In fact, I’d say without hesitation that drum tab is ultimately harder to read and certainly to write. The rhythm above was basically the simplest drum beat we could have, and already the tab looks quite messy. 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.Īttempt 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. 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. 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. 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. This made tab files much easier to share around and archive in the past. In this respect, drum tab did a good job of mimicking sheet music well enough to get across what to play. However the internet of today has no problem handling large documents and images, and a sheet of music is a very small file. Nowadays, when you can download entire scores in an instant, I can’t see any reason at all to be using drum tab.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |