Tom Doyle :: TALK

Drums, Bass Guitar, Guitar, Harmonica, Little bit of keyboards and tambourine

I think that MPA president Lauren Kessler is full of balony. This attitude of scarcity is just wrong thinking. If you have folks out there making tab for songs, then the songs are being promoted, and it’s just another way that ‘buzz’ gets created.

There’s no way to measure such a thing, but I’d bet that the songs that get the most ‘tab’ created, wind up also being the most profitable songs for the songwriters.

But .. fear of scarcity, of not having enough, is a fundamental and common error we humans can easily fall into, even though focussing on what we want, and on expanding successful actions is, IMHO, much more powerful at creating more success.

Of course, while I’m on my soapbox, I think tab is not the way to go. It’s trying to find an ‘easy’ way to learn to read music, because if you don’t read the ‘musical litters’ (notes) then you are, gulp, ‘illiterate’ as a musician.

It’s not a smart move to be illiterate in our society, to be unable to read a newspaper or a street sign. And it’s not a smart move to be illiterate as a musician.

Where tab excels, of course, is to communicate specific fingering on a guitar or bass. But tab also, IMHO, seduces new players into thinking they need not bother to learn to read.

Or, as was mentioned, that they need not bother to learn to hear.

However, with the proper method, and taking time to learn the craft, these things aren’t any harder to learn than driving a car, and they’re easier to learn than how to pick up women.

It just takes intention, and patience, and practice.

I agree with a lot of what you are saying, however, your typical teenager that has just picked up a guitar is not likely to be able to read music. And I’m sure the majority of people that use Tab sites are in fact teenagers, trying to emulate their heros and look cool to their friends.

I agree that you should spend time learning how to read music properly, but I don’t think it’s a neccessity. How many of our top artists can read music do you think?

I’d have to agree. And that simplified introduction to learning to play guitar is a good thing, and darn sure shouldn’t be outlawed. When first learning the guitar, it’s a needless learning burden to have to learn standard notation at the same time.

When tab is outlawed, only outlaws will play guitar!

Of course, it seems that each notation system lacks something. Standard notation has no info about frets or strings or fingering. Tab has frets and strings, but no info about fingering or timing. I developed a set of geometric symbols called TrakBats to show fingering, frets and strings, but it has no info about timing or note names.

If you’re interested, there is a method book I wrote for making easy the learning of two-handed touch-style (or tapping), using this alternate notation system. This allowed me to avoid standard notation in this intitial material.

You can download a copy of the book at no cost, here –

http://www.megatar.com/documents/method_book/method_book.html

If you have an interest in using the specialized ‘TrakBats’ font that is used to show fingering in chordcharts (or in tab, or in standard notation) you can download instructions and the truetype font from this directory here –

http://www.megatar.com/trakbats/

All I ask, if you use it publically, is credit, and a note so that other folks will know where they can download the info and font as well.

Let me know if you find it useful.

It would be great if everyone could read music. In a real world, however, that ’s a dream! To allow a would be musician the liberty to take a shortcut certainly is no crime.

This comment by MPA president Lauren Keiser is absolutely crazy and smack of protectionism.

When I was first learning guitar I relied on downloading tabs. I rarely do this now but I know dozens of budding guitarists who do. They’re all young and often this is the only way they can get access to tabs.

Guitarists are not trying to rip you of Lauren. Leave them alone.

Ian.

I have a music school where many of our students download tab to learn and play in our bands, and I also have a business selling music books where we carry the pay-for tab, so I touch both sides of this issue. I’m also a guitar player who has downloaded my share of tab, going back to OLGA when that was still alive. Given all that, I’ve always been able to see the artist/publisher side of this issue - their intellectual rights are violated when their work is reproduced without compensation. There may be better solutions than what is happening today, but I don’t think we’ll get anywhere with arguments that it’s promoting the artists work to publish their tab without permission. In many cases different people own the publishing vs. recording rights, so the “promotion” here is for the performing/recording artists and not for the people with the publishing rights. I can understand not liking it, but I don’t think it helps to ignore the fact that someone’s intellectual property is being used without permission, whether it’s due to a scarcity mentality or otherwise.

Also, you may accuse me of just wanting to sell product, but have you seen how cheap commercially published music is? $20 gets you a lot of music, cheaper than you could copy at a Kinko’s or otherwise, and the tab is transcribed note for note from a recording, with high-quality notation on guitar techniques. Again, I understand that we don’t like to pay for something, but this is a lot different than the music CD issue where the sale price is much higher than the cost of production.

Why do people think they can have anything regrding the music business for free? And then they get angry with the labels for trying to protect their property.

@ Ibanez :
The fact that they are trying to shut down Guitar Tab websites is ridiculous.

Again from my side of things, when I gigged we would submit a playlist to IMRO who would in return send fees to artists of any tracks we covered.

So if we did 30 gigs a year and performed that one track I downloaded from a tab site, the publishers are going to make more money than me buying something a book in a shop.

Instead of focusing on people that are doing this for leisure why not hit the pros, those that gig 7 nights a week making money from playing only other peoples music??

There’s a whole other debate there. Most tab websites just make enough money to survive and are in a lot of cases user driven content.

So if we don’t have the guys sitting down listening to tracks and writing down the tab, we probably wouldn’t have any of these websites.

Are the publishers going to pay the people that sit down all day and do this? At the end of the day they are promoting their work.

I think too many people get too naive over this whole situation.

If I was in a new upcoming band now, I would love my songs to be published on tab websites. I would love to make it as accessible as possible for free.

The more people that hear you, the more chance you have of making money.

The music industry as a whole needs to stop complaining about how people are “robbing” their music and focus on how they can make it more attractive for people to buy. The music industry is killing the music industry with this crap…

Rant over….

Do these people really thing that shutting down internet sites is going to make the musicians any more money? New sites will go up just as fast as the old ones come down.