Your musical choices are as valid as anyone's. It should encourage you to increase your vocabulary. Seeing that someone else's tablature differs from what you play should not make you second guess your own abilities. If we want to expand our spoken vocabulary, we have to read and listen to other users of language. Same as when we converse with others, speak up in a meeting or write posts on a forum: we use words and phrases we already know. But mostly when we work out our own arrangements, we're quoting ourselves, using the rolls, phrases, chord shapes and vocabulary we already know. Of course it's possible to create our own licks (or independently come up with licks that others already play). It's great to learn how others approach and fill the same musical need.
To increase our understanding of the banjo's possibilities.Īs you're discovering, the arrangements you work out on your own don't always match the ideas of other players. If we're able to work up our own arrangements - as you can - why use tab? For the same reason we listen to and try to learn from other players, whether by ear or by tab: To expand our banjo vocabulary so that we have more ways to make music. Even the most composed vs improvised piece. Sometimes it represents one way that an artist played the piece one time. Please remember this overriding truth about tablature: It represents one way of playing one particular piece of music. It's also a necessary ability for improvising in a jam - which is essentially working out an arrangement in real time as you need it. I know it might sound silly but it makes me kind of second guess my abilities as a picker.Ĭongratulations on being able to work out arrangements on your own. Sometimes I will learn something by ear all the way through and then I'll come across the tab for it and realize that while what I've worked up on my own sounds close, I'm not playing exactly the same rolls and licks as whoever wrote it. I have come to realize that is much easier and much more enjoyable for me to play by ear than it is to try and sit down with tab and learn something note for note. For those few songs that you want to get "exactly right," you learn by tab, but then memorize it. I think that if you can play Scruggs style, mostly by ear, then you're doing pretty good. Consequently, I play clawhammer banjo style mostly, which I can play by ear well enough. This is in contrast to, say the fiddle or piano, where I can just hear a song a few times and then play a decent enough version of it without too much difficulty (I'm not talking about difficult classical music, just the 1,4,5 and relative minor kind of stuff). If I want to play a bluegrass song in that style (or a closely aligned style), I have to learn it by tab. More to your point, I never have been able to play Scruggs style banjo by ear. I readily conceed that playing by tab is fun for a lot of people. It seems more like work than play, and I already have a day job. I look at tabs or sheet music from time to time to figure out a particularly difficult passage, but learning a banjo song by tab is NOT fun for me. I play the banjo, fiddle, harmonica and piano, all by ear. Should I focus my attention on being a quicker tab reader? Or should I just keep learning songs by ear and not worry too much about the tab? I'm wondering if anyone else has similar thoughts :)įunny you should mention this Tyler, I was thinking about the same thing very recently. I know it might sound silly but it makes me kind of second guess my abilities as a picker. Does anyone else experience this? The downside is that there are some tunes I would like to get just right (mostly classic Scruggs tunes). I guess for me there is some kind of mental block that makes it more difficult. For whatever reason I just get to playing a tune much faster if I don't try to follow the tab. Along the way I have come to realize that is much easier and much more enjoyable for me to play by ear than it is to try and sit down with tab and learn something note for note. I feel like I've been sort of stuck at one ability level for a lack of really focusing on improving in specific areas. I've played the banjo for many years (both clawhammer and Scruggs style) but recently I've been trying to get myself to the next level of playing especially with my three finger picking.
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