Music Composition DUMmIES

Composing with Guitar Tablature ..............................................................

A distinct type of lead sheet, designed specifically for guitar and bass, is called

tablature, or just tab. Instead of using standard musical notation symbols, tab

uses ordinary ASCII numbers and letters, making it ideal for reproducing

music for the Internet and online newsgroups where anybody with any

computer can link up, copy a tab file, and read it.

Tablature notation has existed for more than 800 years, with the first known

examples appearing in Asia. Up until the 1600s, the majority of musicians

used tablature to write music for just about every instrument you can think

of, from stringed instruments and horns to early keyboard instruments.

However, tablature had some serious limitations, a major one being that each

piece of it was so instrument-specific that there was no possible way for a

lute player to reproduce a piece of music on a harpsichord, or any other

instrument, by reading his lute tablature. The system began to fall out of

common use when the five-lined staff and modern music notation was stan-

dardized in the 16th century.

Basically, tab sheets tell you what notes to play. However, there is no way to

tell a musician reading tab exactly how long or short a note needs to be —

the way quarter notes and half notes and so on do — so it may be necessary

for musicians to hear how a piece is to be played before they can success-

fully read any tab you’ve written. There are some cases where note flags are

written above tab characters, but this is not a standard practice and is mostly

confined to tablature written for more archaic instruments like the lute and

the contrabass.

Tab is very easy to read, though, and many beginning musicians, or musicians

without any real music theory background, prefer to have their music written

for them this way. The basic idea of tab for guitar is that you start out by

drawing six parallel horizontal lines (four for bass), which correspond to the

strings of the instrument. The top line is the highest-pitched string, and the

bottom line is the lowest-pitched. An example is shown in Figure 19-2.

E B G D A E

Figure 19-2:

A blank

tablature

for guitar

basically

represents

the guitar’s

strings.

Chapter 19: Composing for Other Musicians 243