4 ms·

> Can it? How do you learn a piece for which you only have a sheet? To be fair, guitar players seem to manage. I truly cannot understand how, though. Most guit

> Can it? How do you learn a piece for which you only have a sheet? To be fair, guitar players seem to manage. I truly cannot understand how, though. Most guitar tabs are oddly silent on the topic of what to do with your right hand, and yet everyone uses them.

zeroxfe 8y ago
This is because tablature is not meant to be sight-read. It's typically used to learn music that you've already heard. (Note that there are a few tab formats that have rhythmic elements in them, but they're not very comprehensive.)
hashkb 8y ago
Tab is a leaky abstraction and cannot be sight read. It exists because guitarists are notoriously lazy and/or because guitar is easy. That there is no piano tab, and that nearly all pianists become literate should be telling.
- retsibsi 8y ago
  > guitar is easy Is it? I'm musically stupid, so the fact that guitar is hard for me doesn't mean much. But isn't it truer and more relevant that guitar is a popular instrument for amateur and casual players, because a) it has a big role in popular music, and b) it's accessible, in the sense that guitars can be cheap and they don't require a lot of space? There are plenty of relatively easy guitar pieces (especially if you're satisfied with using the instrument as an accompaniment to singing, or playing single-note melodies as part of a band), but that's obviously true of the piano too, and likewise both instruments have plenty of complex and technically demanding pieces. I'm genuinely interested in being corrected, but as far as I can tell the physical technique is at least as hard, and the possible musical complexity is no different. Is there any sense in which the guitar is actually 'easier' than the piano?
  - hashkb 8y ago
    You're probably right about physical technique. As a lifetime guitarist, I'm certainly not going to disagree. But we're talking about notation. Guitarists avoid learning it (and invent crap like tab) because of the many true things people say below my original comment.
- thebricksta 8y ago
  Hey there, easy on the guitarists. Guitars, like other string instruments, have multiple ways to play each note. Depending on the note progression, hand position needs to slide up and down the neck of the guitar to ensure the necessary groups of notes are all easily reachable from the current position. Tablature solves this issue by telling guitar players where to place their hands. Orchestral sheet music involving stringed instrument parts often include both the standard staff and tablature. Of course, the simplicity of tabs also make it a great way for the community to spread knowledge. A simple tab can be written down in notepad in minutes and passed along freely, whereas sheet music requires specialized software and hours of time. This makes it very attractive to beginners who aren't looking to become professional musicians, but simply want to mimic what they hear on the radio for their friends. I can either sit you down at a piano for two years and teach you sheet music, or give you a few weeks and tabs. Will you be playing perfectly? Of course not - but you'll be enjoying yourself. Mind you, piano notes are already in a 1:1 correspondence with the staff, so hand placement is greatly simplified and tablature would be redundant. When the bar to musical literacy is to learn how to read a notation optimized for piano, it becomes a pointless question to ask why piano players achieve literacy.
  - davidmurdoch 8y ago
    > hand position needs to slide up and down the neck of the guitar to ensure the necessary groups of notes are all easily reachable from the current position. And not only that, but different positions of the same note have different harmonic volumes and other properties (especially on acoustic guitar).
  - furgooswft13 8y ago
    I agree mostly. Guitar is often easier to learn for a lot of the music people want to play, pop songs with simple chord progressions. Once you get your fingers in place, strumming in rhythm is pretty natural to most people. Bar chords (and their bastard stepchild power chords) make this even easier. Also the regular layout of the frets makes improvisation much easier as you just find the right starting point to whatever song you want to jam over, and start going up and down the same pentatonic scale pattern. Of course all this only gets you so far, but it's enough for a lot of teenage rockstar wannabes to have fun. No harm in that at all. By contrast most of the songs people seek to first play on the piano requires a much steeper hill to climb. Even Fur Elise can be very challenging to play at tempo for a beginner. Moonlight, while slow, still requires catching a lot of notes at once and reading a dense score with plenty of double sharps and what not (and God help you if you want to try the 3rd movement). Outside classical, it's much more difficult to get a good sound by just banging out chords, unlike strumming on a guitar. Some sort of separate melody and baseline is almost always expected on the piano. Now if you want to rip out some mad Eddie Van Halen solos or perform classical finger-picking songs then all bets are off. In fact I'd say mastering multiple melodies at once (some sort of counterpoint) on guitar is much more difficult than piano. And yes translating standard notation to guitar fingering is much more challenging, because it makes no sense for the guitar neck, and you have to know not just to hit say A3 but where on the neck it would be best to do that given your current position.
thebricksta 8y ago
I assume you are talking about finger-style guitar here. In that case, most beginner books are very strict about providing staff + tab marked up with right hand finger suggestions. As the player progresses (and depending on the style), right hand fingers may progress to simply being assigned a string, or whatever feels comfortable on that line. Individual differences in technique and style can shine here. If you are talking about picking, then that's simply a matter of picking the string. Both notations are adequate for annotating specific picking techniques. In my opinion, some muting techniques are a bit easier to read in tab notation.
- rimliu 8y ago
  Or it can be about strumming (which I think is the case).

