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Bass Guitar Tabs – Learning through Tabs

Bass Guitar Tabs – Learning through Tabs Guitar tablature is one of the easiest ways of learning a certain piece, but it is advised that you do not make tabs your only source of learning. There are more important things than knowing how to play a certain piece, and this includes understanding your music theory. But for now, we will look at what tablature is, and how this will apply to bass guitar tabs.

1. If you want to know how to play songs on guitar, you could either learn it by ear, have someone demonstrate it for you, read musical notation or use tablature. The most helpful method is to learn by ear, but if you do not know enough about note intervals and chords, you will most likely end up with a wrong rendition of a song.

Musical notation is surely an impressive way of going about things. Only a small percentage of players actually know what a whole note looks like or what a tie is for, and only a few are able to read on sight without fumbling around nervously.

Bass Guitar Tabs – Learning through Tabs

2. Tabs are the most convenient way to learn a piece, but it is kind of considered ‘cheating’ because it is so easy to do. All you have know is that the six (or four) lines in tablature represent the six (or four) strings of the guitar (or bass), and the numbers on them represent the fret numbers. Because there is no time indication for tab, you would have to know how a certain song goes in order to play it right and with the right timing.

Tabs are a great tool for beginners because they feed you the right information as to what to play, but do not require any real musical aptitude on your part. You do not even need to know the names of chords or the relationships between notes, or what the minor scale is. All you need to do is follow the numbers and the lines.

3. It need not be said that you are not to grow dependent on tablature use. Sure they are easy to use, but that ease is precisely what prevents you from progressing in musicality. You have to challenge yourself, and a part of this is making use of your ear to learn.

Bass Guitar Tabs – Learning through Tabs

4. There must be an effort on your part to be able to identify a bass guitar chord and the notes involved, and how these could be varied elsewhere in the fretboard. You have to be able to tell by ear the difference between a six-note interval and a five-note interval. You could do the latter by playing yourself these intervals, and recognizing and internalizing the differences between the intervals.

By understanding the way notes go along together and the variations for these, you are on the road to weaning yourself off bass guitar tabs and embarking on a journey of self-discovery. You could learn musical notation, for one thing, which is an immensely satisfying experience. Another thing you could do is learn the songs you like by ear, and tabbing these out for beginners on the bass guitar. Share these tabs while gently admonishing players that they must grow up one day and find a more sophisticated manner of bass guitar instruction.

Making Your Own Bass Guitar Tabs

After developing a certain proficiency, you are going to perhaps give a bass guitar lesson of your own. A great tool for bass guitar instruction is the use of tablature. There is much you can impart to students by the use of bass guitars tabs.

Many online bass guitar lessons are done with the use of tabs. In fact, there is so much information on bass playing out there that is put into tab form, that a good percentage of tab is done by novices who are getting songs like Blink 182’s ‘Adam’s Song’ bass tabs all wrong.

A rule of thumb is this. If you Google a random tab for a song, for your use or the use of your pupil’s, chances are it would be all wrong. This is why it helps to have a good ear to verify these tabs, or to learn a song yourself and put this into tabs.

1. For bass guitar, it may be insufficient to have just the frets and lines indicating what to play. After all, good technique must be inculcated early on. You could not expect one to play funk bass or something like a Flea bass solo if they didn’t know what to do with their right and left hands.

Slap bass may seem like an intuitive thing, until you hear bad attempts at it. Tabs must at the very least be supplemented by bass guitar videos, say on Youtube, to show how something is to be done right.

2. You should know how to go about writing tabs. Even if you are fairly capable of learning by ear, an inefficient manner of putting things down on paper could lead to a great loss of time.

3. It is advised for you to learn things by the passage. Let us say you are tabbing a song for your student to learn guitar arpeggios. You do not need to play and then pause and then write down the note, and then play-pause-write again.

It is much better to hear how a passage goes and the arrangement of say eight notes in succession, before putting this down either with a pen, or typed out in your computer.

After all, if you have learned sufficient musical theory and are familiar with arpeggio shapes, then you would be familiar with the notes being played and have the proper order of it in your head. This saves so much time, even hours of it.

4. After tabbing out something, it helps to do a ‘spell check.’ Review the entire piece or song, listening to it while reading your tabs. For fast passages, either slow down the tempo or use the pause function.

In reviewing what you did, you may notice some mistakes you have made. Another good thing about reviewing your work is that you are able to comprehend the work as a whole, and even find better and less awkward fingerings and positions for a certain part.

Even when you teach using bass guitar tabs, make sure your student’s horizons are expanded, teaching him listening methods and the proper theory for him to be able to learn tabbing as well.