Reading tab and standard notation together
Short answer. Tablature gives you string and fret but is vague about rhythm and silence; notation gives you rhythm, pitch and duration but not which string to use. Guitar Pro files carry both, so read the tab for the hand and the notation above it for the time.
Open your tab file with Tabline
What tab is good at
Tablature is a map of the fingerboard: six lines, a number on each for the fret. It answers the question notation cannot — where on the neck. For guitar, where matters: the same pitch exists in up to five places and they do not sound or feel the same.
What tab leaves out
- Duration. Plain ASCII tab has no note lengths at all; you are expected to know the song.
- Rests. Silence is part of the music, and tab tends to show nothing where nothing is played.
- Voices. A melody over a bass line is two things happening at once; tab flattens them.
Guitar Pro tab is better than ASCII tab here — it carries rhythm — but the rhythm is easier to read off a notation staff, which was designed for exactly that.
Reading the pair
Look up for time, down for place. Your eyes should spend most of their time on the tab staff — the fingering is what you are executing — and flick up at the start of each bar to see the rhythmic shape you are about to play. After a while it stops being two readings and becomes one.
Notation earns its place on three things
- Dotted and tied notes, where the tab number tells you nothing about the length.
- Rests, especially the short ones that give a riff its shape.
- Two voices on one staff, where stems up and down show you what belongs to what.
When to turn notation off
When you already know the piece and want more bars on screen. A phone showing tab alone fits about twice as much music, which is the right trade once the rhythm is in your hands. Tabline switches between notation-plus-tab and tab-only per file, and remembers what you chose for that file.
See both staves on the phone
Tabline draws standard notation above tablature, or tab on its own if that is how you read.