zeroxfe 8y ago

This is because tablature is not meant to be sight-read. It's typically used to learn music that you've already heard. (Note that there are a few tab formats that have rhythmic elements in them, but they're not very comprehensive.)

hashkb 8y ago

Tab is a leaky abstraction and cannot be sight read. It exists because guitarists are notoriously lazy and/or because guitar is easy. That there is no piano tab, and that nearly all pianists become literate should be telling.

retsibsi 8y ago
> guitar is easy Is it? I'm musically stupid, so the fact that guitar is hard for me doesn't mean much. But isn't it truer and more relevant that guitar is a popular instrument for amateur and casual players, because a) it has a big role in popular music, and b) it's accessible, in the sense that guitars can be cheap and they don't require a lot of space? There are plenty of relatively easy guitar pieces (especially if you're satisfied with using the instrument as an accompaniment to singing, or playing single-note melodies as part of a band), but that's obviously true of the piano too, and likewise both instruments have plenty of complex and technically demanding pieces. I'm genuinely interested in being corrected, but as far as I can tell the physical technique is at least as hard, and the possible musical complexity is no different. Is there any sense in which the guitar is actually 'easier' than the piano?
- hashkb 8y ago
  You're probably right about physical technique. As a lifetime guitarist, I'm certainly not going to disagree. But we're talking about notation. Guitarists avoid learning it (and invent crap like tab) because of the many true things people say below my original comment.
thebricksta 8y ago
Hey there, easy on the guitarists. Guitars, like other string instruments, have multiple ways to play each note. Depending on the note progression, hand position needs to slide up and down the neck of the guitar to ensure the necessary groups of notes are all easily reachable from the current position. Tablature solves this issue by telling guitar players where to place their hands. Orchestral sheet music involving stringed instrument parts often include both the standard staff and tablature. Of course, the simplicity of tabs also make it a great way for the community to spread knowledge. A simple tab can be written down in notepad in minutes and passed along freely, whereas sheet music requires specialized software and hours of time. This makes it very attractive to beginners who aren't looking to become professional musicians, but simply want to mimic what they hear on the radio for their friends. I can either sit you down at a piano for two years and teach you sheet music, or give you a few weeks and tabs. Will you be playing perfectly? Of course not - but you'll be enjoying yourself. Mind you, piano notes are already in a 1:1 correspondence with the staff, so hand placement is greatly simplified and tablature would be redundant. When the bar to musical literacy is to learn how to read a notation optimized for piano, it becomes a pointless question to ask why piano players achieve literacy.
- davidmurdoch 8y ago
  > hand position needs to slide up and down the neck of the guitar to ensure the necessary groups of notes are all easily reachable from the current position. And not only that, but different positions of the same note have different harmonic volumes and other properties (especially on acoustic guitar).
- furgooswft13 8y ago
  I agree mostly. Guitar is often easier to learn for a lot of the music people want to play, pop songs with simple chord progressions. Once you get your fingers in place, strumming in rhythm is pretty natural to most people. Bar chords (and their bastard stepchild power chords) make this even easier. Also the regular layout of the frets makes improvisation much easier as you just find the right starting point to whatever song you want to jam over, and start going up and down the same pentatonic scale pattern. Of course all this only gets you so far, but it's enough for a lot of teenage rockstar wannabes to have fun. No harm in that at all. By contrast most of the songs people seek to first play on the piano requires a much steeper hill to climb. Even Fur Elise can be very challenging to play at tempo for a beginner. Moonlight, while slow, still requires catching a lot of notes at once and reading a dense score with plenty of double sharps and what not (and God help you if you want to try the 3rd movement). Outside classical, it's much more difficult to get a good sound by just banging out chords, unlike strumming on a guitar. Some sort of separate melody and baseline is almost always expected on the piano. Now if you want to rip out some mad Eddie Van Halen solos or perform classical finger-picking songs then all bets are off. In fact I'd say mastering multiple melodies at once (some sort of counterpoint) on guitar is much more difficult than piano. And yes translating standard notation to guitar fingering is much more challenging, because it makes no sense for the guitar neck, and you have to know not just to hit say A3 but where on the neck it would be best to do that given your current position.

thebricksta 8y ago

I assume you are talking about finger-style guitar here. In that case, most beginner books are very strict about providing staff + tab marked up with right hand finger suggestions. As the player progresses (and depending on the style), right hand fingers may progress to simply being assigned a string, or whatever feels comfortable on that line. Individual differences in technique and style can shine here. If you are talking about picking, then that's simply a matter of picking the string. Both notations are adequate for annotating specific picking techniques. In my opinion, some muting techniques are a bit easier to read in tab notation.

rimliu 8y ago
Or it can be about strumming (which I think is the case).