[masukomi]

on the one hand, yay. Tabs have made learning guitar stuff incredibly accessible, and dealing with the separate hands of the piano and separate clefs is a PITA. On the other hand... ugh. We've successfully churned out generations of musically illiterate musicians. We've also made it really hard to find the sheet music for a piece instead of the tabs, and the tabs are lacking in SO MUCH information.

[klodolph]

I think the real problem is that people are going for free tabs, and the free tabs online are just kinda awful. They don't just miss information, but they also contain outright errors.

If you’re serious about learning a piece, so you can perform it, you’ll want to transcribe it yourself, buy some better tabs, or buy sheet music. Or do some combination of those things. It’s not a problems with tabs themselves, but the general low quality tabs you see in ASCII art from random websites.

(For what it’s worth, I think it’s really easy to find sheet music for popular music. Sometimes too easy… I search for some pop song and get a couple dozen different arrangements for different instruments at different levels. The catch is that you have to pay a couple bucks.)

[washadjeffmad]

You know, tabs weren't always awful [1]. Before and during Web 2.0, back when the web was rife with JS-free, non-commercial labors of love, educated fans and scholars of music created phenomenal sheets and tabs, full transcriptions of their favored artists, scores, and bands.

Then came adtech, and when those goons rolled in, they just couldn't believe the opportunity that these idiots were wasting by doing all this work for free and just giving it awa... er- STEALING SALES from LEGITIMATE ARTISTS.

It usually started with campaigns of rude emails that threatened and insulted the site owner. "How could you do something as horrible as stealing the food out of the mouths of the artists you claim to love by competing with their official sheet music? You're lucky I found you first you first since you're such a small-fry, because if they knew what you were up to, they'd be disgusted by you, and their lawyers would sue you so hard, your grandkids would still be in litigation. Oh and by the way, your tabs are shit, your site is shit, and you're a shit person, so why don't you do everyone a favor and shut down?"

Then, once the site owner had a very predictable panic attack and crisis of faith, typically chronicled publicly on their home page, they'd be made an offer of a few hundred dollars. "Look, the only way out of this is to sell. We're connected, partnered with artists. Unlike you, you lowlife, you thief, we make money so we can PAY the artists. It's the only way to do this fairly. If you really think about it, you'll understand and do the Right Thing."

Then, if the site owner sold, the site would be stripped, frozen, and crammed with ads until it was a desiccated husk of itself, or else forwarded to its new home. Either way, there would be no more new tabs, no photos from tours, event updates, band recommendations, or community interaction, all waning value siphoned into some traffic-whoring cramscammer's [2] pocket.

And if they didn't sell, either the interaction left enough of a negative impression they they lost their passion, or they were legally harassed until they shut down, but only after they were scraped and hoovered up into trashy meta-sites like ultimate-guitar.

This is the slum web we live in today, but with more aggressive authoritarian identity management.

[1] For reference: https://www.classtab.org/tabbing.htm#history

[2] I wonder if anyone can name the top two private forums for this prior 2005? Bonus points if you can name a person we all know today who was part of them!

[duped]

Notation is always lossy. And for what its worth, for the entirety of human civilization music has been an aural tradition passed down from teacher to student, and primarily learned by ear. The notation is just whatever is most convenient to people for taking notes at the time.

[vixen99]

> The notation is just whatever is most convenient to people for taking notes at the time.

That 'at the time' now seems to have extended to around 400 years (in Western classical tradition for instance, from pre-baroque). The evolution of another type of keyboard demonstrates that convenience is not necessarily the watchword.

https://www.thoughtco.com/history-of-the-computer-keyboard-1...

[avtar]

Thom Yorke, among probably other great musicians, couldn’t read sheet music.

[zengid]

But Jonny Greenwood can.

I completely agree with your point though, sheet music is an element from Western "Music Theory", and has nothing to do with being able to make music. It definitely does help if you want to have musicians trained in that Western cultural practice to play your music, but not everyone cares about that.

Edit: my point about Mr Greenwood is that he is a huge part of the sound of Radiohead, as well as the other members.

[sebastiansm]

Maybe not, but he has an amazing ear and a vaste knowledge of music theory.