Tab
The archive contains posts about and containing guitar tab.
Tablature
Do you get confused by guitar tab? Or do you find tab easier to read? Simply put, tablature, or tab, shows a picture of the instrument. Woodwind and brass fingering charts, 19th century keyboard tablature, and chord frames can all be thought of as tab. However, it remains most closely linked with the guitar.
The guitar-like lute used tablature back in the renaissance, except that it sometimes used letters rather than numbers to represent the frets.
Standard notation and tablature have some features in common. Standard notation has five lines and four spaces while tab has six lines and five spaces.
Nevertheless, at the core they remain different notation systems. Standard notation acts like a graph that records the pitch height of the notes as they change over time. The lines and spaces act like a ladder that the pitch ascends to climb to higher pitches and descends to reach lower pitches. Notes move forward in time from left to right.
Alternately, tab’s lines represent the six strings of the guitar (or four on the bass guitar). The spaces mean nothing. Numbers written on the lines represent the frets. Like with standard notation, the notes move forward in time from left to right.
However, unlike standard notation, tablature cannot represent the rhythm by itself. Therefore, it often gets paired with standard notation. Tablature gives a graphical representation of the guitar neck, while standard notation provides rhythm and note information.
The following posts show how to color code tablature to make it easier for LD, ADD, and special needs students to learn tab. It also gets used in the posts that discuss special alternate tunings for guitar.
© 2021 Geoffrey Keith
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