and lyrics in front of them except me. I think I was more mystified by this than anyone else in the room; I had never given it any thought. The only answer that comes to mind is that after over four decades of playing I am like a chef that walks into a kitchen and makes a dish without once consulting a recipe. I’ve been playing for so long that creating a melody with an instrument is like creating a melody with my voice, I don’t know how I’m doing it; it’s as automatic as walking. Before I leave a false impression there is something I need to stress however, this didn’t come simply as a consequence of playing for many years, the ability to do this truly blossomed once I had studied the chords and scales of all 12 Major keys and their relative minors.
Playing scales, chords, triad inversions and arpeggios is some of the best training you can give your ears. Having this under your belt enhances your abilities to recognize what is musically correct and distinguish the ostensible from the profound. I think that this skill helps both in classical reading and in the use of more technique oriented methods such as tab and chord charts. Once I understood all 12 Major keys, their relative minors and the chord/scale relationships as they applied in each key the structure of songs began to make more sense. The flow of chord changes became much more logical and unusual chord progressions were easier to reconcile with the rules of harmony. Suddenly the logic of a song became apparent just like the workings of a mechanical clock would make sense to an experienced watchmaker.
Ultimately the ear is king; if music doesn’t please the ear there’s no reason to play. Indeed both reading and non reading musicians can end up playing a piece with no empathy yet be technically accurate. If I were to study the typing technique of a famous author and type exactly the sequence of keystrokes used to write a masterpiece I would not become an author, merely a typist. Likewise, some classical guitar is extremely complex and requires a great deal of practice to master but the players that make the piece their own sound best to my ear. Some players have taken sharp criticism because they have traded some authenticity away and gotten more feeling in return. My view of this is that we have to go back to the composer’s intentions and weigh the new interpretation against the way the composer played the piece if there is indeed a recording available. If not, one man’s interpretation of a given piece is as valid as the next.
