I have played piano and guitar (piano for almost my entire life and guitar for several years) and have used both tabular sheet music and traditional sheet music.
Tabular sheet music is much easier to read initially as it provides a one to one mapping between the visual representation and the physical location of the notes - i.e. 5 frets along on this string. However, from my experience there is a cap on the 'bandwidth' at which you can sight read this. It is just too hard to mentally parse a bunch of numbers on lines and turn that into notes when playing at speed. (For non musicians, 'sight reading' means to read the notes and play fluently at the same time)
Traditional sheet music has a steeper learning curve, however, I've found that reading this music becomes much more subconscious with practice and the bandwidth at which you can parse the notes is much higher. Also, it is much easier to notice patterns in sheet music - i.e. a major 7th chord in the key of the song is visually obvious no matter what the key.
Tablature is a _physical description_ of how a particular stringed instrument should be played, and the notes are a side effect of that. It is instrument specific and it doesn't contain much information about the musical details of the piece.
For example, tablature doesn't describe the key the piece is to be played in. To figure that out, you have to mentally translate the mechanical description into notes, and from there determine the key.
Standard notation is a _musical description_ of how a particular song should be played, and the physical act of playing is a side effect of that. It is not instrument specific, and it contains a lot of information about the musical details of the piece, but usually no information at all about how a the instrument should be played. (There are a few minor exceptions.)
For example, standard notation tells you exactly the key the piece is in, but the player has to mentally translate the notes into the physical steps of getting that note out of the piece.
Basically standard notation adds a layer of indirection from the music to the mechanical act of playing. Like many indirections, it can be hard to understand at first, but has adds great power and flexibility that a direct system doesn't have.
What you're saying makes sense, but it applies oppositely too in that tab is non-physical and notation very physical. Example, if you see a scale in musical notation, it's immediately obvious that it's a scale just from a 50 millisecond glance, whereas in tab it's not obvious that it's a scale until you read/play through it.
When you become adept with musical notation, this is one of the primary hindrances of tab.
Tablature is also needed because the same note can be played on different strings, notes can be doubled, there are different ways to transition from one way to another, and there are various other nuances that are messy at best to try to express in standard notation.
another feature/side effect is that you can use any instrument to play any part of a written piece, as long as it's physically possible to play the notes as written. and if not - you can improvise easily by dropping superfluous or unnecessary components/notes without changing the overall sound of the music.
Another side effect is that as a guitar player you can look at the tuba player's part to figure out what he is playing even if you have no idea how to play tuba, if you read music. With tablature only a guitar player will know what you are playing.
> However, from my experience there is a cap on the 'bandwidth' at which you can sight read this. It is just too hard to mentally parse a bunch of numbers on lines and turn that into notes when playing at speed. (For non musicians, 'sight reading' means to read the notes and play fluently at the same time)
I've noticed this as well and my team has developed a notation based of key/scale and a new user interface for the guitar so that experienced players and beginners can sight read on their first attempt at a new song.
We reduced the cognitive load of sight reading music, not only that, we then back fill technique like chord fingering where we introduce traditional chords one at a time, here is a series of three videos of what I'm talking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXpTGIzBONU&list=PLvoNIaPTga...
> However, from my experience there is a cap on the 'bandwidth' at which you can sight read this. It is just too hard to mentally parse a bunch of numbers on lines and turn that into notes when playing at speed. (For non musicians, 'sight reading' means to read the notes and play fluently at the same time)
Sorry but this is wrong IMO. You've been reading sheet music your entire life, but you've only been reading tab for the past few years.
I've been reading tab for 10 years. I think in tab. There are a bunch of songs that I can't be bothered learning (sultans of swing, metallica songs+solos, oasis songs.. you get the idea) because I don't like them enough but are fun to play along with, and I do so with Guitar Pro playing the tab at full speed. It's basically like rocksmith/guitar hero but in "real life" mode.
I started with tab and learned to read music 15 years later. I was amazed at the vast amount of information in sheet music.
Tab is great for messing around, beginners or simple songs. I can't even imagine trying to learn to play complex jazz or classical music using tab. Sheet music also guides you right into learning scales and intervals.
