Some time, maybe a couple of years ago, a friend of mine, bassist in a hard rock band, wrote in SM an interesting thing - she doesn’t like tabs! At all! And uses sheet-music only. For the record - she plays not only bass, but also guitar, harmonica and flute, all self-taught.
And her explanation is, for bass, that tabs stick you to one particular fingering, while in reality same note can be located not in different places of the fretboard (for example - A note can be played on the open A-string or on the 5-th fret of an E-string) so you can have various fingerings to play same thing - and thus can choose the fingering that is most comfortable for you, or fits best for the particular situation, you are in, and so on.
For me personally, that’s a valid argument! For the record - I can read both tabs and sheet music (not at master level, but still), and just like notes more than tabs).
So the questions are:
What do you think about that?
And are tabs inevitable for the beginner bass player, or It can be possible to use the notes right from the start (and then just getting more used to them and upgrading reading skills)?
I often use tabs to help learn a song. I sometimes continue to use them to help remind me where section changes are.
Ultimately, a fluent musician does not read tab or notation one note at a time while playing. They learn to recognize patterns and process them in chunks. So it comes down to what you’re most comfortable with.
Tabs are helpful but limited. Reading sheet music gives you much more information particularily for rhythm, note lenght, etc. As far as picking certain notes for fingering though you need to consider what is the best tone.
In my case, I’m working on sight reading and remembering the notes on the staff and their positon(s) on the fretboard. It’s not that hard other than getting it burned into memory!
You can always change the tab fingering to better suit you.
Tabs are not inevitable for beginner bass players. For me it is alot easier to play by tabs and moves me along quicker and is mentally easier at this stage of my playing. Do what is most important to you.
I use both and find it extremely funny that anyone looks down on either of them. Both are useful ways to convey the same information (especially since modern tabs contain tempo, note type and rests - technically modern tabs convey more info than standard notation, though it’s minor).
Yeah. Modern tabs and sheet music are both more or less equivalent ways to convey the same information for bass and guitar. I prefer standard notation but am happy to have either.
For other, non guitar-like instruments, tabs make no sense. I hate reading keyboard parts on tab sites, it’s ridiculous