Yes, learning bass tab is great… unless you’re in the doomscape of BAD TABS. Watch this to avoid the mayhem.
If you’re doing the Beginner to Badass course, you’ll know all the basics I cover here by Module 2. But you might still enjoy the video.
Honest question - have online tabs been a net positive or net negative on your bass learning journey?
Net positive. Using them, realizing they are wrong, and submitting fixes for them is a good learning experience 
@JoshFossgreen By and large a net positive, but here’s the kind of stuff I have run into, a month after finishing BTBA and wanting to learn songs I am very fond of.
Sting - “Shape of My Heart” from “Ten Summoner’s Tales” (1993)
First I found this one. First listening, I found the slides to be cool but I didn’t remember the song sounding that way. I also found fretting the 16th notes that first appear in measure 6 very tricky.
I looked at Sting’s official video and saw that he was fretting it in a different place and seemingly more simply - definitely less slides.
Then I went back to Songsterr and have been using this one for the most part. The fretting of the part I mentioned previously is still a little tricky, but for now I just play them as 8th notes and it sounds okay.
But notice in the Songsterr tab that the fretting of the same phrase suddenly changes in Verse 3 (measure 122) to something different, and adds a slide in one place. Listening on headphones, I don’t hear that new slide anywhere, and ironically there is one slide that can be heard throughout the song, and seen in Sting’s video, but is not noted in the tab. It sounds beautiful and I do play it that way.
Then there’s this one, which is totally different!
Now imagine a scenario (which is actually true) in which my neighbor - who is at about the same stage of learning guitar as I am on bass - and I agree to learn a half dozen songs so we can play together. Then we each go to our accustomed tab source(s) and discover all this confusion. Now multiply that by six. It seems like a lot of wasted effort to achieve the simple result of making the same joyful noise.
In the end I am able to enjoying playing a fair amount of songs using tabs, but only a couple by heart thus far. Ear training is looking pretty good to me at this point.
Edited to add: the notation segment, even at just 30 seconds, is VERY useful. The tips on beating bad tabs will be very helpful, especially in layers.
Online tabs have been a net positive for me. When I know the song well enough, I notice right away when a tab is wrong.
What I hate most is ----t-e-x-t------t-a-b-s----!!! I really really hate them 
Generally I only look at those if everything else fails. But I first look for tabs with notation on youtube. For most songs I like, I usually find good tabs with notation from YouTube. In some cases there are only tabs, but they are still okay if the notes have the same kind of symbols used on notation (that helps so much!). Without them, sometimes it is an otherwise “correct” transcription but without rests and note duration, which makes them inconvenient.
I don’t know sight reading music yet, but it really helps me a lot to have both the notation and the tabs.
Fortunately I have found some YouTube and Patreon accounts with really good notation. I very gladly subscribe to a Patreon account for good quality tabs.
I haven’t yet tried transcribing songs by ear. I would probably make mistakes. But I would like to learn to use MuseScore to make notation for songs I only found tabs for. I just haven’t had time for that.
The video was excellent and fun! 
PS: this post got too long! It is practically an essay on why tabs with notation are cool.
Can you share these please?
Overall I’d say a qualified “net positive”. However, I think they are most useful early on. Then there comes a point where “what got you here isn’t what will take you there” and at that point, tabs can become a crutch that you have to learn to let go of.
So yeah, learning to use them and then learning to let go of them - both net positive things!
Sure! Here are some good sources:
Constantine Isslamow make excellent tabs with notation as PDF files. Each video has a link to the tabs in the video description.
Bernd (tiefsaiter) on youtube. Excellent tabs & notation. He also has a Patreon account.
Patreon:
Nicolle Dias, a Brazilian bassist that transcribe songs by ear, has great videos with tabs. The newest videos also have notation. And she also has a Patreon with tabs as PDF files for those who want to print them.
Patreon:
Here’s a link to the thread where people were talking about good tabs:
Wow! This is GREAT! Thank you!
These are unfortunate in that they don’t convey rhythmic information well at all, unlike modern tabs which are closer to parity with standard notation.
However, the old school ones DO have one thing going for them - they are usually presented broken down logically in to the main repeating parts of a song.
This is a much better and more tractable way to think about music than as a single unbroken string of notes. By breaking the song down structurally like that it’s a lot easier to understand the song.
I read music notation in treble clef and for now my brain has to “translate” the notes to bass clef.
It is cumbersome and adds more load to my RAM - which is already busy processing rhythm, finger position, string crossing, plucking and muting before the final explosion.
Tabs are therefore welcome. In the future I’ll say “goodbye and thanks for all the fish” to them, but not now.
That’s exactly where I’m at - I’m using tabs as training wheels until I can sight read the bass clef and map it to the fretboard naturally.
I also find them useful when I just want to play along a random song that I know but have never played before.
The minor downside is that so many of them are wrong, including some of the “Pro” ones on UG and ones done by YouTube creators, but discovering those errors is also part of the learning process.
Net positive
I started with no music background and tab gave me the joy of playing music first.
The other stuff can come later but IMHO getting people to play music first is why the course is successful.
It opens a door into a world that I previously assumed I wasn’t talented enough to enter.
I now know it’s the work, not the talent that’ll get you places on bass.
Tabs are great but seem to be frequently wrong. Songsterr especially. The most accurate I have found are people on YT.
FWIW, free online sheet music is just as frequently wrong as free online tabs, in my experience
I wondered about that.
There are more youtube sources with good tabs. I should have remembered to mention Fusilli Jerry. He has cover videos with good tabs & notation. I noticed today he has a Patreon account too, if someone wants to download and print the notation.
I have found many great songs in his channel. It is worth taking a look!
His Patreon:
@JoshFossgreen YAY! The return of NotJosh!
You need a second account here so that we can @ NotJosh. 
Yes , this…. 
Tabs are fine for me. The ears do the rest. I plan on reading sheet and will get another go around on B2B soon I hope.
I think tabs have been very helpful to get me started on a particular song, however online sources can be unreliable, as Josh warned us in lessons…that said, Ultimate Guitar tabs and Songsterr tend to have completely different versions of songs either by individual interpretation or by different artists. There tends to be no absolute “wrong” way to play it, so have tended to play it the way I hear it, since I’m not selling records or playing in a band at the moment, lol 