Question:
I have been playing the guitar for about three months now and I really need some solid advice! I have started to learn how to read sheet music in notation format and ow to form scales and very basic chords. After recently getting onto the internet I have found that tablature seems to be the popular thing. Do the semi - professionals read tablature or notation or both....very confused!
Answer:
Sight-reading standard notation for guitar is extremely hard, compared to most other instruments. In the first place It's a contrapuntal instrument where almost all others are single-line only. Keyboards are contrapuntal, but there's only one place to hit a given note on a keyboard, while there may be two, three, or even four places to play the same note on the guitar. When writing stuff down, I use both standard notation and tab, in parallel. The notation line shows the notes' time-values (very hard to show in tab); the tab is a record of the fingering decisions I made when figuring out how to play a given passage (very hard to show in standard notation.) The more I look at the tab available on the net the less I'm impressed by it. Most tab files aren't even tab, really -- usually only the song's characteristic riff is tabbed out, and only chords are given for the rest of the song. Sometimes an attempt is made to tab out a solo, almost always wrong. If there's something I REALLY want to learn I go ahead and buy a published music book, which will have correct standard notation above correct tab for the whole song. Worth the price, IMHO. Don't let the sneers of music snobs embarass you about using tablature. There's vast amounts of gorgeous renaissance lute music that exists *only* as lute tab, except for that small portion that has been transcribed into guitar notation by later hands (a fundamental failure of taste, this, since the guitar sounds no more like a lute than instant coffee tastes like coffee.)
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