Maybe 50 or 55 years ago, in music class in public school, we learned to sight read, a skill that I completely lost a few years later.
Now, as I’m learning guitar and doing a lot of improvising off of scales I’ve wondered about transcribing something cool to paper. This got me thinking about sight reading. Do people only sight read from standard notation or does anyone do it from guitar tabulature?
I sight read from tab, but it has its limitations. For one thing, you can’t notate the duration of a note. I find it most helpful if I’m already familiar with the melody.
I really wish I had learned to sight read from standard notation as a kid.
But I never had music lessons… we didn’t have a piano.
It’s probably one of those skills that are easier to learn when young, like other languages?
I can work things out from notation: I know the rules etc. But I can’t do it in real time, like a trained sight reader.
As for tab, to be honest I don’t find it that useful?
I’m not one of the real guitarists here…taking it up again after thirty years copying guitar gods of the 1960s and 70s in high school. Pretty much a rank beginner at this point, but enthusiastic.
I find tab useful for looking at something quickly and playing it. Somebody else has already done the “translation” from pitch to placement on the fretboard, so for me it’s easier.
But what I find most useful is to take standard notation, then tab it out myself…find all the different ways of playing a phrase on the fretboard and see what makes the most sense. I suffer from extreme jazz wannabe-ness, so I’m all about going up and down the neck, not staying in one position. Probably because I heard someone say that’s what Wes and lots of people did.
But, no, I can’t sight read in any real sense. I can read, slowly, but always making decisions about where to put each note.
And guitar being transposed an octave up, is still sometimes confusing to me. You know, middle C (or “C4”) is the one on the first fret of the B string, e.g., but is actually written up an octave.
But, yes, when transcribing (or learning tunes), I write things out in standard notation and then figure out the best way(s) to play it, and write that down in tab underneath the regular notation.
Tab written in Guitar pro can show standard notation. Quarter notes, half notes,eighths etc.
You can play the Tab in guitar pro and confirm your counting it correctly.
I also use SoundSlice it’s on the Web. You can import a Guitar Pro file and a YouTube video of the performance. Once it’s synced you can watch the performance and see the Tab display the chords and notes.
That only works if the Tab is accurate. 
It’s important to remember which version was used to transcribe the Tab. A live performance rarely matches the original recording note for note.
How is tab not useful? If it’s an accurate tab (which is a BIG if), it tells you more than regular notation does. I grew up with piano, so I can read music just fine. There’s nothing difficult about it for me on piano, though I’m not as fast at reading giant vertical blocks of notes as I once was. On guitar, I’m more interested in reading the tabs of the music, as where you play the chord can make a pretty huge difference in terms of the sound of it and in terms of getting around from one chord to the next.
A lot of the commercially available guitar books have this as well and it is quite useful.
I was wondering the same thing. When there are a few different fingerings for each note the tabs can be extremely helpful, especially if they capture some subtle sonic nuances that may exist in the original recorded music.
Just a personal thing. I have never bothered to learn to read it. Yes, I’m lazy!
But I’m pretty good at working things out by ear, so that’s what I normally do.
That’s a fantastic ability to have IMO. For the longest time I’ve been trying to learn and practice using various tabs for favourite music with mediocre results, until a couple of years ago, I just started playing scales and noodling and improvising off of them, and having a blast. By doing that for up to an hour most nights I’m developing an “instinctive” feel for the fretboard as well as slowing developing an ear for what note is where.
Having a good ear and being able to pick out songs that way is kind of ideal, or at least a very important skill to have. Tabs take maybe 5 minutes to learn. It’s an extremely straightforward method of notation: literally shows you the string and where to fret it. Some musical snobs would even make fun of guitarists for not being able to read “real” music and relying on tabs.
The problem is, like any chord chart, they often have mistakes in them. It helps to use the tabs, use your ear, and watch some live shows to see how the band plays the song. I find that a lot of songs I pick up by ear, while harmonically correct and sound “fine”, often have chords that are not fretted where the artist frets it. Now, you probably have a much better ear than I do, but sometime through the distortion/fuzz I can’t quite pick up what chord shape is being used or where on the neck it is. (But I can blame that as not being “natively” a guitar player–piano is my most comfortable instrument.) Or sometimes I discover I am making life difficult for myself with my fretting only to discover it’s a pretty simple lick if played in the right position.
