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Tablature (or tabulature, or tab for short) is a form of musical notation indicating instrument fingering rather than musical pitches.
Tablature is common for fretted stringed instruments such as the lute, vihuela, or guitar, as well as many free reed aerophones such as the harmonica. Tablature was common during the Renaissance and Baroque eras, and is commonly used in notating rock, pop, folk, ragtime, and blues music.
Three types of organ tablature were used in Europe: German, Spanish and Italian. There are several types of ocarina tabulature. Harp tablature was used in Spain and Wales.
To distinguish standard musical notation from tablature, the former is usually called "staff notation" or just "notation".
An alternate usage of the word "tab" is common on the Internet, where it can also refer to conventional chord symbols (for harmony), or note names (for melody).
Both of these words are frequently shortened to "tab" in casual speech. To be less ambiguous, it is preceded by an instrument name, when required, e.g., "guitar tab", "bass tab", "organ tab".
Lute tablatures were of three main varieties, French, Italian (also widely used in Spain, Bavaria and southern France), and German, detailed below. A special variety of Italian tablature called "Neapolitan" was in use in southern Italy, and a Polish variety of French tablature appears in one manuscript. French tablature gradually came to be the most widely used. Tablatures for other instruments were also used from early on. Keyboard tablatures flourished in Germany c. 1450–1750 and in Spain c. 1550–1680. Much of the music for the lute and other historical plucked instruments during the Renaissance and Baroque eras was originally written in tablature, and many modern players of those instruments still prefer this kind of notation, often using facsimiles of the original prints or manuscripts, handwritten copies, modern editions in tablature, or printouts made with computer programs.
Victorian-era musicologists found themselves in a quandary when it came to publishing scholarly editions; players of the original instruments were uncommon, whereas most musicologists did play piano. Editions prior to the early music movement presented the music transcribed for guitar or piano (or both), leaving lute players at a loss for their own repertoire as it was originally published. Popular interest in early music created a need for performing editions of Renaissance repertoire in tablature.
After World War II ended, acoustic and electric guitar became popular, and guitar tablature was reborn.
Tablature notation has two significant deficiencies. First is an inability to convey the duration of notes sustained against a melisma. Only the beginning of each note can be shown; which notes of a chord should be sustained, and for how long, is an artistic decision for the player.
The second problem is one of choice. Historical lute tablature has three major forms (French, German, Italian); each of these has variants. Modern players usually specialize in just one form, and it is difficult to become facile at reading all of them. The surviving repertoire is divided roughly equally, with French and Italian being preferred by modern players over German (especially facsimile editions, as the originals were published in black letter type which is unfamiliar to modern readers). Modern publishers have a difficult decision to make in choosing a form for a modern anthology.
*Fingering position determination ::Tablature removes the requirement for the player to determine the fretboard position within which the notated music is to be executed. Notes on the guitar can be played in different fret hand positions and upon several different strings; for example the note C4 could be played on the third string at the fifth fret or on the fourth string at the tenth fret. In the case of fretted instruments such complexity makes the relationship between staff notation and playing technique less direct than in the case of the piano and many other instruments. Whilst standard staff notation can remove the string/fret ambiguity by further indicating the playing position (usually with Roman numerals), tablature does not contain this ambiguity. Tablature has two additional advantages. First, it clearly identifies the note. Tablature makes explicit all instances of musica ficta, so that there is no guesswork about whether a note is, for example, an F or an F. Second, tablature can notate music in different tunings and scordaturas.
*Simple typewriter-font representation ::Tablature can be easily (albeit crudely) represented as ASCII tab. This is a plain-text computer file using numbers, letters, and symbols to construct tablature. This characteristic makes it easy to distribute tablature electronically, a practice that has become very widespread; it is now possible to find free tablatures for virtually any popular music on the Internet, although a considerable number of those tablatures may be inaccurate and also illegal. (See Tablature (Legal Issue) below.)
