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Comment by javier123454321 | Hacker News Reader

Super cool, great job. Looks like a really fun project. This really highlights why sheet notation is so much better at describing music than tablature. The advantage of tabs is that they tell you which version of the same note to play (You can play the same note in up to 6 places in the guitar). However, sheet notation tells you precisely the duration of each note, and can often include the intended articulation. Writing music is fascinating, here is an excellent breakdown of different systems which have been developed, and how they came to be: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq3bUFgEcb4

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>However, sheet notation tells you precisely the duration of each note,

True but the reason that guitar tabs missing the duration of the notes is not much of a handicap compared to traditional sheet music notation is that the guitar players learning popular music already get the notes' durations from listening to the actual recordings.

This is the same reason that printing out the lyrics for songs don't require notations of durations for each syllable of every word. People singing karaoke or whatever already get the durations by hearing the recordings. (Indeed, lyrics sheets are also missing the pitch of each syllable.)

On the other hand, traditional notation was invented before recordings so musicians often had no idea what the music sounded like unless they correctly decoded the notes durations on the page.

That's a great point I'd never considered as a guitarist myself who uses both tabs and sheet music.

I think it also explains why in my last 2 years of playing flamenco I never found tabs, the rhythm is almost as hard to play by ear as the notes.

Yes, I already said this but you really hammered the point home with the additional analogy of karaoke lyrics. I feel people playing non-popular forms of music live in this ivory tower where they forget other forms of music exist. I wonder why it happens

While I agree that sheet notation is superior, it actually is fairly common to indicate duration and articulation in tablature, especially classical. See many of the tabs on classtab.org: https://www.classtab.org/tabbing.htm#key

Surprisingly (to me), tablature is apparently older than sheet music. Tabs are also pretty nice when you're dealing with non-standard tunings.

Lastly, even with standard notation, guitar music is often "unnecessarily" annotated with numbers for left hand fingering, roman numerals for barres, "pima" for the right hand, diamonds for harmonics, etc.

There are often several strings that could be usedeto play the same note. However getting the right one is important as they are not substitutable. Thus standard notation isn't enough.

> However, sheet notation tells you precisely the duration of each note

That's why "real" notation is displayed above the tabs or sometimes some other way is used to indicate duration, mostly space between two notes. That's also why it's hard to write an actual usable guitar tab GUI, it needs to display sheet notation too, with all of it's intricacies.

I think that neither notation is wholly superior, and your comment perfectly illustrates why. Sheet music notation tells you the tempo of the notes but gives no guidance on which way you should play them. Tabs tell you exactly how to finger the notes but don't (usually) tell you anything about tempo. Both notations are leaving out crucial info, and so neither is really superior to the other. It's a matter of which defect you are more willing to live with.

Agreed, the video goes into depth in those tradeoffs.

Sheet music often gives fingering suggestions which make it clear which string to play it on. With fingerings though, there's no correct answer, and often you want to bias towards the best sound (to your taste) vs. the easiest finger execution.

Sheet music often has fingering suggestions when adapted for a particular instrument. I say "suggestions" because on some instruments, like the guitar, there are multiple fingerings possible for the same note.

Which leads to something you didn't mention, that sheet music can be used with any instrument, whereas tablature is limited to not only a single instrument, but the specific combination of an instrument and a tuning.

In practice this means you won't be able to play a 6 string lute piece on modern guitar in standard tuning if all you have is the lute tablature.

The biggest advantage of guitar tabs is you don't need to be able to read music. You just need to know how to count. The timing is a non issue as most people will try and learn the song with a tab and a recording of the song.

Which is funny if you presume it is true that tabs precede standard notation (and therefore recording techniques).

Tabs make quite a bit of sense in a post recorded music culture. However, the information density you can get in standard sheet notation is far greater. There's tradeoffs.

Powertabs or guitar pro files fix the tradeoffs at least. You get the sheet music for all instruments, tab, and midi instrument backing tracks to listen to in one view. And a metronome.

For most people using tabs, the additional information is not needed as you are most of the time not aiming for an identical replica of the song. You might play it slower or faster, different key, remove sections, etc

On the other hand I think tabs actually do strive to be an actual replica of a song. That's why there are so many versions of the same tab that broadly sound the same, from people trying to get as close as they can by ear to the recording.

Tablature does precede standard notation, by hundreds of years. In fact tabs are older than guitars and were heavily used for lute music.

Assuming you’re talking about standard guitar with standard tuning system, no, there’s no notes that you can play in 6 different strings.

