In my case (and I suspect in the case of many others), I just DON’T LIKE tab. I prefer playing from standard notation. People can harp on all day about How it “locks me out of 95% of song resources out there”, I just don’t care. I know how to learn songs by ear, and I know how to transcribe if music scores are unavailable. I don’t need to be shackled to playing by tab just because there’s so much of it available. I dislike playing by tab, period. Playing by notes, rather than strings and frets is far more efficient in my book.
It’s pointless for people to expend so much energy trying to change other peoples’ minds about what their choices are. They just need to get over it and understand that everyone has their own personal preferences. If you like playing from tab, just keep doing it, but don’t try to convince everyone else to do it your way.
I broke away from tab (mostly thanks to the Sight Reading course), and I’m happy I did. If anyone else is interested, it’s a great course and it’s still on Black Friday sale for 30% off. 
Well, willful ignorance is a pretty popular thing too 
What always amuses me is people outside of the US who moan about things in US/Imperial units (usually in YT videos) but speak multiple languages and can’t learn like 5 easy unit conversions 
I live in a country that converted to metric in the 70s but I still have to buy wood in feet, most ovens are still in F and almost everyone I know still weighs themselves in pounds. And then there’s the UK vs US spelling of word… 
No warranties express or implied, not valid in the province of Quebec or the state of California 
Especially the part in an orchestra where the person at the front tells you what to do and when. In classical music you usually don’t get to make a lot of your own choices, especially if the conductor is the person who wrote the score.
I’m not sure about now but until at least fairly recently Bela Fleck couldn’t read music very well and would sing a melody into his iPhone, then play it on banjo and notate it in Sibelius.
Yeah. This was me too.
Just my 2 cents here… i bought the sight reading course on talkingbass because i like reading sheet music. I can probably sight read any bassline… on a keyboard 
… and i wish i could do the same on my bass. That being said I have nothing against tabs, especially those with rhythm notation. Pam is right when she says that tabs make some choices for you e.g. indicating not only the pitch, but the string and fret…but almost the same can be said about a piano score, where ofc the key to press is only one but the author (or the editor) suggests the fingering. For anyone who has ever played a keyboard that is one of the most important thing and while of course with some experience and practice you can write your own fingering for a piece you Will find that usually the “choice” made is good or even the best for most people. It’s true sheet scores are scarcer than tabs, tho, so i guess that learning to “sight read” tabs has its usefulness overall. One may not like it (I particularly don’t) but on the other end it can help you learn that song or bassline you could try to learn by ear (which is something i like to try to do sometimes) or transcribing by the tab itself in any case spending more time and effort.
Yeah. With piano scores, each note corresponds to exactly one key. There’s no choice involved with the key. You can choose how you want to press that key, but there is also often an optimal way to play a piece where other ways will give you a bad time. Sometimes (rarely) these are written, if you have a nice teacher/conductor/director/editor; most often they are not.
This is true of most instruments; really it’s only stringed instruments where you have any real choice here. Some wind instruments (clarinet, I assume sax, some others) will occasionally have a few fingerings for some notes but mostly it’s 1:1.
And these are only happenstance based on the design, not purposeful.
Put enough holes in a tube and some other combinations of keys will get you the same note as others. Altissimo notes have many fingerings, and can be horn dependent. Some sound better on different horn designs. Saxes are the world’s most imperfect instrument, which, gives them all their character of course.
Not to belabor this silly and pointless argument over tab vs standard notation, but I do want to make one more comment about this:
@SirJoe While your statement regarding piano scores is true in a sense, I don’t believe it’s an accurate comparison to playing guitar or bass from tab. The piano score states what pitch the composer means for the note to be played, but doesn’t tell the player where it is on the keyboard. It’s up to the performer to know the keyboard well enough to know on which octave to play the note and where it is on the keyboard. The same holds true when playing bass: when I see a notation on the stave, I know what note it is, and (based on its position on the stave) where on the neck I should play it. I don’t think in terms of frets and strings, I think in terms of notes and intervals. I see a note, I play it. I don’t take time to think about strings and frets. This is what sight reading is all about and it’s my preference. If that preference makes me ignorant (as a couple people here have implied), so be it.
@JoshFossgreen can you please close this topic? The sale is over and this thread has degenerated into something other than what I had intended it to be.
As is the fate of many a thread… 
Sadly, that is very true 