*Instrument-specific ::Tablature is instrument-specific, while staff notation is generic. Tablature does not provide any skills transferable to other instrumental or general musical study. Tablature can only be read easily by a player of one particular instrument, whilst music written in staff notation can be played on any suitable instrument. Reading solely from tablature compromises communication with other musicians such as flаutists or violinists, who are commonly trained only in the use of standard notation. Reliance solely upon tablature limits the repertoire of the player to works published in tablature or transcribed into it. A player who can read both forms of notation is at a decided advantage.
*Inherent harmonic or analytical information ::The science of harmony and musical analysis is codified by recourse to standard musical notation. Standard musical scores enable musicians to utilise advanced tools for such analysis. These tools cannot be easily applied to, or from, tablature. Therefore the study of musical theory is hindered by reliance upon tablature.
*Rhythmic information ::Tablature notation provides limited information on rhythm and timing. Tablature writers sometimes provide limited rhythmic information by adding note stems, flags and beams above the fret glyphs but the system is not as well-defined as in standard notation.
*Distinction between musical parts ::Multiple parts cannot be rhythmically distinguished within tablature notation. This is serious limitation when conveying information required for the proper rendition of multiple-part music on any polyphonic instrument.
*Indication of pitch ::Tablature notation shows how the notes are fingered; relative pitch is shown and actual pitch can be calculated by considering the tuning, but it takes experience for a player to sing (or internalize) the notes by sight. Dynamic markup is usually left to the performers artistic sense. It can be difficult to get a general outline of the music by simply studying the tablature page without recourse to playing it through or listening to a recorded version beforehand. In contrast staff notation allows musicians to sing from sight.
Lute tablature is similar to guitar tablature, but comes in at least three different varieties. The most common variety used today is based on the French Renaissance system (see example at right). In this style the strings are represented by the lines on the staff (occasionally the spaces above the lines on the staff), and the stops are indicated by lowercase letters of the alphabet (rather than numbers), with the letter 'a' indicating an open string and the 'j' skipped (as it was not originally a separate letter from 'i'). A six-line staff is used, just as for modern guitar tablature. However, lutes were not limited to 6 strings or courses (they could have as many as 19), and stops for any courses beyond the sixth were shown below the bottom line, with short diagonal strokes (see below).
The letters soon developed somewhat stylized forms for ease of recognition. In particular, the letter 'c' often resembled 'r'. This was common in many styles of Renaissance handwriting, but also helped to differentiate 'c' from 'e'. Also, sometimes 'y' was used for 'i'.
Lute tablature provides flags above the staff to show the rhythms, often only providing a flag when the length of the beat changes, as shown in the example. (Notice that this piece begins with a half measure.)
Other variants of lute tablature use numbers rather than letters, write the stops on the lines rather than in the spaces, or even invert the entire staff so that the lowest notest are on top and the highest are at the bottom.
As with guitar, various different lute tunings may be used, all written using the same tablature method. A tenor viola da gamba can usually be played directly from lute tablature as it typically uses the same tuning. A guitar can often be played from lute tablature by tuning the G string down to an F and putting a capo at the third fret to preserve the original pitch.
In standard Baroque lute tabulature, each staff has six lines, representing the first six courses. The course of the highest pitch appears at the top, and that of the lowest appears at the bottom. (The Italian Archlute of the same period uses an opposite system.)
F____________________ D____________________ A____________________ F____________________ D____________________ A____________________
Lowercase letters or "glyphs"are placed on each of these lines to represent notes. If it is required to play an open D course, for instance, a small "a" will be placed on the appropriate line. For a note with the finger on the first fret a "b", a note on the second fret a "c", etc. However, as mentioned above, "j" was not used since it was not considered a separate letter from "i", and "c" often looked more like "r". Thus:
F_____c___ D_____a___ A_____b___ F_____c___ D_____a___ A_____b___ G - a
would represent a G-minor chord,
All open strings would represent a D-minor chord:
F______a________ D______a________ A______a________ F______a________ D______a________ A______a________ D- ///a
The strings below the sixth course are notated with additional short "ledger" lines: glyphs are placed below the staff. These courses are tuned in accordance with the key of each piece played:
G- a F- /a E- //a D- ///a C- 4 B- 5 A- 6
A number of slightly different systems were used to show rhythm: some scribes and printers used headed notes, but it was simpler for a scribe to use headless tails for the fast-moving notes these plucked instruments commonly played (breve to semi-fusa); and early printers followed the scribal practice. Individual tails were sometimes combined into 'grids', resemblimg today's beams. The semibreve was indicated by an untailed line, the breve by a circled line or a line flagged to the left. Regarding notation of rhythms, French manuscripts tend to use a more florid script for the rhythmic values while English and Germanic manuscripts tend to use a more conservative script.