(But if you’re not talking about standard guitar, then don’t stop at 6, you can have more than that.)

Nit: if you count harmonics, you only need 14 frets to play high E on every string in standard tuning.

Harmonics should be denoted differently. For such notes, you can only play the same note on at most 3 different strings.

I wasn’t responding to the broader topic about music notation, only picking the nit on the claims about whether you can play the same note in six positions on a standard guitar in standard tuning. If you count harmonics— acknowledging one may not count them—but now I’ve repeated almost my entire comment.

If you have an ear then a harmonics should not be counted as the same note. To a layman, they probably can’t tell the difference between the same note from a different string. But it will be very obvious to even a layman a harmonics has a different quality.

That’s the reason they have a different notation. The notation is there to convey what we mean, not a nitpicking. To claim it is still the “same” even when the notation isn’t are really pushing what “the same” is. We might as well start to count the way one scratch on the string to be the same note if they gives the same fundamental.

My pedantry and your pedantry are totally orthogonal. You are, of course, correct in the pedantic points you’re making; the pedantic point I was making, however, was not intended to dispute or even discuss these points.

I could bring the points closer together, say by pointing out that fretted notes also exhibit harmonics; or that picking technique and position can significantly enhance or mask that fact. In so doing, there would certainly be much to dispute if I suggested without any qualification that any pronounced harmonic intonation is “the same” as any other intonation lacking the same pronounced harmonics.

But all of that is moot. I didn’t suggest any of those things. And I did include a qualification that invites you or anyone else to count or not count harmonics as you see fit!

You could just say “I don’t count harmonics”, and I would have no quarrel with that. But I do object to repeatedly conflating my point with points I both did not make and already clarified I did not make, to dispute something I am clearly not saying or even discussing.

It is not about counting harmonics or not, but what should be counted "the same".

We could have gone all formal here, musical theory and physics and all that. But I claimed that you can just tell by ears and use common sense.

What I was going for is accuracy. Someone made a quick comment that one could have played "the same note" on all 6 different strings, which aren't correct under closer inspection and reasonable assumption to define the context.

Similarly, if you include harmonics in the definition of "note" (while still hold the distinction that harmonics are different from normal notes), then still you cannot play "the same note" on all 6 strings, and in fact even lesser (for the same harmonics to be played on different strings) due to the constraints.

Interestingly, if you also include artificial harmonics, (again, while still hold the distinction between normal notes, harmonics, and artificial harmonics), then yes, you finally will be able to play the same note on all 6 strings, theoretically. One could argue whether we should consider harmonics and artificial harmonics the same, as they share different notations, and requires different techniques, but sounds the same to the ear. But either way there exists artificial harmonics that you can play on all 6 strings.

QED

Again, all of what you say checks out, but none is responsive to what I said. I appreciate your dedication to accuracy and I’ll leave it at that.

I suppose a lot depends on what we mean by standard. For example the number of frets varies. Classical guitars are usually 19, acoustics are typically up to 20, and electrics 21 or 22 but sometimes 24.

Those with 24 frets can play E4 on all six strings, but 24 frets is pretty uncommon so I can see an argument for calling those non-standard.

But how about a 22 fret electric with a whammy bar? Those are very common. The highest note on the 6th string without using the whammy bar would be D4. Can you pull on the whammy bar enough to raise that to E4?

The comment I replied to mention sheet notation, last I check we only use that with classical guitar.

(But even “classically”, there are other guitars with many more strings or other tuning systems, etc.)

Lastly, “standard” can be perceived as the most common guitar you can think of. It is very likely if you tell a random Joe go buy a guitar for their nephew, it will be 6 strings 19 frets with EADGBE tuning.

Guitar Pro tabs have time durations on every note (as described in the article), and can also be displayed in standard musical notation. It also has a whole host of articulation symbols, including the standard musical articulations (mezzoforte etc) as well as a bunch of guitar specific special articulations (e.g. artificial harmonics).

Printed guitar tab books also have durations and articulation symbols.

I agree that old fashioned ASCII art guitar tabs without durations aren't great.

some tab viewers do have the rhythm shown as well, just connected to a tab number. Though it might get confusing a bit but more than sheet music imo.

A lot of tabs will put the note length on the "beat" of the tab too.

You can see this in Tuxguitar IIRC.

You are missing the point of tabs. Sheet music people always do. I will explain it below:

- Tabs are meant for music you have the recordings of (so additional details can be obtained by listening to the song)

- Tabs are meant to be an easy way to play a song for people that might not be interested or have the resources to invest the time to learn sheet music

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