If you have any sense of rhythm and timing, chord progression and the like, you’ll get by just fine on tabs. I play in a full on country band and don’t read a lick of sheet music. Neither does our lead or rhythm players, nor the drummer or fiddler. I print out the lyrics and just write the tabs above the spot where I change notes, works like a champ.
1 Like
I’ve had this in my queue since this post and finally got around up watching (listening mostly) to the whole hour+. It’s really good, and the click bait title had me expecting to hate it.
I do think he completely skips one important point. Any notation improvement needs to be a big enough improvement to be worth all of the people who use current notation re-learning, and all of the music written with current notation being transcribed. That seems like a really high bar to clear since notation is already pretty good.
3 Likes
That video just convinced me to start trying to read standard notation as it relates to bass.
4 Likes
I watched that Tantacrul video a while back. It’s very good.
I am a person who hates tab. I’ll use it in a pinch, but I don’t enjoy it. I can read sheet music, but to be honest, I find an understanding of theory the best thing for playing bass. When I say “theory”, I don’t mean reading sheet music, I mean understanding theory. Those are two completely separate things IMO. You can learn theory without ever touching sheet music.
Theory = understanding note/chord intervals, having a good grasp on timing, learning your shapes and patterns to hit different intervals on the bass, knowing the names of the notes on the neck, understanding how chord progressions work and having a good grasp on the roman numeral chord naming conventions (what Josh refers to in the lessons as the Nashville system). If you know what the chord structure of a song is you can play and transpose anything very quickly.
1 Like
Yay! The video is a great and balanced look at a lot of different stuff around the subject. Glad you all liked it.
Reading standard notation will pay off big time in the long run for other instruments even if you don’t use it much on bass. I really believe learning both it and also using tabs is a great approach; why artificially limit oneself? It takes less than a day to learn to read standard notation well enough to make it extremely useful.
That’s a really cool, informed and funny video!!!
1 Like
I’ve been working on the Hal Leonard Bass Method books. Starting off was a little rocky but is it ever rewarding seeing day to day improvement!
2 Likes
Definitely! I can read music but I almost never need to do it for bass. What I do use all the time are the notes on the fretboard and their intervals. Given a chord progression, it’s extremely useful to know what notes you coukd/should be playing and where to find them. Improvising over known songs is a very good skill to practice. Transcribing music is much easier too when you understand theory and have decent ear training skills to recognize intervals.
I think that for most people playing guitar/bass, being able to play from standard notation is one of the least useful skills. On other instruments like piano, I think it’s a much more crucial skill. It’s much easier to learn a skill if you need it and have a problem to solve vs just wanting to learn something because you might need it someday.
We all have a finite amount of time, if we want to improve our playing (I’m assuming most people’s main goal is to play music), it serves us best to work on our weak points which impact our playing now 
if people want to work on obscure music theory because they desperately need to understand all the workings of our universe, that’s great but just remember that everything has an opportunity cost
3 Likes
Yeah. Standard notation is useful in the same way tabs are - learning the song initially and as a rough roadmap of the song. But for me I have neither the need nor desire to put time into learning to sight read at full speed in real time on bass.
3 Likes