The lute was a virtuoso's instrument, and rapid ornamentation in the form of graces, trills, shakes, fall-backs, mordents, etc. were expected of players ad libitum to ornament the music artfully, beyond just playing the written notes. Some of these ornaments may be written out, but more commonly a special symbol would mark places where they might be used; these symbols are the subject for a special discussion; each scribe and composer had a different style of ornamentation and there were a variety of ways to notate them. However, for a general discussion of French tablature ornaments see Furnas' dissertation discussing the Manchester Lyra viol manuscript.
The majority of viola da gamba tablature manuscripts is written in French Baroque tablature. The difference between viola da gamba tablature (also called lyra viol tablature) and lute tablute is that the chords in lyra viol music must include all the strings between the highest and lowest notes in the chord. Lutinists, however, can play broken chords (chords that do not include all the internal strings within a chord). Additionally, a diagonal slash often appears in lyra viol manuscript, indicating a slur. As these distinction are subtle, manuscripts have often beein misidentified.
Two features of French tablature are critical. French tablature does not use the letter i. It is replaced by the letter y. Second, the letter c is often written in a manner that suggest the letter r.
A few lyra viol manuscripts notate music above the octave. In such rare cases, no letters are ignored. Thus, letters follow: h, y, j, k, l, and m. Lyra viol music above the octave is extremely rare. Contemporary composers, including Peter H. Adams have written music up to the octave and a fifth above the open string.
Examples:
French Italian German -r- --- k -d- --- o -d- = -0- = n -a- -3- 2 --- -3- --- -2-
There are many other programs, some solely for tablature while others also write lyrics, guitar chord diagrams, chord symbols, and/or staff notation, e.g., Encore, Power Tab, Guitar Pro, TabDiv, TablEdit, Musedit, SmartScore, PriMus etc. ASCII tab files can be written (somewhat laboriously) with any ordinary word processor or text editor. VexTab is a more recent text-based tablature language that is simpler to edit than ASCII tab. An Opensource program written in Java is TuxGuitar, it supports writing notes, tablatures, playing them, and exporting to many formats. Internet sites such as TinyLick allow creation and sharing of tablature using a Web browser. Both Sibelius and Finale software offer some lute tablature support in Italian, Spanish, and French styles, but no German, as is offered by Fronimo. Sibelius and Finale do not provide fonts to score lute tablature giving an historic appearance, but can incorporate any fonts needed for any style desired, with extra set-up time, which can be easily transferred to additional scores.
The following examples are labelled with letters on the left denoting the string names, with a lowercase e for the high E string. Tab lines may be numbered 1 through 6 instead, representing standard string numbering, where "1" is the high E string, "2" is the B string, etc.
The numbers that are written on the lines represent the fret used to obtain the desired pitch. For example, the number 3 written on the top line of the staff indicates that the player should press down at the third fret on the high E (first string). Number 0 denotes the nut — that is, an open string.
For chords, a letter above or below the tablature staff denotes the root note of the chord.
