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Topic: The limitations of tab, my two cents |
Lane Gray
From:
Topeka, KS
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Posted 23 Aug 2014 1:33 am |
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In a PM exchange, I just had opportunity to throw together my thoughts, and compile them in a way that makes sense, at least to me¹.
I find tab alone inferior to tab and tape, since tab usually coveys little phrasing info BUT it's still useful
Anyway, here's the copy of what I'd sent:
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I understand where you're coming from re: tab. BUT if you look at tab as a way of learning new words/phrases/sentences that you then incorporate into your own vocabulary, it's helpful. After all, tab is no better than standard notation at conveying the emotions, but a skilled musician can take sterile notation and play with feeling.
As soon as you learn a piece from tab, or a Mickey Adams video, DELIBERATELY try to use the same lick to evoke (or portray: you don't have a lot of control over what a listener takes away) three different emotions. Tab can tell you WHAT to play; HOW you play it is up to you. |
If stuff you learn from tab sounds stiff or sterile, then you might not have developed your own ability to express emotions with sound yet, or you haven't yet gotten a good grip on it yet.
On the PLUS side, your ears and awareness have developed to the point of recognizing what's missing. That's a good step. If other licks of yours have expression, and only the new stuff from tab is wooden, I'd say you don't know the lick well enough yet.
I'd recommend going back to some of yjr earliest licks in your bag, and take what you know well, and deliberately use them to portray a different emotion.
In other words, tab is not the limiting factor, but rather you're accidentally limiting yourself.
If you learn your licks from Mickey or Herb or Newman, check to see if you're not limiting THOSE licks/phrases to the emotive context in which you learned them. They, too, can say something different.
¹I find it both helpful and rewarding to hone my thoughts by expressing them.
PS: if B0b or Joey thinks this shoulda been in Music, you can move it
_________________
2 pedal steels, a lapStrat, and an 8-string Dobro (and 3 ukes)
More amps than guitars, and not many effects |
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Donny Hinson
From:
Glen Burnie, Md. U.S.A.
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Posted 23 Aug 2014 3:09 am
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I think that using tab to learn or convey a nebulous or particularly difficult passage is fine. (I did that myself, once.) But, I do feel that learning and playing entire songs from tab is counter-productive. At some point, you should force youself to learn, experiment, and remember what you're doing, or you'll never develop even a basic understanding of what playing is all about. To me, it's not about the limited expressiveness or emotion that's capable with tab, it's about how it puts the blinders on really learning to play.
When something becomes an always-used crutch instead of an occasional aid, be it tab, a calculator, or even an electronic tuner, it's not a good thing. |
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Lane Gray
From:
Topeka, KS
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Posted 23 Aug 2014 3:39 am
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Donny, you could make the same point about standard notation. Once you learn how to play it, it's up to you to make it sing.
Even if you DO develop your ears so you can play what you hear on the radio, if you break an intro or ride into licks (which we ALL should be doing), if it comes out just like Lloyd played it, you're not really ahead of the game. Parroting Lloyd's (or Robert Randolph's) soul/emotive content might not serve the next song you play it in.
_________________
2 pedal steels, a lapStrat, and an 8-string Dobro (and 3 ukes)
More amps than guitars, and not many effects |
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Joachim Kettner
From:
Germany
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Posted 23 Aug 2014 5:43 am
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Like the line from the song "Loving Arms" saying something about "Freedom of my chains" I cling to tablature. Since I'm doing nothing musically with others at the moment and not to loose my interest in PSG completely, I work myself through Doug Jernigans "50 Hot Licks In C6th".
It's better than unispiered noodling, which I used to do.
_________________
Fender Kingman, Sierra Crown D-10, Evans Amplifier, Soup Cube. |
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Donny Hinson
From:
Glen Burnie, Md. U.S.A.
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Posted 23 Aug 2014 5:52 am
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| Lane Gray wrote: |
| Donny, you could make the same point about standard notation. Once you learn how to play it, it's up to you to make it sing. |
While that may true, it's still a fact that many thousands of professional musicians play use standard notation, but I know of none that regularly use tab. To me, that speaks volumes about it's real usefulness. |
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Alex Cattaneo
From:
Quebec, Canada
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Posted 23 Aug 2014 6:07 am
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There are two main uses for tablature for me. The first one is to be able to pass information to others quickly and clearly. Listening to someone dictate a passage takes forever, while with tabs I can see the whole thing right away, and clearly. With all the levers, knees, slides, etc, spoken explanations are brutally long, and I don't have that kind of patience. Plus, by the time you get to the end of the passage, it's unlikely you'll even know what's what, so you have to listen over and over again.
