I’m trying to learn ukelele. My fingers don’t have enough flexibility for guitar, due to arthritis, but the uke is a bit more friendly. There are two methods to learning to play the uke or any similar stringed instrument: learning the actual notes and the positions that apply to them, or learning tabs, which show you fingering positions and doesn’t require learning to read music. Each method has its proponents. My wife, self-taught on guitar, believes learning the notes is the best way to learn any instrument. (She says she has no idea how to read tabs.) But to me it seems that having to learn to read music just further complicates the whole process and takes the fun out of it.
So, for those of you who play uke, guitar, mandolin, dulcimer or anything like it, how did you learn to play?
I learned how to play electric guitar about 15 years ago. While I kinda know how to read sheet music, my instructor focused purely on tab notation, so that’s what I know, as far as playing guitar.
With something like a piano keyboard, it’s much easier to know what a particular note is due to the pattern of black and white keys, a pattern which repeats every octave. A stringed instrument is quite different.
Tab is a visual representation of the fingerboard, so it’s easier to transfer that visual information from page to instrument. With learning sheet music, one would need to learn sheet music and then essentially convert that in your mind into tablature or the visual representation of the fingerboard. So it adds an extra layer of complexity.
Plus, on a keyboard, there’s only one place on the instrument each note can be played. On something like a guitar, the same note can often be played at several locations on the instrument. Some locations might require fingerings that are impractical. Tab should show the best place on an instrument to play things.
Junior high school guitar class, the teacher used an overhead projector (if you remember these, yer much too old) to shine chord charts on the wall, then sat in front of the class on a very tall stool and played “Monkey see, monkey do,”-style. We would study the chord charts, effect our fingering and strum along (I think the first song was, “Lemon Tree,” by Peter, Paul and Almond Joy [ ], which everyone was familiar with – two chords, I believe). The first couple weeks were SLOOOW, but the method was highly effective IMHO. Not much theory at first, that came later. As my "ear " developed, I started learning songs by ear. Never learned to read Tab or sheet music well, at all. I drive my wife crazy just picking up songs out of the blue, she’s college music trained but can’t really pick up anything by ear. She’ll start to play a church hymn and I’ll yell from across the house That sounds like so-and-so tune! which earns me a big SHUT UP! Now I can’t un-hear that!, as I chuckle evilly.
Perhaps (as on a keyboard) the preferred fingering should be left up to the performer? Most guitar books for beginners that I have seen just use normal notes, with occasional annotations for left and/or right-hand fingering, position and barring, picking technique, expression and so on. If there are tabs they will be on an auxiliary staff below.
I think it is some older-school guitar and lute music that used things like French and Italian tablature.
I checked my Mandolin for Dummies book, and it is pretty similar.
Very bad self taught uke player here. Tablature is totally intuitive. Understanding notes would take a lot of time. If you’re a young person just learning, it would probably serve you well in the long run. Otherwise, tabs.
Yes, sometimes you will encounter chord diagrams, which are basically just an illustration of the fretboard and where your fingers are supposed to go.
The tabs are a form of music notation (common in the Renaissance and Baroque eras and sometimes today for certain genres. The difference to standard notation is, the tablature does not explicitly indicate pitch, it tells you where to put your fingers). If you use nothing at all, that is called “learning by ear”.
Self-taught so-so guitar player here, and I always used tablature or even just simple chord notation. I sort of have a vague understanding of sheet music, but as mentioned it would be much more difficult to learn a song on a stringed instrument from sheet music than from tab. I’m surprised your wife never learned tab— literally the newest newbie can understand how it works in 5 minutes. Getting your fingers to do what the tab shows is the hard part!
A couple tips: if you want to find tab for a certain song, google ‘[Song Name] tab’ and several hits will likely come up (depending on how well known the song is of course) with several different versions of tab. I don’t know if tab for guitar is transferable to tab for the uke, though. Anyway, of those several versions, test them all out since some will not be in the right key, or will be flat out wrong. The tab is written and posted by amateurs and the quality varies widely.
If you want song lyrics, most tablature does not include the lyrics, or just has a bit of the lyrics to show where song lines start in relation to the tab. It must be a legal copyright thing. If you want the lyrics as well, you can just look up the lyrics of course, or if you want lyrics and just want to know the chords for strumming, type ‘[Song Name] chords’. I do that a lot because I basically sing and strum along, campfire playing style, and just knowing the basic chords I can come up with my own fill notes and rhythm, and put my own spin on a song.