Examples of guitar tablature notation:
The chords E, F, and G:
E|---0---1---3---
B|---0---1---0---
G|---1---2---0---
D|---2---3---0---
A|---2---3---2---
E|---0---1---3---
E F G
Tablature can use various lines, arrows, and other symbols to denote bends, hammer-ons, trills, pull-offs, slides, and so on. These are the tablature symbols that represent various techniques, though these may vary: {| class="wikitable" ! Symbol !! Technique |- | h || hammer on |- | p || pull off |- | b || bend string up |- | r || release bend |- | / || slide up |- | \ || slide down |- | v || vibrato (sometimes written as ~) |- | t || right hand tap |- | s || legato slide |- | S || shift slide |- | * || natural harmonic |- | [n] || artificial harmonic |- | n(n) || tapped harmonic |- | tr || trill |- | T || tap |- | TP || tremolo picking |- | PM || palm muting (also written as _) |- | \n/ || tremolo arm dip; n = amount to dip |- | \n || tremolo arm down |- | n/ || tremolo arm up |- | /n\ || tremolo arm inverted dip |- | = || hold bend; also acts as connecting device for hammers/pulls |- | <> || volume swell (louder/softer) |- | x || on rhythm slash represents muted slash |- | o || on rhythm slash represents single note slash |- | ·/. || pick slide |}
Guitar tablature is not standardized and different sheet-music publishers adopt different conventions. Songbooks and guitar magazines usually include a legend setting out the convention in use.
The most common form of lute tablature uses the same concept but differs in the details (e.g., it uses letters rather than numbers for frets). See below.
Borjon de Scellery's Traité de la musette includes pieces for musette de cour in both standard notation and tablature, plus a partial explanation of his system. The numbers refer to the keys on the instrument, and are shown on a five-line stave so that they also correspond with standard notation. Standard symbols for note lengths are written above each tablature staff.
The standard notation shown in the illustration is also taken from de Scellery; no explanation is given for the slur-like symbol; the comma , is explained as indicating a tremblement, starting on the note above. No explanation is given for the unusual beaming or the significance (if any) of where note-length symbols are repeated.
One method of indicating direction of breath is by using arrows; another is by using either a "+" or "-" sign, or "i" (for inhale) and "e" (for exhale). Bending is shown with a bent arrow with the direction of breath, or by a circle around the note, or even a simple line next to the breath indicator. Additional lines and/or circles may be used to indicate how much to bend.
For example, on a "C" diatonic instrument:
Unbent Bent lv1 Bent lv2 Bent lv3 3i (B) 3i| (Bb) 3i|| (A) 3i||| (G#)
To indicate button-press on a chromatic instrument, a similar indication to first-level bending may be used.
The breath indicator may be placed right next to the hole number, or below the number. The same is true for bending or button-press indicators.
To indicate the beat, in the arrow system the length of the arrow may be varied. However, the more popular method is to use a slightly simplified rhythm-symbol notation, such as "o" for a semibreve, // for a minim, "/" for a crotchet, "." for quavers, and place them above the characters, while spacing them accordingly.
For chords, the numbers to play are shown, so, for example: a C major (CEG) chord (on a C diatonic instrument): 456e However, they may simplify it, especially when playing blues. For chords, it was common to just play three or two holes instead (sometimes even just one), especially when the instrument is not of the same key. For example, in the blues progression in G (G G G G7 C C G G D7 D7 G G) it is common to use a C diatonic instrument, and notate the following:
There are many harmonica tablature systems in use. The easiest tablature system works like this.
Diatonic Harmonica tablature
2 = blow the 2 hole -2 = draw the 2 hole -2' = draw the 2 hole with a half bend -2" = draw the 2 hole with a full bend
chords are shown by grouping notes with parentheses
(2 3) = blow the 2 hole and the 3 hole at the same time
Chromatic Harmonica tablature
2 = blow the 2 hole -2 = draw the 2 hole <2 = blow the 2 hole with the button in <-2 = draw the 2 hole with the button in
Harmonica tablature is usually lined up with lyrics to show the tune and the timing and usually tells one the key of the harmonica for which the song is tabbed.
Here is an example of harmonica tablature:
"Mack the Knife" C Diatonic
5 6 -6 -6 5 6 -6 -6 Oh the shark has pretty teeth, dear -4 -5 -6 -6 -4 -5 -6 And he shows them pearly white 6 -7 -8 7 -7 -6 7 -4 Just a jack knife has MacHeath, dear 5 -5 7 -4 7 -7 -6 And he keeps it out of sight
Such free Internet tablature sites often attempt to defend themselves by claiming to be educational providers or non-profit organizations, even if not formally registered as such. This leads to considerable difficulty justifying the service as legal under the fair use doctrine of copyright law (see Fair Use As A Defense). The legality of free Internet tablature served by such Web sites is disputed, largely because Web sites have thus far only been threatened with legal action; the issue has yet to be taken to court.