Secondly, I love tabs because I can come back to it later. I use them to write down ideas, remember solos I composed, transcriptions of recordings I like, etc. I've transcribed hundreds of licks from recordings, and there is no way I could remember all of them forever. Sometimes I run into a song, and I'll think, hey , there was this lick in song x that would be great here, so I can look it up. Same thing if a band wants to play a song I tabbed months or years ago.
I tab everything. Some of it makes it into my playing, some doesn't, but at least it will always be available to me should I need it. And it has nothing to do with "being a pro" or "pros using it" and what not. I never use tabs when I perform, and play 95% of my gigs strictly from memory. My two cents. |
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Lane Gray
From:
Topeka, KS
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Posted 23 Aug 2014 7:22 am
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I agree about people using it to avoid learning standard notation. We ALL should at least know what all them marks mean, although I don't think we all need to be able to sight read.
Standard notation IS the way most of the rest of the music world communicates.
I submit that in both tab and standard notation, it's up to the musicians to put heart in the music: it misses the point to say EITHER lacks heart: they both show what to play, how to play is up to us.
THAT was what I was trying to say.
_________________
2 pedal steels, a lapStrat, and an 8-string Dobro (and 3 ukes)
More amps than guitars, and not many effects |
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Lane Gray
From:
Topeka, KS
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Posted 23 Aug 2014 7:37 am
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Donny, there is one useful purpose for tabbing pedal steel not applicable to most other instruments: on the E9th neck, I can think of about 23 ways to play, for instance, the 440 A (sorry, I don't recall which octave that is), while a guitar will only have 3 or 4, since the D string might not have the frets, and the A string certainly won't.
Tab makes it clear which fret, string and active change.
We SHOULD all know SN, but on our critter, tab does make some sense
_________________
2 pedal steels, a lapStrat, and an 8-string Dobro (and 3 ukes)
More amps than guitars, and not many effects |
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Joachim Kettner
From:
Germany
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Posted 23 Aug 2014 8:18 am
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I know that there are no time signatures in tab, that's why standard notation is often written above it, at least Frank Freniere and some PSG courses do so.
PSG tablature is fairly simple to read, but when I look at standard guitar tablature that's another story. Using symbols like: hammer on, pull off, rake, slide, bend, release (I forgot the rest, I wonder if notation can make it explicit like that.
BTW, I've heard that tablature is also very old.
_________________
Fender Kingman, Sierra Crown D-10, Evans Amplifier, Soup Cube. |
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Tom Gorr
From:
Three Hills, Alberta
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Posted 23 Aug 2014 8:33 am
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Tab by itself doesn't reveal the flow of the musical passage, nor the interval relationships between the notes (they are implied).
Having played piano and six string guitar for the better part of my life, I'm inclined to believe the steel sits slightly closer to my understanding of piano than guitar, probably due to the higher note density within the open tuning compared to guitar and ability to play three and four part harmonies relatively easily. Piano and standard notation fit well together because there is a one to one relationship between the visual record and the keyboard. Obviously the one to many relationship between notation and fretted instruments is why it's more difficult to adopt.
I thought about guitar mostly in terms of the basic chord and scale shapes, whereas classical piano has a great deal more emphasis on scale variations, chord interval structure, etc. Eg more theoretical depth as is required learning imo for understanding the steel.
This said, viewpoints on tab, notation and ear are driven a lot by what our individual goals are. The most satisfaction I get out of steel is to execute ideas I hear in my head, so understanding of the scales and interval relationships are on equal footing with ear playing.
If playing covers in a gigging band were my priority, tab would be the most time efficient way of nailing the song specific licks the audience expects to hear.
My general sense however, is that tab always leaves me with the belief that I learned nothing of substance about steel guitar when I have used it. I really don't think counting frets and string numbers is educational.
Last edited by Tom Gorr on 23 Aug 2014 10:49 am; edited 1 time in total |
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John Billings
From:
Ohio, USA
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Posted 23 Aug 2014 9:57 am
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"I've heard that tablature is also very old."
