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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 wa
by 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 agoThe 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 agoI’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.