tablature notation tautology

[David Raleigh Arnold]

Tablature notation is used for notating music for plucked string instruments. It 
notates pitches not by using note heads, but by indicating on which string and fret a 
note must be played.

Seemingly a minor matter, but troublesome, producing wrong thinking, and leading to 
mistakes already.  Tablature is not notation.  Better something like:

Tablature does not give pitches, but instead indicates how notes are to be played.  
In the case of plucked stringed instruments, it gives string and fret.

There was such a thing as keyboard tablature, for one thing, when the keyboard was 
first invented.  I'll have harmonica tablature pretty soon, or rather a helper for it. 
 It can be done now, without great difficulty.  Some
wind instruments give fingering by a diagram of the holes.  Producing the tab is 
simply a matter of putting
little black and white circles in as fingering.  If it's on a single line staff 
instead of a regular one, it's
tab, otherwise, it's notation.

Actually, all drum notation is tablature, strictly speaking, but there you don't have 
both tablature and notation to cause confusion, so drum notation makes sense.  
Tablature notation does not.  DaveA
 


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Re: tablature notation tautology

[William R Brohinsky]

Before this becomes something other than the trivial pursuit that it is,
let's lay it to rest once and for all.

Tablature is notation. Every dictionary and encyclopaedia I can access,
physical and online agrees. Music notation on staves with noteheads, in
fact, can be considered a kind of tabliture, in fact. However, music
notation is simply a system for indicating how to play music. Any
system. Tablatures, successive fingering diagrams,
staff-and-notehead-and-flag/stem, the lot.

While tablatures are not _limited_ to plucked instruments, the statement
is utterly accurate that

David Raleigh Arnold wrote:
 
 Tablature notation is used for notating music for plucked string instruments. It 
notates pitches not by
using note heads, but by indicating on which string and fret a note must
be played.
 

Although the statement can be taken to be exclusive or absolute, it is
not either.

 Seemingly a minor matter, but troublesome, producing wrong thinking, and leading to 
mistakes already.
Tablature is not notation.  

The claim 'tablature is not notation' is the actual inaccurate
statement, leading to wrong thinking. (Notation is not notation because
it uses 'notes': notes are called notes because they were a form of
notation that became common and wanted a name for the entities. Notes
can also be jotted letters on a pad, informative marginal entries, or
many other things: are these things all music?)

Moreover, the real question is whether the definition proffered
originally meets the description of the tablature that Lilypond is
currently capable of making. It does.

If we're going to get tautological about tablature in a manner that is
effective where lilypond is concerned, it might be more useful to
consider how we're going to be differentiating harmonica tablature from
German organ tablature from wind instrument graphic fingering
representations from line-and-number tabs like Lily does now. Unless the
mechanism for notating (and perhaps the mechanism by which the objects
are selected and placed?) is uniform, this is where differentiating and
delineating will be of importance.

raybro



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