Lutes used tab from around 1500, or perhaps earlier. |
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Alex Cattaneo
From:
Quebec, Canada
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Posted 23 Aug 2014 10:41 am
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A lot of people write tabs without any rhythmic markings, and I agree those are not very helpful, but if you include proper rhythmic notation, then you have a much better picture of what's going on. You can't look at Fred Amendola's tabs and say they're incomplete! Everything you need to know is there. If you don't know how to read music, well then of course it will seem incomplete. And I'm not saying reading music is a must, but it seems like it would be hard to fully appreciate the value of music notation if one is not familiar with it.
Tabs and/or standard notation are like maps. It's silly to say we should disregard maps because they don't provide the complete experience of what's it's like to actually be somewhere. If you want to know your way around a city, you of course have to experience it for yourself, but a map can be of great help because it shows you the big picture all at once.
Last edited by Alex Cattaneo on 23 Aug 2014 10:42 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Mike Perlowin
From:
Los Angeles CA
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Posted 23 Aug 2014 10:42 am
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I'd like to remind everybody that I wrote a short article about reading music on the E9 tuning, which I will give away for free to anybody who requests it.
My system is not quick and easy. It requires some real effort on the part of the person using it. But it does work. If you follow my instructions and study the things I talk about, you will learn how to read music, and how to apply it to the E9 neck, using the pedals.
Please send me an E-mail, instead of a PM, so I can attach the file to the reply.
_________________
Please visit my web site and Soundcloud page and listen to the music posted there.
http://www.mikeperlowin.com http://soundcloud.com/mike-perlowin |
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John Billings
From:
Ohio, USA
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Posted 23 Aug 2014 11:14 am
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| When I write tab, I write the timing , half notes, sixteenths, eight notes, etc,., on a line below the tab. |
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Herb Steiner
From:
Briarcliff TX 78669, pop. 2,064
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Posted 23 Aug 2014 11:59 am
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Tab isn't all things to all players, and is/was never considered, by me anyway, to be a musical education. It's educational only in that it instructs the player where the solo or riff is to be found on the fretboard. It doesn't answer the "why it's there" questions. That is left to the more curious or engaged player to discover for himself.
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_________________
My rig: Infinity and Telonics.
Son, we live in a world with walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with steel guitars. Who's gonna do it? You? You, Lt. Weinberg? |
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Stuart Legg
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Posted 23 Aug 2014 12:31 pm
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| They are great players and wonderful people all but the Icons of Steel Guitar come on here and call tab “painting by numbers” but the irony is they sell you a ton of it because they haven’t came up with anything better. |
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Niels Andrews
From:
Salinas, California, USA
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Posted 23 Aug 2014 12:33 pm
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Great thread gentlemen.
We are like blind men feeling the same elephant. I look at tab to see how someone played a passage. I think a proper NNS chart is the way to go. Some want to play it as lose to how somebody else played it. I want to play it better than anyone else played it. And the best part is I am the judge of that!  To me the real joy of playing the PSG has been learning Music Theory and reading music and NNS charts and then working on putting this knowledge to the instrument. Point is we all have different goals. Like Franklin said, we are all on a musical train, and we all get off at different stops.
_________________
Die with Memories. Not Dreams.
Good Stuff like Zum S-12, Wolfe Resoport
MSA SS-12, Telonics Combo. |
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Bo Legg
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Posted 23 Aug 2014 12:54 pm
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The tab has in resent years improved with the addition of PSG into the TablEdit software.
It includes notation and play along midi (follow the moving line note for note) along with the tab, a vast improvement over the early steel guitar tab.
You can download a free version to view and learn from this tab.
The irony here is that the folks who write all the crappy tab of the past don’t think the newbie worth the money to buy the TablEdit software nor the time it would take to learn how to use it.
It’s easier for them to change the name of their tab to a worksheet and not deal with it. |
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Lee Dassow
From:
Jefferson, Georgia USA
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Posted 23 Aug 2014 1:07 pm
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I might be a little off topic but,If your a beginner and just starting out reading music, a competent teacher will have you count time out loud and tap your foot. This is Imperative by the first four lessons. If your not counting time your going to have problems when you get into harder material. For instance Eighth note triplets,Eighth note flagged together with two sixteenths. I've had to many students come to me with timing problems. Children and adults. I know this, been doing this since 64. Now that doesn't mean that you cant learn to play by ear. There are many fine players that
don't read that can play the h\\\ out of an Instrument. I don't want to sound like I'm blowing
my own horn here. Just stating some facts. Tennessee Lee
_________________
2015 Mullen D-10 Royal Precision 9x8,-1990 BMI S-10 5x5-1972 Silver face Fender pro Reverb amp,-1965 Fender Super Reverb Amp,- 1966 Fender Showman Amp Two 15" JBL speakers,- 2006 65 Fender Twin Reverb reissue Amp,- 1982 Peavey Session 500 amp,-1978 Peavey Session 400,Goodrich Volume Pedals,John Pearse Steel Bars,
Last edited by Lee Dassow on 24 Aug 2014 7:25 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Alex Cattaneo
From:
Quebec, Canada
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Posted 23 Aug 2014 1:30 pm
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| Hi Niels, what does NNS stand for? Thanks! |
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Bo Legg
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Posted 23 Aug 2014 1:55 pm
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Why is it that tab is bad because it doesn’t capture the soul but every other method gets a pass on it.
