h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"Guitar tablature (or 'tab') is the way lazy guitarists, or those who don't want to actually learn how to read music, read and transcribe riffs, licks and songs"

Please read A1046963 "The Three Ages of Music" before you commit such an outrageous slur on tablature users.

This is an example of the pot calling the kettle white. Staff notation is one way of writing music, tablature is another. Staff notation has no claim to superiority; it does not more truly represent musical sound.

Your only justification for downgrading the status of tab is that "the timing can be quite hard, and for the best results the musician must really know how the tune goes."

This is also true of staff notation.

Tablature was invented in the early sixteenth century, using the signs for time-values that were already established in staff notation. These note values are written above the tab, and work perfectly well. For contrapuntal music (fantasias and fugues) they work particularly well, giving the reader a single line of rhythm signs to read instead of a forest of concurrent time systems trying to keep the voices visually separate; which is always problematic, often inaccurate, and utterly unnecessary.

It is an unfortunate fact for guitarists that at the time the modern classical guitar was invented (around 1770) the piano was the favourite instrument, and the guitarists of the time aped both the notation and texture of piano music.

Now, will you apologise to yourself and all other noble users of tablature?

Guitarist players are lucky they only have one system of tablature to cope with (and alphabetto - the system of using chord names invented in late 16th/early 17th C Italy).

Lutenists and players of other associated intstruments have several tablature forms to deal with; French - letters a,b,c..., excluding j, for each fret on each string on a stave of 5 or 6 lines with the top line corresponding to the top string, any extra strings written underneath ; Italian - numbers 0,1...9,X as above, except the string order on the stave is up-side-down, the top string being written on the bottom line ; German - each individual fret/string combination is given a lower case letter with some letters missed and two replaced with symbols, 25 in all, which are repeated with a tick for the next 25 etc, these are for the top five strings the frets for the bottom string designated A,B,C... .

The tabs above are the main regional ones, I know of four others that are local in time and space to particular composers as well as minor variations in main three .

Modern Guitar tab is remarkably straight forward and standardised especially in rhythm notation and the adoption of staff notation symbols for effects.

Modern guitar tab is the same the remaining principal one you didn't mention -- Spanish vihuela tablature. ¡Viva España!

Only the tablature of Luis Milans; El Maestro is similar to modern guitar tab, all the other published vihuela works are in italian tablature, even the renaissance guitar pieces found in some works.

Luis Milan
He the man