I took about a decade of piano lessons, starting when I was 7. I learned notes and music theory on the piano. When I was about ten I got a kid’s guitar, which came with an instructional book that I mostly ignored. The only thing I found useful in it was a chord chart. The book was based on notes, not tabs. The book didn’t even mention tabs at all.
My daughter plays the ukulele, and gave me one for Christmas last year. The only thing I did to learn how to play it was download a chord chart for it from the internet.
I did learn how to read guitar tabs at some point. So technically I can read notes or tabs, but I am very slow at either. I used to be able to sight-read on the piano, but I’ve lost a lot of that skill over the past few decades by not using it at all. I have never been able to sight read on the guitar, bass, or ukulele.
I played the trombone in school, so I am able to read music on that instrument.
Aside from the piano/keyboards and trombone, I mostly play by ear.
I bought an electronic drum kit a few months ago and I’m teaching myself how to play it, but again I’m learning by ear. I don’t even know what drum music looks like.
Those fake books with 1000s of songs are not really written for a particular instrument. I have one here which has the basic melody, harmony in the form of chord symbols plus guitar chord diagrams, no form of tabs though, and lyrics. A different book has no lyrics or diagrams, just melody with chords listed (Amaj7, C#7, etc.) You are supposed to figure out for yourself what to do with it, what spin to put on it.
Assuming we are talking about non-pitched drums, the different places indicate different voices like bass, snare, tom-tom, hi-hat, etc.
If you are just starting out, I’d say you should find a primer that shows you a few basic chord shapes that you can use to accompany songs and singers. So you can get some fun more or less from the start.
Four or five chords will allow you to cover a lot of songs.
It’s more important to be able to hear and find the right chords for a song than it is to worry about theory.
If you want to get more technical, I would definitely say learn notation. Tab is very limited and specific to particular instruments.
You can get away with those. But it’s handy to have E, A, D and Em too.
And as Paul McCartney once supposedly said, the Beatles went across town to learn the magic B7 chord from someone who Knew the Secret?
Hey everyone! Thanks so much for your thoughts and input. You’ve all given me valuable advice. Ultimately, I’d like to learn fingerstyle instead of only strumming chords, but I’m getting ahead of myself to even think about that at this point. I just want to progress at a steady pace and not become frustrated. (I’m learning chords but some of those are hard!) I’ve always had ADD and patience isn’t one of my virtues.
People sometimes think of the uke as a silly little instrument used as a prop (think Tiny Tim or Arthur Godfrey - if you remember either of those folks) but played by skilled musicians, like Mustafa Kamaliddin, Al Wood or the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, it can sound lovely.
There is zero reason to use sheet music to learn a uke or guitar. Nobody uses that anymore. I believe (I could be wrong here…) but string instruments are unique in that there are multiple fingerings that play the exact same note and pitch so tab makes it MUCH easier to see HOW something is played vs what the notes are.
Tab is the standard. All of the “sheet music” you see for guitar is autogenerated based on the tabs.
I think that’s correct for chords, but what about playing individual notes? When I learnt classical guitar, we used sheet music because we weren’t cording; we were playing individual notes. Haven’t done that for a long time, though, so I may be out to lunch.
Which is why I’m glad I learned piano first. Music theory made so much more sense if I could see the chords laid out: “Here’s the root, the third and the fifth…I get it now!”
But guitar (and mandolin and uke) makes so much more sense to me with tabs. Especially since the D chord in Twist and Shout might be the basic one, Stop This Train might add the F# on the bottom string, Hotel California might be an inversion, and Radioactive might use an A chord barred up five half-steps.
Tabs all the way. If you want to get into music theory and dive deeper, you can always start using music, but tab will get you there much faster.
I have a tenor uke (GCEA) and baritone (same as upper four strings of guitar - DGBE). They have the same chord shapes, just a fourth apart. I am a bass and guitar player, so I prefer the baritone but I can pick up the smaller version and play semi-competently just knowing the chord shapes.
], which everyone was familiar with – two chords, I believe). The first couple weeks were SLOOOW, but the method was highly effective IMHO. Not much theory at first, that came later. As my "ear " developed, I started learning songs by ear. Never learned to read Tab or sheet music well, at all. I drive my wife crazy just picking up songs out of the blue, she’s college music trained but can’t really pick up anything by ear. She’ll start to play a church hymn and I’ll yell from across the house That sounds like so-and-so tune! which earns me a big SHUT UP! Now I can’t un-hear that!, as I chuckle evilly.