I also suffer from the same dependence on tabs. I just don't seem to be able to play by ear, and find it very difficult to memorize the tabs. I have about 20 or so melodies that I can play reasonably well, but must read the tabs. It's getting pretty frustrating.
Start by learning to find easy catch lines.....like the lick to Low Rider....hint...start on three draw unbent on a C harp...learning off simple phrases and licks worked for me anyway...it took awhile but the more I figured out short licks and phrases the easier it became..starts at 27 seconds
TABs are very useful, but blues harp is ideal for developing skills by ear. Find your favourite slow blues on CD or iPod and play along, over and over and over, 'borrowing' the licks from the masters. The only trick involved is hard-earned practice. Do it enough and the licks become second-nature and the big step towards improvisation suddenly becomes a smaller step. Do this a couple of hours a day with no TABs in sight, and you'll soon shake your 'need' for the TAB crutch.
I have the opposite problem. I do it almost all by ear and when someone asks me to tab something out I have to play the note, slide my finger in between my lip and my harp and figure out what note I just played. I'm usually pretty good at getting the melody down, but the melody gets so stuck in my head I can't figure out anything else to play sometimes.
I went from learning the instrument to playing in a band very quickly. The only way I could do this was to use some tab sheets. I've begun to slowly wean myself from this crutch. I find that when I now learn a new riff/tune I don't need any references to perform.
I sometimes have a hard time identifying every interval (note) by ear. Tabs (or written music, or letter names of notes) can be a big help for learning to play a particular passage accurately.
But I usually don't refer back to tab once I learn the tune. Melodies (or other passages) have a pattern to them which is more or less easy to follow. After i know the tune, it's pretty easy to remember the pattern by ear once I start playing.
I think playing melodies accurately is more difficult than improvising or soloing around a melody.
I gave up on tabs after I'd been learning for a year. a) practice makes your ears better, and b) (not to accuse the harp of being limited) there are only a few recognisable patterns. e.g. most harp playing either involves sliding up or down, drawing or blowing, so that's only 4 possibilities. It's not as though the ear has to be listening for myriad possibilities. This is just a matter of becoming familiar with harp-players' technique through practice. ---------- Andrew, gentleman of leisure, noodler extraordinaire.
Last Edited by on Feb 07, 2011 5:03 AM
I think that they can be a very good teaching tool. 1) I used them to look or what I would call patterns. 2) If there is a song that you love and want to learn right away it helps alot. I know, I've heard from you guys about it being a better learning experience to get ALL of it by ear (and I agree). That can become frustrating for a new player. 3) I thin keveryone would agree that the goal is to get away from them at every opportunity. And yes, play by ear to your CD's. As a new player, if I wanted to put together a set of songs to play, tabs would drop the learning time tremdously.
For me, tabbing out a song is part of the process for accurately learning a song. It requires repeated listening, and then putting the notes and TIMING to paper. Once the harmonica part(licks, melodies, backing)is ingrained in my ear (this normally happens very quickly), I rarely look back at the tab sheets. However, it's way easier to check back at a tab sheet than to listen to the track for questions or if you forget something. Just my experience, little as it is. ---------- Ken Cardwell YouTube videos
I take whatever help I can get. Tabs, Youtube lessons, video/audio slowdowner's, etc.
I love this instrument but I'm also well aware of my limitations as far as talent is concerned. I'm not artistic in any way and so improvisation is hard for me.
Between working full time, dealing with my rental properties, homeschooling my three boys and keeping my marriage together, I seem to always be short on time. From Friday afternoon until Monday morning I usually don't get to play much harp.
Tabs, more than anything else, help me figure out the subtleties (as Adam calls them) that I can't figure out.
I feel that it is a crutch because you wind up like the way some classical musicians get taught and you really don't properly use your ears. ---------- Sincerely, Barbeque Bob Maglinte Boston, MA http://www.barbequebob.com CD available at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/bbmaglinte
I am using the tab for juke and trying to learn the part past the first 8 repetitive riffs-the tabs for it go for several pages but maybe once I get past this maybe not use tabs for the rest-juke is a difficult one for me as I have trouble with fast tempos
Well, it depends on where you get your tabs. I sit in with a jazz band occasionally. The leader has a masters in music and will sometimes write jazz heads out for me in note names. I convert these to tab in order to learn to play the heads accurately and these tabs are almost always right.
The accuracy of the stuff you find on line varies considerably. The tabs on the Wandering Wilf's Harp Surgery site are consistently very accurate.
Learning by ear is preferable but my ear is not always good enough to figure out all the stuff I try to learn. but once i know for sure what the notes are, i can usually play by ear without referring back to the tab
@ OzarkRich "Between working full time, dealing with my rental properties, homeschooling my three boys and keeping my marriage together, I seem to always be short on time."
Sounds to me like you need to GET YOUR PRIORITIES STRAIGHT, brother!
Just kidding!!! I have kids and a job, too.
---------- It's MUSIC, not just complicated noise.
I play by ear but sometimes I find that I have 'selective hearing'. I find tabs have their limited use. I play Irish fiddle and some bluegrass stuff which doesn't have lyrics & in the initial learning of the tunes I find tabs useful. If a tune has lyrics I generally find I can play it without reference to tabs. A lot of tabs are wrong ie even those that are supplied and transcribed by top players/teachers sometimes have mistakes.
