Kids these days just don’t get humour anymore.
I find this hard to believe—I have seen a lot of guitar music painstakingly engraved with attention to detail, e.g. Home · Matanya Ophee Collection · Digital Collections Omeka
Also, if something were to be “autogenerated” (and what auto-generation tech today does not result in unreadable crap?) based on the tabs, where would these tabs come from in the first place? Did we not hear from a few posters (eg @Musicat ?) whose job it was to transcribe music; I do not recall anything about tabs. It seems like it would be a lot more work to generate tabs, especially if one is not oneself a guitar virtuoso, knows all about weird tunings, etc than to notate the pitches.
I have Guitar for Dummies and Mandolin for Dummies and they absolutely use “sheet music” (aka standard notation). There is a tab staff indicating left-hand fingering, but it does not replace the main staff. I suppose in some cases it could be made to stand alone, but as it is especially the note durations are not easy to read (compare to lute tablature!)
If I remember right, from some of @Musicat 's posts, the transcription (which was in sheet music form, IIRC) was specifically for documenting the music for copyright purposes, not necessarily for purposes of publishing sheet music for use by other musicians.
Kenobi_65, you are mostly right. In my heyday of writing lead sheets and other musical tomfoolery, copyright was the most common use for a transcription. But lead sheets are valuable as a musical shorthand and guide for musicians of all types, and written music is the only practical thing to put in front of a string section if you want all of them to play together!
In the 1970’s, '80’s, I first ran across tab notation when a guitar player couldn’t find blank sheets of tab layout, and asked me to create a master image he could use to duplicate and use for sketches. I never learned much about the notation, since my focus was keyboards and orchestras.
IIRC, that was before computers could do graphics well, so I used Rapidograph and other technical pens on a drafting table.
Computers could do graphics just fine, but good computers and laser printers were not cheap in the 1970s. 1980s were a little better for the home user but, still, an IBM PC/AT cost the equivalent of $18000 today when it came out and a LaserWriter more like $20000. Leland Smith’s SCORE (1987 version) cost the equivalent of well over $2000 today [but was definitely widely used by a lot of publishers for computer engraving, including classical guitar stuff].
My guitar teacher was a smart guy. Had studied music in college and all that. I asked about music theory, as it seems like one should know the underpinnings of it all. He said “Sure, we can go into that if you like, but what is your goal? Are you wanting lessons to entertain yourself and maybe others or are you more interested in spending a lot of time listening to me lecture?”
You can learn to read tabs a lot faster than you can learn to read sheet music, IMO. Tabs are especially handy when you change to open tuning.
I think “music theory” is entertaining!
I am a struggling guitar player who has been taking lessons on and off for the last several years. Though I know what standard notation is (I can’t read it without a cumbersome effort), everything I’ve done since 2006 has been tabulature, both from instructors and numerous books. I can’t think of any limitations with it.
I had an abortive guitar learning experience in the early '80s and at that time I think that the books I had had standard notation.
For XOldiesJock, I don’t know exactly how a uke is similar or different from a guitar, outside the number of strings but one thing I really enjoy is just noodling off scales and improvising. I also have an acoustic bass and I really enjoy the same thing with that.
Learn the notes but your approach is wrong. it’s a pitch and rhythm graph. If you can read a map you can read music. The learning curve isn’t nearly as big as you think it is.
I only learned to play stringed instruments because i couldn’t find players that could read the notes. So I learned how to do it myself, and I was playing guitar on stage 2 weeks after I first picked it up, and no one could tell I weren’t a guitar player.
“We’re gettin’ old, Jake.”