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.
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?