Lets’s play from Tab. What is your favorite Tab? How do you read Tab?
Two circle ago I was listening to John and Alan talk about slowing down the difficult parts in order to make the music possible. I was struck by the realization that the reason I have so much trouble with some of my efforts is that I play too fast. Since then I’ve reconnected with the TAB and my metronome.
Here are two different transcriptions of the Bouree from the Lute Suite in E-minor.
This music is intermediate level classical guitar. It has no really difficult stretches and not many bar positions. What is does seem to require is four working fingers on your left hand and a basic idea of how fingers relate to strings on the right hand. i, m, a play the high strings. T the thumb plays the three bottom, thicker, strings.
The key to playing this appears to be using a consistent fingering with the left hand. It is interesting to compare bars 8,12 and 14 which are marked in red. There are several ways to get the same notes on the guitar. I was given only the standard notation by my first teacher. I think the idea was that I should learn a bar or two at each lesson. That is not unreasonable but it would become expensive and I would have been forced to create my own tablature just to adequately record what I was being taught.
Most people should be able to learn a bar a day. This might take several hours but I’ve always thought it worthwhile.
Here are the TABs for The Entertainer and Spanish Romance contributed by Thomas Matheson.
Spanish Romance is about 29 min into the video above.
Pickers Circle 