Appreciation post: Learning guitar tabs vs reading sheet music for folk songs

I spent like 4 years in high school trying to learn sheet music for banjo and it just never clicked. Switched to tabs three months ago and I can already play through 15 old folk songs from my grandpa's collection. Has anyone else found that one way of learning just made everything fall into place?

3 comments

3 Comments

nancyn691mo ago

Picked up tabs after failing at sheet music for years too. Found the same pattern with other hobbies like cooking - follow a real recipe once then do your own thing. Tabs just clicked because they showed me the path instead of the theory.

allen.kai1mo ago

Did you ever notice how music theory is like the grammar rules of a language? I was watching this video the other day where a guy explained that tabs are basically the "spoken" version while sheet music is the "written" version. It made SO much sense to me because I can carry a conversation in Spanish fine but ask me to diagram a sentence and I'm LOST. Tabs are the same way - they let you play the song right away without needing to pass a test first. Your cooking example is perfect too, I do the EXACT same thing with recipes.

dakotab931mo ago

Wait wait wait hold up @allen.kai you're telling me you can just speak Spanish without knowing the grammar rules? That's wild to me, I can barely order tacos without my brain short-circuiting. But I totally get what you mean about tabs being the spoken version though.