Stub Mandrel

Ultimate solution...

I've only recently discovered this world. I've found that if you get a good, accurate 'cover' video taht's filmed well you can slow it down to 50% and learn tricky bits. The fingerings are often more practical and accurate than tab (because people actually have to play and listen to them!) I found transcribing a bass cover of Sunny Afternoon from one of these was a great way to learn it - especially as I still had to play it along as some bits it wasn't clear which finger was doing what! On the other hand there are ones that range from the dire to excuses to show off virtuosity with a busy line that would have overwhelmed the original recording.

I enjoyed that 🙂

Went to a practice studio last night for our first rehearsal session. One of these 'enter a code' ones. Guitarists had 100W marshal heads and 5x10 cabs supplied but no speaker leads (jack-jack). Took twenty minutes before 'support' could confirm there was nothing they could do about it. The 'spares' cupboard only had jack to speakon, so they had to go through the PA. I found myself with a Ashdown ABM500 into a 15% ashdown cab, luckily its speakon cable hadn't been 'borrowed'. Can't say we really had the time or the inclination to be fussy about the tone. At practice volume I saw the VU meter needle twitch slightly of the bottom stop 🙂

I'm a bit disappointed here. I was introduced to reading music in junior school and I'm 56 now; so that's nearly a half-century of experience, on and off, of trying to read music and failing. What I was hoping would be that other people who use tab might chip in with ideas around how it could be better or even suggest things like software I could use to rework some tabs to better suit my playing style. Re-tabbing something really helps me learn it. Instead everyone seems determined to tell me that I should be reading notation instead and the only reason I can't is because I won't put the effort in/get a good teacher. All this has done is convince me that my 'dyslexia' analogy is probably more accurate than I realised. It seems there is a condition identified in 2000 called 'dysmusia' that relates to the inability to develop the skill to read music. Unfortunately all the interesting stuff seems to be hidden behind pay walls.

That's exactly the point. That's the one simple barrier I can't overcome. The rhythm bit is easy, I can do that. But that limits me to basic percussion, like the triangle...

Well my view is coloured by my complete inability to grasp notation. I don't deny its superiority at all. I just can't do it and no amount of telling me I can will change that. There are plenty of things I never thought I could do, that I persevered with and got the hang of. Then there are a few things I have tried really hard at and failed completely, like reading notation and ice skating.

But only one person has to come up with a decent standard for tab, that could help millions of people. I have to disagree with you both! I have had plenty of music lessons, I have been through the agonies of notating my own compositions, I have carefully worked out music from scores. It's agony. It was along time before I realised that I wasn't tone deaf nor was it a lack of dexterity and rhythm that was stopping me making progress - once started to have some confidence and rely on my ear, I made progress. Just like reading? No, I know a dyslexics who is way beyond me at maths and chess but who has to ask for help with spelling. To take your analogy, I can't get past the letters. I know 'every good boy deserves favour' I can only tell G, A and B by looking at a stave. I can work out the others but an hour or two later they will be forgotten again. I am sure I have some form of musical dyslexia. I think my problem is that I simply can't relate the vertical position on the stave to pitch in the same way I can relate pitch to a fret. Funnily enough although I am not brilliant at keyboards I find it easy to construct chords or scales on one because I understand the theory. I even know how chords are notated, I just can't see them as anything other than cryptic blobs that need to be carefully decoded. I can look at a piece of music all day. Intellectually I can see how it relates to the music but I can't develop any fluency. I've being trying to read music since the 70s, at one point after intense effort I was able to haltingly follow a simple single-line melody in C, but after a week off the skill had gone. I've only been trying with tab for about six years, and seriously for a lot less than that, before it was virtually all chord charts and by ear, or very slowly working out the notation. I have a pile of music books a foot thick, virtually all of it I have only ever used the chord symbols. I really am a hopeless case, I'm afraid.

For a start, you need to understand keys and scales to understand notation. It surprising how many people start guitar without having a clue about either. I have Led Zeppelin Complete. Believe me, it isn't easy, even if its possible. Once you have added text notes then any advantage of using classical notation is lost. For a keyboard player, most chord voicings are obvious and easily recognised, but guitar chord voicings often cover well over an octave and may include open strings and strings well up the neck that even an experienced reader will have to put in effort to 'work out'. Many apparently 'intricate' or 'obscure' chord sequences are actually chosen to make use of easy fingerings and open notes on a guitar; that might not be obvious from notation - take Fotheringay or even Wurm as examples.

Cross purposes here, perhaps. I have no issue that standard notation can express more information, more succinctly, than tab. But tab is accessible for beginners as it needs no knowledge of musical theory. The point about it being dropped 1000 years ago is wholly incorrect; it was still preferred for the lute alongside classical notation well into the modern period as the fingerings used were seen to be important. This is still true for guitar for example where some parts can be effectively impossible to play correctly and easily without seeing the voicing in tab (the intro to Stairway to Heaven being an obvious example).

It has never been superseded for the lute, it carries right through from renaissance era to modern guitar.

Doesn't double bass fingering generally assume you use the ring and little fingers together? It's not so much about knowing scales in different positions and chord inversions - it's that much tab appears to show no respect for such things, which would make it much easier to play and follow!