I’m sure they do. I’d guess that over 50% of chord charts one sees on the Internet are wrong, or at least incomplete. And of course they just get parotted from one site to another, so trying to find a better alternative to a bad one can be quite a waste of time.
As for tabs, I understand the notation and can work stuff out from them. I can do that with standard notation too. But I have never put in the practice time to develop the ‘automatic muscle memory’ link between eye and fingers which allows playing in real time from either. Mea culpa, I’m lazy… don’t enjoy buckling down to technical practice…
Subtle sonic nuances? 
At some point, written music involves a certain level of abstraction, otherwise one can always refer to the original recording.
Randomly transcribed music on the Internet may vary wildly in quality, but normally published guitar music may include all sorts of “sonic nuances” added where appropriate, like fingering, tempo and dynamics, special techniques, etc., also there may be tablature added underneath, or possibly even instead of, the regular staff, depending on the style of music. Done right it should help, rather than hinder, someone trying to learn the song
It would actually be interesting to hear from people who are fluent sight readers.
I’m assuming that when sight reading one does not consciously think “that’s a C” or “That’s an E” as part of the process?
Presumably there’s a sort of reflex pathway that has developed so that what you see in the notation translates to finger motions on the keyboard or fretboard in a sort of automatic way?
Not of course to say that at the conscious level one may be simultaneously thinking something like “that’s the dominant 7th resolving to the tonic” etc…?
The biggest revelation for me was switching to a guitar headphone amp. Plug in your guitar and Tablet or phone. I was shocked at the difference in hearing what I’m playing compared to the orginal performance.
Any errors in Tab will be very obvious. I’m much more aware of my guitar tuning. It has to be in tune with the recording.
I use the Vox. But there’s other brands that work the same.
The Vox comes in various profiles. Metal, Classic Rock, Bass, Clean etc. I got the clean because I need to accurately hear myself and the recording. The clean amp supports chorus and delay tones.
When I sight read on piano, it’s kind of hard for me not to think of both at once. Like, I’ll see a C chord and think “C chord” pretty much at the same time as I play it. It’s just impossible for me to hit a key on the keyboard and not know the note right away, so when I see it notated, both kind of come at once to me.
For real embarrasment, record your playing to a DAW.
Then you can check your timing against a metronome to very fine detail.
I’ve always thought of myself as a good groove bass player, but it’s humbling to see how sloppy my timing really is… 
Haha. Ain’t that the truth! I’ve been doing a lot of recording lately, and, man, while I’m playing everything sounds good and groovy to me; on playback, I can hear every slight timing error. Granted, my most-practiced heyday of playing was 20-30 years ago, so I expect some slop being so rusty, but, man, it’s humbling.
With this, if you never plan on playing to or for anyone else, can you do without an amp?
So it’s completely seamless for you, if I understand you correctly - like the mental picture you automatically get if you’re reading a novel. Is that correct?
Sure. Especially if you live in an apartment. Your neighbors won’t hear anything. Your spouse will barely hear it either. It’s like playing a unplugged guitar.
It can get loud (in the headphones) if you want.
Btw those headphone Amps don’t come with cables. You’ll need a standard amp cable and 3.5mm audio cable with male plugs on each end. (Connects your phone to the amp)
I use two rechargeable AAA batteries in mine.
It depends on the complexity. Once things start getting real chromatic and vertical (lots of notated chords), at the level of practice I am at now, I do have to seriously slow down and pick out some notes, especially if there’s double sharps involved. I seem to be better at sight reading flat keys to sharp keys. But something like a lead sheet, which is just a melody line and the names of the chords, that’s pretty seamless. I was better at sight reading back when I was doing classical. I started jazz and pop stuff in high school, and basically fake/ad lib everything but the melody line these days.
ETA: But, yes, if I see a C notated I know exactly that’s a C and where it is at the same time. This is very different from, say, how I play harmonica, where I don’t know what all the notes are unless I sit down and think about it or play along with the piano, but I can “hear” what I want to play instinctively. It’s really weird, as it’s very opposite of how I play piano. Guitar is somewhere in between for me. I’ve dicked around for years on one, and I still wouldn’t be able to tell you what, say, the 9th fret on the B string is instantaneously without going up the scale in my head (or down from the 12th fret. Actually, I know a fifth is 7 semitones, so it should be a major sixth up, or a G#/Ab, but see how much thinking I did there?). I write music on guitar and have some idea of what’s going on, but I generally just try to find what I hear in my head and have to figure out after the fact what notes they are.