Every beginning guitar or bass player is taught to play music with tablature, or tab as it’s commonly called Tab is sheet music with a diagram of the strings and a numbers to indicated which fret and which string to play. The player just follows the diagram, unaware of what notes she’s playing. It gives the player a feeling of satisfaction as she belts out music that sounds good. This is how I was taught in most of my beginner bass lessons, but I soon became quite uncomfortable with it.
Why am I uncomfortable with Tab?
Tab makes me feel like a puppet with strings tied to my hands and an invisible puppet master pulling the strings. It’s very similar to painting with “paint by numbers” with which all artistic touch is eliminated. Playing by musical notation allows the player to choose where on the fretboard to play a given note or arpeggio. The player now has license to add interesting accents like walking from one chord to another or sliding occasionally. With tab, you just pluck and fret the string wherever you’re instructed.
Don’t get me wrong, tab is a wonderful tool for the bassist, and we’re fortunate to even have an alternate notation system. However, a reliance on tab severely limits ability to choose how best to play music. The bass guitar is extremely versatile in that we are able to play almost every note in at least two places and in some cases five or six. A tab just shows you one opinion on how something should be played, knowledge of the actual notes allows you to make the determination yourself.
I wholeheartedly agree with what Mark Smith of Talking Bass says.
“I absolutely understand the criticism of tablature as a popular form of sheet music. To any bass player out there that doesn’t already realise, you CANNOT learn music from tablature alone. It’s impossible. You would need a copy of the recording to listen to at the very least and that is not a very reliable process. To make things worse, the majority of tab sites on the internet are terrible and the tabs that get submitted are usually far from accurate.”
You decide. Tab or Music Notation?