Of course tab does have a history as long as classical notation:

Two problems with that, I simply can't read standard notation, it's not for want of trying or even lessons. I simply can't relate a dot on a stave to a note in my head, I do know where G and A are on the treble clef without thinking about it, but despite years of trying anything else I have to work out. I then have a letter in my head I have to 'translate' into a pitch. It's completely beyond me to look at notes and 'hear' a tune or even a chord or arpeggio. As for playing by ear, the problem is two-fold - clearly hearing what the bass is doing in busy parts and understanding the structure of the song. I use tab chiefly to get the bits I can't catch by ear. I know tab is far from perfect, but all notation is an abstract that can't capture all every subtlety of a piece*, and it does help an awful lot of people to access music that they otherwise couldn't. I just wonder if there are ways it can be made better. *If it did, every classical performance would sound pretty much the same.

Missed smiley alert! Just a jest because the staves could be argued to be one line per string on a piano 🙂

Another thread got diverted by a discussion of tab. As someone who really can't read music despite much trying - I simply can't relate position on the stave to a note in my head or on the instrument without 'thinking it out' - so I can get the right starting place and just about pick a simple piano line in C major or a key with maybe one or two sharps... but useless for a fretted instrument. Finding myself learning a lot of songs from tab I find it much easier but also very frustrating at times. I thought it might be interesting too discuss the good and bad of tab and what makes a good one, although I don't mean how accurate it is but how it can be used to show more than just the basic sequence of notes to play.. Better tabs have bar lines and position the numbers to reflect the timing. Some people overdo this and use bracketed numbers (slurs) to make up the timing for things like off-beat and dotted notes which really confuses me. I find tabs that set out the whole song as one linear thing overwhelming. At the other extreme those that reduce a song to a set of riffs usually over simplify and lose all the transitions. There are ways of showing repeats like "X2" which is easy to follow and "D.S. al coda" which gets terribly confusing with multiple destinations poorly marked. I would find tab easier to work with if it always included a key and chord symbols as well. The biggest issue I have is poor fingering choices. I mix one-finger-per-fret with some three-finger playing so I realise they are very personal to the player. But look at this lifted straight from a "popular tab site" - can you see the deliberate mistakes? Ironically this is a good example of how to show timings (note - tabbers often struggle with triplets and anything above fret 9 causes issues): I don't know how it could be done but some sort of graphical interface for generating tab - where you click on an image of the fretboard and it automatically generates the tab - would help avoid boo-boos like that by keeping the tabber aware of where they are on the instrument. Finally a 'special font' for tabbing - equispaced like the ubiquitous courier but with single symbol numbers for 10, 11.... (perhaps we should have used A,B,C etc.....) Any other ideas?

Not as ironic as someone who feels upset enough to post that 'the only people getting upset about the issue seem to be those posting how they "don't understand why people get so upset about the issue". ' I could have opened to door to infinite recursion here 😈

Surely classical notation is piano tab 🙂

Get that old 'dodgy kebab' alibi in first 😈

Saturday Night's All Right for Fighting Update! Both tabs on UG seem simplified (but still 'interesting')... but then I looked at the tab for the Nickelback version. All root notes eight to the bar, except one chromatic run. Tells you everything you need to know about Nickelback 🙂

The more I see Geddy lee, the more I realise that over the last twenty five years he and a friend of mine have grown almost identical as they aged!

That's cheating. It actually looks like a real old guitar rather than a fake! Perhaps that's the sort we really ought to worry about?

Move from anti-gua to pro-gua? I must admit I always thought that finish was just a bad sunburst. I am now traumatised by seeing it applied around f-holes. It's a sort of 'dirty sanchez' for guitars...

Sadly, some of us can't read the dots, even after over forty years of trying (I think I have musical dyslexia). Good tab can show as much as written music if it is done well, but it isn't as elegant, only possible to sight read at low tempos, and unfortunately much tab is really badly done. What tab does well is give fingering information. an advantage lost because most tab writers appear to have twelve fingers on their left hands.

Not actually a 'board' yet. I need to convert it and the DOD delay to work off a standard connector (I'm worried that using a 3.5mm jack creates the risk of a short when it's not plugged in). I had to do a simple (reversible) mod to the HM2 to run off 9V supply. TheHM2 is as good as its reputation. The BEQ7 seems happy despite technically wanting the old BOSS 12V ACA, I used to use it for quick changes of sound rather than on all the time. The Ibanez chorus works really well with bass, possibly the best of all the effects. The Toyo flanger is a good budget one but sounds ckanky and makes extra noises when dialled. The DOD delay works well but needs great care in setting up. I discovered that if I play staccato single notes I can get a convincing 'gated' effect for Boulevard of Broken Dreams. Very dated but has a good, long 4-second max delay which made it very expensive back when I bought it! I like the compressor too, it's a fairly budget one but very robust. It's just a sort of 'better knob' - it makes the sound richer and evens out my playing on quick passages. The Wah is cheap plastic crap, but it's the same basic Cry-Baby circuit as found in every wah ever made... (I once did a component for component comparison of my old (cheap but quality and much missed) wah with a Cry Baby and all the values were the same and with one difference - the cheap one had an extra resistor). I might fit it into a good quality s/h volume pedal. The tuner replaces my awful analogue (yes with a meter in it!) Vox one that was really, really tricky to use. I hate most clip ons because they are so slow to react, the Boss tuner even reacts to how a note changes pitch from attack to sustain. Not shown I also have a one-knob Melos Mini-Fazer (the various brands it sold under are legendary for their sound) but I can't find it and it needs converting to external power.