tabs, and guitar, and visualizing it all...

S

SEDstar

Active member
God, guitarists drive me up a wall. I can decipher sheet music, but, all the guitarists got together one day... and I assume while smoking a joint, all decided...

"Hey, dude. We are, like, way too cool of an instrument to, you know, like... have sheet music, you know."

"Yeah!"

"Uhm, so how are we gonna, like, lay our cool riffs off on other guitar dudes. You know, so they can worship us, and stuff, you know?"

(Phfffff----tt!) (exhale...) "Whoa, like... we'll just make up our OWN kind of sheet music, you know? And, it will be cool, you know? EVERYone else can have sheet music, yo, but we'll have our OWN kind of notation, dude."

"Yeah!" "Cool!" "That'll rock!"




LMAO

If I wanna know what those Iconic 4 notes that are the main thematic material for Beethoven's fifth, they are there on sheet music for the taking. If I wanna know how Rhandy Rhoads got that ultra cool rhythm line for bark at the moon, though... I stare at tabs for it, and since I dont play guitar, it drives me up a wall!

My sequencer uses a "piano roll" instead of staff. I didnt like it at first, but quickly got used to it. L-O-N-G notes are physically longer, left to right... and pitch is up and down, on a graph.

After years doing it this way, its very natural to me. (and likely drives someone else up a wall, just like tabs drive me up a wall, LMAO) I dont have to calculate that the E on the staff is dropped a semitone or the G is raised a semitone, because of some flats and sharps shotgunned onto the beginning of the staff line, LMAO. It allows me to clearly see the relationship between 2 notes in terms of pitch distance.

a piano keyboard is there vertically on the left hand side, so it keeps me grounded so to speak, to something proper.

I use Pentatonic Minor a lot, and for the first couple years would cut and paste those notes onto the left of where I was composing, for easy reference. I no longer do that, the Root,3,2,2,3 is automatic now. Raising it all 5 or 7 semitones for a IV or a V is autopilot too.

I REALLY wanted to get just the "rhythm" of that chugging Randy Rhoads rhythm line of bark at the moon onto my precious piano roll, you know study it. hear it in piano then in cello. Maybe a sax... "grok" whatever it was he was "doing, man....", you know?

Randy is a "modern master" to me with that iconic rhythm line in that song.



I suddenly realized I could put the OPEN guitar strings on the computer screen, kinda like I used to put my scales notes on it. 3rd fret was just counting UP three semitones from the appropriate reference note (string).

My software doesnt do hammerons, pulloffs, bends, or slides... but my NEXT software guitar will, trust me, heh heh

it allowed me to get some basic idea what randy was doing for that basic rhythm line. timing wise, and some basic interval movements. I saw the quick fan picking was just on an open E string, good christ, it always sounded so COOL, I figured it was a fan picked power chord. Huh...

giddy with my success, I quickly looked at the opening bars to ACCEPT, "fast as a shark". I can fumblingly get the basic thing going, though it sounds way different when I can't slide to blur between power chords, and have to delineate them. (they were riding an open string too, where I figured they were mute-fan-picking a power chord...)

I realized the strings were all a perfect 5th apart. ANything other than drop-D tuning doesnt mak much sense, but... I can get the basic idea of a few things I always wondered about now.

Question:"which E" is the thickest E on a guitar? I mean, I lay these reference "open string" notes down, and I dont think they are 5 semitones apart in real life... open E, going to open A... is that an octave PLUS a 5th??? I mean, I know they are EADG, etc... but are they 2nd E, 3rd A, etc etc??

also... I dont see clear lines in root, IV, and V on my fave tabs..... the best songs I like, they seem to be mixing up all 3, and pulling parts of the melody from all of them. Somehow, this seems to be related to the thing I notice when I "stack" my Root pent min scale, "on top of" the IV and V positions of the same scale... it seems to make a giant chromatic scale then... (viewed from C as a root...)

I either drink way too much coffee on my time off work... or, I feel like I might be "onto" something that has been puzzling me, perhaps a breakthrough of some sort. I kinda never understood harmonic theory, and rather bypassed it to get where I am at. Instead of sounding my melody(s) off in distinct chord positions (I, Iv, or V...) I am pretty sure Accept and Randy Rhoads are demonstrating I should "pull" parts of my melody from all 3 of them.... and, classical sheet music from the masters, when I look at a famous pleasing line I like and find on the internet... seems the same way... "pulled" in pieces from all 3 chord positions, not distinctly from one or another.
 
