Dear Howard and Vance, I was very interested to read your comments regarding the relative virtues of staff notation and tablature. Being a beginner, I find tablature means I have little or no idea which notes I am playing, whether I am supposed to play a fifth, an octave or indeed what interval is intended. Even the key is often a mystery (I do not have absolute pitch) What looks like a 'third' in staff notation can turn out to be anything between a second and a seventh. The letter 'd' in the first chord or two of Greensleeves, I discovered, represents about three entirely different notes. Of course my musical origins are in staff notation, and I am so used to hearing what I read before I even try to play it, that I find it very difficult to adapt to the new notation. I have managed, am beginning to recognise what is an octave, a scale, and the like, but find sight-reading very difficult. In staff notation one knows from the context what comes (or could come) next. To find a b-flat in a-major (to take the first example that occurs to me) would be highly significant, and not at all what one would expect. In tablature none of this seems possible, i.e. I have to read letter for letter (I imagine like some poor beginner in music, struggling to read any form of notation), rather than in what I would consider a 'total way'. Why, then, would it be so wrong to use normal staff notation? One would then be in the same position as the guitarist (and lute and guitar are not exactly light years apart), able to read and above all hear what was going on at a glance. To this beginner at least, that seems a definite advantage. Cheers
Tom Beck
