The Guitar Tab Edition

On learning, notation, and process

John Peabody is a friend of WITI. He writes the excellent Substack the Hand & Eye.

John here. I’ve been playing guitar for almost three decades. Someday I might actually learn how to play it too. Like a lot of guitarists, I’m the campfire kind of player who knows how to pluck out a couple of tunes, knows how to bar chords, and has a general understanding of scales, but I quickly lose it if I attempt a solo or do anything up the neck. 

My “study” of guitar has also mirrored the rise of the internet. When I first started playing, I used to go to sites like rukind.com (amazingly it’s still up) and the Online Guitar Archive (OLGA) to find chords and tablature for songs. Tablature (Tabs) is essentially the way guitarists cheat to write music. Like sheet music, Tabs are written on a staff but the horizontal lines correspond to strings, not pitch, so it’s really only useful for guitar.  During these early days of my guitar playing, internet forums and Tab sites seemed like an amazing unlocking of user-generated content and showed me the potential of the internet.  

Then YouTube came and a bunch of guitar instructors took to the platform to offer lessons. Eric Haugen is a personal favorite. Haugen sells tabs for songs he teaches on his channel for pretty cheap, and it makes it possible to learn a song “with” him. I tried this a couple of times, but it didn’t really stick. 

I recently found what I would call the next evolution in online guitar instruction and it’s blown my mind. 

Why is this interesting?

Pow Music has created a new kind of guitar instruction video that combines an evolved version of guitar tab with animated color-coded marks for fingers and actual videos of artists playing the song that they call fretLIVE TAB. It’s hard to explain so here’s one to watch to see what I mean. 

You can see exactly what and how the guitarist is playing while also hearing them. I’m not sure what the tech behind these videos is, but the labor to produce them must be intense. A skilled guitarist must have to learn the song note for note, transcribe it (into actual sheet music most likely) and an additional layer of motion graphics are added. Needless to say, it’s big a step above the old days of posting basic tabs to a guitar forum. 

I’ve found myself dazzled by these videos. I wish I could tell you that I’ve learned Steve Ray Vaughan’s Tin Pan Alley and Red House by Jimi Hendrix by dutifully watching them guitar in hand. I have not. 

What I have gained is a much deeper understanding of how these guitarists approach their playing. Being able to see the keys they’re playing in, which fingers their using, patterns of licks and runs, etc., while listening to the song, is a bit akin to suddenly being able to understand a foreign language, without actually being able to speak it.

So while I won’t be sliding up the neck into a solo anytime soon, I do have an even deeper appreciation for some of my favorite musicians and their unique flair. (JP).