Being a guitarist, I have a very negative attitude toward tablature.
JSB wrote his 1st lute suite with tab and never messed with it again.
The rest of the lute suites had notation. Not many composers have
enough patience to stick with it that long. One might argue that it was
mainly tab that made the lute the dead instrument it is today. (A dead
instrument has a past but no future.)
Unfortunately, tab is a necessity for a lot of banjo music. Notation
does not give enough information to the banjo player to make it possible
for him|her to perform it. Neither does tab. Both together are
required. In this situation, the tab should be considered a neat way of
writing fingering, not an alternative notation, because there is no way
of writing complex music with tab that gives the performer enough
information to be able to play it without hearing it, simply because
one has only the beginnings of the notes. There is no indication
whatever when notes end, and therefore no way of guessing parts or
automatically inferring what the parts should be.
None of the extant programs, free or not, can generate tab from good
notation (notation which conveys enough information about how the music
should sound to make it possible to play it without hearing it first).
They require one part, or two at most, which makes the exercise utterly
pointless. You end with two staves which together don't have enough
information. GIGO. I would very much like to be able to generate tab
for banjo under a single staff having 3 or 4 parts, so the player could
see what it really sounded like in notation and how to play it in tab.
I hope that someone does it someday. Please not yet. Real notation
first. :-)
Another issue is programs which transcribe tab into notation. There
are lots of them. Since the finished product has only one part, I fail
to see that such software could ever be of any use at all. There are
examples of such transcriptions done by hand in books on lute music.
They would require so much further editing that they might as well not
be done at all. One can't transcribe what isn't there.
apropos of nothing:
I use American tuning for banjo, which tuning passed out of use in the
1880's. I love it. I do not inflict it on others. The last thing
written for it was Mack the Knife, presumably because B. Brecht hadn't
heard over there in Germany that it wasn't used anymore. People have
a hell of a time when they work with the original score. :-)
--
Peace, understanding, health and happiness to all beings!
U U u ^^ ` 'U u U ''`'`
_-__o|oO|o-_|o_o_-_MN[-->mm@_-_--___o|o|oU_|o_o__lilypond
dave N Va USA David Raleigh Arnold [EMAIL PROTECTED]
