Nowadays, when you can download entire scores in an instant, I can’t see any reason at all to be using drum tab. However the internet of today has no problem handling large documents and images, and a sheet of music is a very small file. In this respect, drum tab did a good job of mimicking sheet music well enough to get across what to play. This made tab files much easier to share around and archive in the past. The only thing I can think to say in its defence is that in the early days of the internet, bandwidth was at a premium, and a tab written in ASCII computer characters was a much smaller file than a PDF or JPG of written music notation. Both languages are equally hard (or easy) to speak when it comes to drums, and, unlike guitar, drum tab offers no significant shortcuts or advantages. No one, apart from other drummers, knows what drum tab means.ĭrum tab is a bit like learning a language that only a few other people speak, when instead you could invest the same amount of time and learn the one everybody is already speaking. Not only is it really no easier to read a drum tab than it is just to read notation, you’re investing your time in getting comfortable with a system that has no musical value and zero transferability. ![]() Attempt to do it on a standard word processor and your results usually end up looking more like this: And another thing to bear in mind is that this tab was written in a program that perfectly aligns the columns. The rhythm above was basically the simplest drum beat we could have, and already the tab looks quite messy. In fact, I’d say without hesitation that drum tab is ultimately harder to read and certainly to write. There is no significant difference in the difficulty level of reading drum tab or just reading actual drum notation. Similarly, what’s the difference between learning to write the hihat as x’s on a line marked “HH”, and just knowing it’s actually the x’s in space above the top line (G in the treble clef) in notation? Likewise, it is really no harder to commit to memory that the snare drum is represented by note heads in the second space down from the top (C in the treble clef), than it is to say “It’s the “o’s” on the second line from the bottom marked “S” in tab. It takes no longer to learn that the bass drum is always represented by note heads in the lowest space of the stave (F in the treble clef), as it would to learn that, in tab, it’s the “o’s” on the lowest line marked “B”. How does drum tab make things any easier? With these points in mind, let’s compare a basic beat written in drum tab to the same beat written in notation:īoth of these display exactly the same rhythm – bass drum on beats 1 and 3, snare on 2 and 4, while the closed hihat plays steady eighth notes on top. It’s to show that when it comes to reading and writing music, the challenges presented by some instruments are demonstrably greater than others. The point of this isn’t to say that drums are easier to master than guitar. Unlike guitar, it’s not like you have four or five snare drums scattered around that each have a slightly different tone, and you have to decide within a split second which one to hit. If you’re told to hit the snare drum, for example, there can be no confusion what to do because there is only one snare drum in the kit. In addition to this, there is only one place any particular piece of the kit can be played. ![]() ![]() However, a drum kit has a very small number of “playable pieces” compared to guitar - 8 or 9 versus well over 100 at minimum. So it should be easy to see how tab helps when it comes to guitar. When you have between 130 and almost 200 places you might need to be, that’s a hell of a lot of information to have to keep on top of. Īnd if you happen to play a 7 or even 8 string guitar? You’re looking at 168 to 192 playable frets. If you have a 24 fret guitar that rises to 144. Does that sound like a lot? Let’s quickly compare it to a guitar.Ħ string guitar x 22 frets = 132 playable notes So there are eight or nine individual items that you can hit on a standard kit.
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