Dear Tom, Please don't think that your questions are naive. You are asking all the right questions, and it is a pleasure to try to answer them.
Just two small points. 1) Tablature and staff notation both have their advantages. My view is that it is better to learn to read from staff notation on the lute first, until you are absolutely familiar with the G tuning. Otherwise there's a risk that you will think of the 1st course of the lute as e'. There is no need to rush into learning to read tablature. Very soon you'll be reading them both fluently. 2) Forgive me if I am stating the obvious, but your talk of 1/128th notes makes me wonder if you have made a common mistake. This sort of flag |\ | is a minim or half note, not a quaver or eighth note. This sort of flag |\ |\ | is a crotchet or quarter note, not a semiquaver or 1/16th note. This sort of flag |\ |\ |\ | is a quaver or eighth note, not a demi-semiquaver or 1/32nd note. If you want a 1/128th note (I don't know the English English for it), it would be |\ |\ |\ |\ |\ |\ |\ | in tablature. Heaven forbid. :-) Best wishes, Stewart McCoy. Another point that seems slightly superfluous is the wide variety of different note values. I must confess that I have all my lute music from Wayne's wonderful website, and there are pieces which seem to have 64th notes, where a 16th note a most would do. There appears to be no consistency about the notation, and I often find myself stuck between dotted 64th notes and 128th notes or whatever, where a few good old 1/4 notes etc. would do the trick just as well. Indeed Art Robb, who built my lute, has just given me some music distributed by the lute society of GB, and there they make use of 1/4 notes and the like, and this makes life a great deal easier. till I know what I'm talking about. It just interested me to know what the experts think of my naive questions and ideas.