As of December 12, 2005, distributing free tablatures of copyrighted music using the Internet was considered illegal by the music industry in the United States. By early 2006, an unprecedented legal move was taken by the Music Publishers' Association (MPA), initiating legal action against tablature Web sites that hosted interpretations of songs and music. The Music Publishers' Association (MPA) had been pushing for Web sites offering free tablatures to be shut down. MPA president Lauren Keiser said that their goal is for owners of free tablature services to face fines and even imprisonment. Several Web sites that offer free tablature have already taken their tablature off-line until a solution or compromise is found. One of the proposed solutions is an alternative compensation system, which allows the widespread reproduction of digital copyrighted works while still paying songwriters and copyright owners. In addition, there are now a number of "legal" services offering guitar tablature that have been licensed by music publishers.
One site, MetalTabs.com, contacts the bands themselves for permission to post tablature. Few bands have declined the request.
The tablature debate was featured on NPR's Morning Edition in a segment entitled "Music Industry Goes after Guitar Tablature Websites" on August 7, 2006.
On April 10, 2010, Ultimate Guitar, a Russia based, free online tablature site has entered a licensing agreement with Harry Fox Agency. The agreement included rights for lyrics display, title search and tablature display with download and print capabilities. HFA’s over 44,000 represented publishers have the opportunity to opt-in to the licensing arrangement with UG.
# Web sites that offer "professionally-created" content: These Web sites typically hire professional musicians to transcribe songs into guitar tablature, and generally charge anywhere from $0.99 to $6.99 for the ability to purchase legal pieces of guitar tablature. These Web sites also claim to have acquired the proper licenses to display this tablature on-line. Several Web sites in this first category specifically cater to guitarists, including GuitarInstructor.com and UnitedWeTab.com # Web sites that offer "user-created" tablature, but have obtained the proper legal clearances to post these transcriptions on-line. There are several Web sites that fall into this second category, including Guitar World Tabs and Mxtabs.net, which generally do not charge consumers for using these user-created tablature pieces, and share any advertising revenue with music publishers and/or songwriters.
On February 29, 2008, MXTabs.net relaunched as the first legitimately licensed site designed to provide musicians with access to free tablatures, while also compensating music publishers and songwriters for their intellectual property. Similar to other user generated content sites, MXTabs.net users are encouraged to create, edit, rate, and review their own tablature interpretations of their favourite songs. However, unlike other user-generated content sites, only songs that have received explicit permission from participating copyright owners will be made available on-line.
In response, GTU's site owner(s) immediately created a Web site named Music Student and Teacher Organization (MuSATO) to attempt to reposition themselves from an illegal-copyrighted-materials provider to an "education provider". MuSATO's main objective is to use fair use as their rationale to publish tablature free of charge. By claiming to be an educational provider, they do not have to obtain publication rights nor pay royalties to the original composers. MuSATO claims to be educational by classifying users downloading tablatures as "music students" and transcribers as "music teachers".
Furthermore, MuSATO also argues that Internet guitar tablature does not infringe upon publishers' copyrights because the tablatures it provides does not contain rhythmic information and therefore is not an entirely accurate representation of the song. However, it did not note that some lyrics provided are copyrighted. It has since removed lyrics from all tablature in an attempt to appease the NMPA. Tablature is not directly provided to users unless it is through the forum, where members link to other Web sites hosting tablature.
GuitarTabs.com has been contacted by the NMPA and MPA with similar copyright infringement allegations. The NMPA and MPA have also threatened Guitar Tab Universe with similar legal action. A copy of the certified letter received by the site owner, along with a brief note similar to the one posted on Mxtabs, has been posted on their Web site.
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