Don't want to hijack your thread but lets look at this from a guitar players point of view...
I learned to play guitar many years ago when very few guitarist could read sheet music, this was also a time when very few music teachers considered a guitar as a serious instrument so little effort was put into the importance of reading music if you wanted to play guitar, even less for bass players. Fortunately for us someone used their intelligence to devise a system of writing music so simple even a drummer could figure it out and chose to call it tabliture. I seriously doubt smoking a joint had anything to do with the process since this was long before smoking pot and playing music became so horribly intertwined. Two systems of writing tabs were devised. One consists of a six line staff with numbers on the lines to indicate the number of frets from the nut (0) the note(s) would occur. The second has the notes written as fractions, the number below the line for which string, the top number for how many frets up the fingerboard to find the note. No key signatures, just the letter of the key at the beginning of either system and no sharps or flats. A few imbelishments were soon added to indicate various effects such as bends, slides, hammer notes etc. Tabliture is also written for other string instruments like mandolin and banjo. Transposition of tabliture is much easier than with standard notation, at least it is for guitar.

I don't mean to imply that guitarists should not learn to read standard notation, it comes in real handy when trying to explain what we are doing to keyboard players. I find it quite interesting how keyboard players can remember all the sharps or flats from the key signature, or make perfect sence of shaped notes and yet be totaly baffeled by something as simple as tabliture. It makes me wonder... Who's smoking what?
 
Cliffs notes...LMAO

Sorry, complaining about TABS made my question get "buried"...

Lets say I make a short melody in Pentatonic C minor... Its in one octave, using those 5 notes of that scale.

Thats chord I... the root. I can play that melody in F, or G (transposed up 5 or 7 semitones...) to play the same melody in IV or V chord.

When I look at a pleasing guitar line from a modern metal master... I dont see this. Rather, it looks as if PARTS of the guitar melody are "pulled" from the I, the IV, and the V and strung together.

They are still in Pent minor... but they are playing in Cmin, Fmin, and Gmin *all at the same time*


I am wondering what "rules of thumb" or "guidelines" governs this... ?
 
I didn't mean to sound so defensive in my other reply. I kinda see what you are getting at now. Tabs are written cromaticaly so I can see how they seem to overlap to someone used to looking at standard notation. Tabs are generaly written to convey the general idea and structure of note patterns rather than the precise noting of standard sheet music. Most guitar players who rely on tabs also have to rely on their improv skills to fill in a lot of gaps so don't feel bad when you don't see the whole structure of what is going on.

For what it's worth, standard notation looks like a bunch of blackbirds sitting on a 5 strand fence to most guys who are used to reading tabs. That's an old joke among old guitar players who play strictly by ear, the funny part is to many of them reading tabs is too much like doing math. ;)
 
Tablature

There are two primary ways of notating Western music (Western as in NOT oriental or Eastern music). You can have a system that tells you what the note is (as a regular staff does), or you can have a system that tells you where to put your fingers on YOUR instrument, a guitar, for instance, to produce the note.

Tablature, in fact, has been around for a very long time. It was used at least as far back as the 14th or 15 century for notating lute (one of the forerunners of the guitar) music. Singing troubadours traveled about Europe from court to court and wrote their music using it. There is still to this day more music written in tablature for lute than for all the piano music written since the 18th century. Most of it has never been transcribed into staff notation.

Tablature died out, however, with the waning of the popularity of the lute. In the early 1700s, J.S. Bach, still occasionally used tablature to finish up a short piece at the bottom of a page of manuscript to save wasting another piece of expensive printed sheet music. A few years after that, however, tablature had become an anachronism and I doubt anyone still used it when Mozart and Beethoven were writing.

Modern Tab developed fairly recently I believe since, as you noted, most guitar players were self-taught and did not know how to read staff notation. The difference is that the old tablature DID indicate the rhythm of the notes by placing timing symbols over the tablature. This is why I view modern Tab as a deficient method of notating music. It is as if guitarists decided they needed some way to write a piece down, but did not go all the way and include a method to notate the rhythm.

Since a melody line consists of notes and rhythm, it seems obvious that devising a system that can only represent one of those elements is seriously deficient.

Do a Google search on lute tablature, and you can find images of what it looked like.
 
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