Tablature
Tablature (or tabulature, or tab for short) is a form of musical notation indicating instrument fingering or the location of the played notes rather than musical pitches.
Tablature is common for fretted stringed instruments such as the guitar, lute or vihuela, as well as many free reed aerophones such as the harmonica. Tablature was common during the Renaissance and Baroque eras, and is commonly used today in notating many forms of music.
Three types of organ tablature were used in Europe: German, Spanish and Italian.[1]
To distinguish standard musical notation from tablature, the former is usually called "staff notation" or just "notation".
Etymology[edit]
The word tablature originates from the Latin word tabulatura. Tabula is a table or slate, in Latin. To tabulate something means to put it into a table or chart.
History[edit]
Organ tablature is the first known tablature in Europe, used for notating music for the pipe organ around 1300.
Concepts[edit]
While standard notation represents the rhythm and duration of each note and its pitch relative to the scale based on a twelve tone division of the octave, tablature is instead operationally based, indicating where and when a finger should be placed to generate a note, so pitch is denoted implicitly rather than explicitly. Tablature for plucked strings is based upon a diagrammatic representation of the strings and frets of the instrument, keyboard tablature represents the keys of the instrument, and woodwind tablature shows whether each of the fingerholes is to be closed or left open.
For example, on a "C" diatonic instrument:
To indicate button-press on a chromatic instrument, a similar indication to first-level bending may be used.
The breath indicator may be placed right next to the hole number, or below the number. The same is true for bending or button-press indicators.
To indicate the beat, in the arrow system the length of the arrow may be varied. However, the more popular method is to use a slightly simplified rhythm-symbol notation, such as "o" for a semibreve, // for a minim, "/" for a crotchet, "." for quavers, and place them above the characters, while spacing them accordingly.
For chords, the numbers to play are shown, so, for example:
a C major (CEG) chord (on a C diatonic instrument): 456e
However, they may simplify it, especially when playing blues. For chords, it was common to just play three or two holes instead (sometimes even just one), especially when the instrument is not of the same key. For example, in the blues progression in G (G G G G7 C C G G D7 D7 G G) it is common to use a C diatonic instrument, and notate the following:
There are many harmonica tablature systems in use. The easiest tablature system works like this.
Diatonic Harmonica tablature
chords are shown by grouping notes with parentheses
(2 3) = blow the 2 hole and the 3 hole at the same time
Chromatic Harmonica tablature
Here is an example of harmonica tablature:
"Mack the Knife"
C Diatonic