Tab is great for playing guitar hero but, even on a real guitar, it's like pressing buttons. It doesn't help you learn much at all. I'll never go back to using tab even though I can visualize it easily in my head.
I wonder if you had been a guitar + tablature player your entire life and picked up piano a few years ago, if you would come to the same conclusion.
I've tried learning guitar a few times and when I've asked accomplished players how they get by with tabs, it's been explained as tab music establishes a minimal framework that you play within. It's a lossy compression scheme (and traditional sheet music is less lossy). Would you agree with that?
>I wonder if you had been a guitar + tablature player your entire life and picked up piano a few years ago, if you would come to the same conclusion.
I was a tab-reading guitar player for years, then learned classical notation. Classical notation is undoubtedly faster to parse. For whatever reason, there seems to be a much more direct connection between your eyes and hands when you're reading dots.
It seems to be much more amenable to chunking[1] - you stop seeing individual notes and start seeing chords and scale fragments. Tab is a meaningful and direct representation of the physical parameters of the guitar fretboard, which I think is a shortcoming; classical notation represents information in a way that more directly corresponds with musical theory.
Tab is lossy, but it discards some very important information. Unlike classical notation, it has no native means of indicating note length and can't accurately represent rhythmic subdivisions. If a piece of music has any real rhythmic complexity, tab alone is insufficient.
I think most guitarists (including me) use tabulature as a loose framework to extemporize around rather than as an exact transcription. You can find lots of youtube videos of people playing exact versions of old favorites (stairway to heaven for example) but they are usually the musical equivalent of painting by numbers, lacking feel.
Jazz musicians typically learn the changes (chords and melody line) to tunes and improvise around that from a sophisticated understanding of harmony, a variation on the tab approach.
Sight reading music, especially for guitarists, is more akin to tightrope walking in my opinion but typically a combination of tablature, staves and chord changes gets me to where I need to be
Tab is LESS lossy than traditional sheet music because it encodes the string as well as the pitch.
A given note could be played in as many as 5 different places, and they will ALL sound different. An open A (5th string) will sound different than the same A played on the low E string, 5th fret.
(This is completely unrelated to the woeful quality of most of the tab floating around on the net. You can write down a piss-poor transcription as sheet music too.)
Tab is terrible at conveying rythmic information, playing anything moderately complex is very hard unless you're already familiar with the material. And I'd say it's a very lossy format if it's reliant on out of band information like a recording to make sense.
Fingering is a problem that mostly goes away as you gain an innate sense of what sounds good versus economy of movement and the ability to mute. For music written on guitar, it's usually relatively easy to tell what position works best.
Every guitar is different, too. String gauges, pickups, resonant notes, action height and intonation all play into it, and most of those are subject to personal preferences.
> Tab is LESS lossy than traditional sheet music because it encodes the string as well as the pitch.
But it doesn't encode the note type, right? All the tab books I've bought don't differentiate between whole notes, quarter notes, etc... So that seems pretty lossy. Look at any guitar fake book for an example.
Plus, I never looked at tablature as a literal transcription. That's why I would describe it as a more of a framework. Like you say, a note can be played in a lot of different places. Once you internalize the fretboard logic, when you see an A in the tab, you play the one you think will sound right or is physically accessible.
A lot of the nicer tablature is in a hybrid format that borrows symbols from standard notation, like attaching stems and flags and dots to notes as appropriate to make the rhythm explicit.
Tabular sheet music is much easier to read initially as it provides a one to one mapping between the visual representation and the physical location of the notes - i.e. 5 frets along on this string. However, from my experience there is a cap on the 'bandwidth' at which you can sight read this. It is just too hard to mentally parse a bunch of numbers on lines and turn that into notes when playing at speed. (For non musicians, 'sight reading' means to read the notes and play fluently at the same time)
Traditional sheet music has a steeper learning curve, however, I've found that reading this music becomes much more subconscious with practice and the bandwidth at which you can parse the notes is much higher. Also, it is much easier to notice patterns in sheet music - i.e. a major 7th chord in the key of the song is visually obvious no matter what the key.