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It's interesting how staunchly people will defend "standard Western musical notation" but I agree with you - from a design point of view it looks like notation

by zik 7y ago

It's interesting how staunchly people will defend "standard Western musical notation" but I agree with you - from a design point of view it looks like notation originally designed to match a piano keyboard which has then had many years of extra features inelegantly bolted on to it. It works well enough for the keys of C or Am but gets progressively more ridiculous the further you depart from those keys. And transposition is a mess. Some people seem to think that standard musical notation is "right" and you can't possibly have any alternative notation and yet this is clearly false. There are at least two or three alternative forms of musical notation in wide use today. Most guitarists use tablature notation because it's better suited to that instrument - standard musical notation is less useful on guitar since it doesn't clearly capture the different ways that a single chord can be played. So it makes sense to have a special notation for that instrument. Secondly chord charts are used by musicians everywhere because they're very concise at conveying the chord structure of music and often that's all the information you need. Standard notation is just way too much information in that case. The third, less commonly seen form of musical notation is just like the one you've described. It's seen in video games like SingStar[1] and in modern music composition software such as Ableton Live[2] and others. It's used so often in music composition software because as you've noted it's very intuitive and far less cumbersome than standard musical notation. Transpositions become trivial and everything just makes more sense. [1] https://www.gamesmen.com.au/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/s/i/singstar_celebration_screenshot_5_.jpg https://www.gamesmen.com.au/media/catalog/product/cache/1/im... [2] http://whereisdarran.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Screen-Shot-2014-02-13-at-6.50.21-AM.png http://whereisdarran.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Screen-S...

0815test 7y ago
> It works well enough for the keys of C or Am but gets progressively more ridiculous the further you depart from those keys. If you're in something other than C or Am, you're supposed to use key signatures to point that out and clean up the notation. C/Am is just the default. "Standard musical notation is ambiguous when used on guitar", actually it isn't if you mark strings and fingerings as needed. This is widespread practice, each instrument has its own "tweaks" on the basic system. Standard notation in particular is quite hard to work with on guitar, and one can see why so many people just rely on tablature - but ambiguous it's not. Chord charts may be "concise" but they don't actually convey harmonic structure very well, not least because of the multitude of informal conventions and the ambiguity that these create; figured bass notation (while admittedly not very well known) does a far better job of it overall. For example, "walking" bass lines become immediately apparent in thoroughbass.
- zik 7y ago
  My point was that these notations exist for a purpose and are popular. They do and they are. Why would tablature be so popular on guitar if standard musical was overwhelmingly better? Tablature is intuitive, expressive and concise when used with guitars. Just as standard musical notation has its strengths so does tablature. Ok, tablature's poor at expressing rhythm but standard musical notation's terrible for transposition. So they're all just different tools with different strengths.
  - 0815test 7y ago
    The one thing that "standard notation is overwhelmingly better" at is notating music, and making it understandable as such. Some people care about this enough that they'll put in the effort to use standard notation even on guitar; some just want to focus on how each specific piece should be played on the instrument, for which tab is quite optimal. It's even quite common to have a format where both are notated, on separate staves. (For that matter, standard musical notation is not even that terrible for transposition once you understand how key signatures work, via the cycle of fifths. It's a bit tedious, but it absolutely can be done; one can even learn to transpose directly on sight. And good tablature notation will of course include accurate info about rhythm, there are quite easy ways of doing this.)
  - hamiltonkibbe 7y ago
    I’d argue that tablature is terrible for transposition as well in most cases, sure you can just +/- N semitones from each fingering in the ideal case but that breaks down as soon as you have voicings or melodies with open strings and need to transpose down e.g. a half step. Capo at 11 gives a very different character.
- romwell 7y ago
  >actually it isn't if you mark strings and fingerings as needed You mean, if you add tablature above each chord (or, effectively, transcribe that information via numbers, etc)? :) When the parent said standard notation, he meant the one without this augmentation, for which it wasn't quite optimized. >Standard notation in particular is quite hard to work with on guitar That's the point - that it's not the use case the notation primarily was designed for. Guess we all agree here, don't we?

by zik 7y ago

0815test 7y ago

> It works well enough for the keys of C or Am but gets progressively more ridiculous the further you depart from those keys. If you're in something other than C or Am, you're supposed to use key signatures to point that out and clean up the notation. C/Am is just the default. "Standard musical notation is ambiguous when used on guitar", actually it isn't if you mark strings and fingerings as needed. This is widespread practice, each instrument has its own "tweaks" on the basic system. Standard notation in particular is quite hard to work with on guitar, and one can see why so many people just rely on tablature - but ambiguous it's not. Chord charts may be "concise" but they don't actually convey harmonic structure very well, not least because of the multitude of informal conventions and the ambiguity that these create; figured bass notation (while admittedly not very well known) does a far better job of it overall. For example, "walking" bass lines become immediately apparent in thoroughbass.

zik 7y ago
My point was that these notations exist for a purpose and are popular. They do and they are. Why would tablature be so popular on guitar if standard musical was overwhelmingly better? Tablature is intuitive, expressive and concise when used with guitars. Just as standard musical notation has its strengths so does tablature. Ok, tablature's poor at expressing rhythm but standard musical notation's terrible for transposition. So they're all just different tools with different strengths.
- 0815test 7y ago
  The one thing that "standard notation is overwhelmingly better" at is notating music, and making it understandable as such. Some people care about this enough that they'll put in the effort to use standard notation even on guitar; some just want to focus on how each specific piece should be played on the instrument, for which tab is quite optimal. It's even quite common to have a format where both are notated, on separate staves. (For that matter, standard musical notation is not even that terrible for transposition once you understand how key signatures work, via the cycle of fifths. It's a bit tedious, but it absolutely can be done; one can even learn to transpose directly on sight. And good tablature notation will of course include accurate info about rhythm, there are quite easy ways of doing this.)
- hamiltonkibbe 7y ago
  I’d argue that tablature is terrible for transposition as well in most cases, sure you can just +/- N semitones from each fingering in the ideal case but that breaks down as soon as you have voicings or melodies with open strings and need to transpose down e.g. a half step. Capo at 11 gives a very different character.
romwell 7y ago
>actually it isn't if you mark strings and fingerings as needed You mean, if you add tablature above each chord (or, effectively, transcribe that information via numbers, etc)? :) When the parent said standard notation, he meant the one without this augmentation, for which it wasn't quite optimized. >Standard notation in particular is quite hard to work with on guitar That's the point - that it's not the use case the notation primarily was designed for. Guess we all agree here, don't we?