Looks to me like Nashville Numbers has less soul than a box of rocks, so how is it better if the bench mark is soul. I think we’ve put tab on the train of unreasonable expectations.
Last edited by Bo Legg on 23 Aug 2014 1:55 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Niels Andrews
From:
Salinas, California, USA
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Posted 23 Aug 2014 1:55 pm
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For Alex the Nashville Number System. Once you learn a song you can play it in any key. Your root note is the one chord for the major scale, so the relative minor scale is based on the 6th note. Also referred as charting.
_________________
Die with Memories. Not Dreams.
Good Stuff like Zum S-12, Wolfe Resoport
MSA SS-12, Telonics Combo. |
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Lane Gray
From:
Topeka, KS
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Posted 23 Aug 2014 2:00 pm
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I'd like to + 1 all the calls for Standard Notation. I can't play off the page (my fault: I had YEARS of piano lessons inflicted on me from about 3rd grade on til about 8th or 9th), I know what all the marks mean, but it takes me forever to tease music off the page.
Then Herb said what I tried to say in my first post:
| Quote: |
| Tab isn't all things to all players, and is/was never considered, by me anyway, to be a musical education. It's educational only in that it instructs the player where the solo or riff is to be found on the fretboard. It doesn't answer the "why it's there" questions. That is left to the more curious or engaged player to discover for himself. |
THAT was the soul and heart of my top post, but Herb said it more concisely than I. And SN has the same lack. Although SN DOES have the tradition of giving some hints to the emotion one should play a passage with, so one could almost expect to see "Tristemente, come se il vostro cane è morto il giorno tua moglie ti ha lasciato"¹ at the start of the steel ride to "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" or "Con nostalgia malinconica" at the start of "Faded Love."
But it's STILL up to the player to figure out how to play ¹"mournfully, as if your dog died the day your wife left you" or ²"with wistful longing."
Whether you learn the notes by ear, off notation, from tab or by throwing darts at a picture of the neck of a steel guitar (not recommended), that last is ALWAYS up to us. And, unless you wanna haggle about whether one should put some tags as to the emotion of a ride/lick and what they should say. Given that 85% of what we play has lyrics, I'd say it's not needed: the lyrics of the last verse just TOLD you that, and in greater detail than any Italian phrase could do. If you can't play "Faded Love" while thinking "it was in the springtime that we said goodbye", either realize that you're kinda missing the whole point of playing music and you have some learning to do, or just sell your stuff and buy a record collection.
THAT, I think, was my point.
_________________
2 pedal steels, a lapStrat, and an 8-string Dobro (and 3 ukes)
More amps than guitars, and not many effects |
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Mike Perlowin
From:
Los Angeles CA
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Posted 23 Aug 2014 2:02 pm
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| Stuart Legg wrote: |
| They are great players and wonderful people all but the Icons of Steel Guitar come on here and call tab “painting by numbers” but the irony is they sell you a ton of it because they haven’t came up with anything better. |
Jimmie Crawford did. His Musim-tab system is IMHO the best tab system ever invented. It's really a shame it never caught on.
_________________
Please visit my web site and Soundcloud page and listen to the music posted there.
http://www.mikeperlowin.com http://soundcloud.com/mike-perlowin |
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Lane Gray
From:
Topeka, KS
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Posted 23 Aug 2014 2:20 pm
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| Bo Legg wrote: |
| Why is it that tab is bad because it doesn’t capture the soul but every other method gets a pass on it.(shouldn't that have been a "?") |
BINGO. Another, less wordy, way of what I was saying.
_________________
2 pedal steels, a lapStrat, and an 8-string Dobro (and 3 ukes)
More amps than guitars, and not many effects |
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