To learn something accurately by ear I put the music into Audacity(free recording software)in which it is possible to slow down without altering the pitch.
"@pistolero: I'm leaving my family behind to attend HCH 2 so there's hope! :)"
That's the spirit! Hey man everybody needs some kind of vacation once in a great while anyway. If I get it all together myself maybe I can make it too.
---------- It's MUSIC, not just complicated noise.
"Well, it depends on where you get your tabs. I sit in with a jazz band occasionally. The leader has a masters in music and will sometimes write jazz heads out for me in note names. I convert these to tab in order to learn to play the heads accurately and these tabs are almost always right."
Of course! :) My buddy does the same thing. Of course he gives me Punk stuff to sort out. Wish I had one of those "Jazz Guys".
ONLINE tabs mostly suck. Though I've never heard of "Wandering Wilf's" ------------
Last Edited by on Feb 08, 2011 7:24 AM
I feel better after reading this thread. I have only been playing for 6 weeks, but just can not remember the notes to lessons or songs without seeing them in tab form. I know it's early in the game, but frustrating none the less.
BeaverIslander, that will come with time. I think tab is useful, but over reliance on it can make it harder to internalize the notes in your head. If you really hear the melody in your head and learn where those notes are on your harp then you'll be able to play along with anything you can remember well enough to whistle or hum. At six weeks very few people will be at that point though, where you really know what noise is about to come out of the hole.
If you know the key and the first note then as you learn the different intervals it will start to really gel.
I'm in a similar situation as BeaverIsland. I'm re-learning to play harp after about 10 years of not playing at all. I got to about an intermediate level when I first learnt and expected that things would come back to me fairly quickly. Unfortunately I'm making very slow progress. I can play OK with the tabs in front of me but find it difficult to memorise songs and play without the tabs.
I agree about the sometimes dubious quality of tabs online; even at this early stage some of them just don't look right to me. There doesn't seem to be many harp tab books available in music stores or online compared to the vast amount of guitar tab books. Has anyone else found this or am I just looking in the wrong place?
One tab book I've found useful is Jon Gindick's "Bluesify Your Melody." I integrate some of the tabs at random into my practice sessions. Most of of them are of the "Old Favorite" variety, tabbed out in 2nd position.
It's really been helpful to me in improving my bending skills . . . and playing something familiar (House of the Rising Sun . . . that sort of stuff) is a nice change-up from straight exercises.
Once I know the basics of the song I'll keep the book shut, play the tune from memory, and throw in various improvisations. Keeps things fun. ---------- Marr's Guitars
Offering custom-built Cigar Box Guitars for the discriminating player of obscure musical unstruments
Just a couple of my observations about tabs: 1)they are a tremendously valuable learning aid for beginners and intermediates. 2)they are great way to store knowledge of a tune you have learned when you come back to it later. 3)You ARE training your ear when you use tab, because they make no sense by themselves without intensely focussed attention to the recording. 4)Breaking down a song by ear and creating your own transcription is even more valuable for training your ear. 5)For performance you must get wayyyy past reading tab, and even past memorization, until you are playing that memorized material with feeling ,in the moment, with full awareness of the other musicians around you. 6)Be careful with tab. True story: We had a lead singer who picked up lyrics by ear. After playing Sonny Boy Williamson's "Bring it on Home" about a hundred times we discovered he had been substituting " I got my chicken and I got my Loaf" instead of "ticket and load". :)!!! Point being, written records are not a bad thing, but watch out, you could easily be playing someone else's "chicken and loaf".
You can no more perform from tab than a singer can perform while focussed on reading lyrics. But written lyrics can be a helpful starting point.
I find GOOD tabs to be very useful to me. Both Adam Gussow and Dave Barrett present good tabs IMO. They are good not because they are "accurate" but because they communicate the time properly. Both these guys give you enough information to be able to count out the piece so that you can get it right.
I like to use a tab to learn a new song or some new phrases. Then I like to take that material and use in other songs, other places and to improvise around. For example I take Adam's riff from his "Floyd's Garage" lesson and use that as the foundation of a solo to just about any medium tempo blues, I add some rhythm bits and play with the length of the individual notes to produce what I feel at the time.
There's a technique that my piano teacher used to use on me that I use on harmonica students...
We would work on a classical piece a page at a time...After a few weeks of working on one page, I would be staring at the printed music while playing.
My teacher would wait a moment and then snatch the music off the music stand. At first, I would freeze up (in a panic), but he would tell me "now keep playing...you know the music". After I lived through the panic moment, I would start to slowly piece the music together from my memory. Even though it was not consistent and at tempo, I eventually found that I did indeed know the music internally, and could start to play it from memory slowly.
This broke that fear and insecurity barrier and moved me into another realm of musicianship.- ---------- The Iceman
tabs are great when you first starting playing to give you a clue about what's going on but after you develop some knowledge and can see patterns, ditch the tabs altogether.........use your ears!! Ear training is best!
Tabs are like training wheels....you got to take them off at some point and have confidence that you will not lose your balance.
Last Edited by blueswannabe on Mar 15, 2015 7:59 AM
Don't know about anyone else, but have never used tabs...never liked the idea. Always felt it better to feel the music and let the ear do the teaching. And no, I don't consider myself to be at an "expert" level. I still marvel at great harp players, both past and present who could and can do amazing things on a diatonic and the ability some have at mastering breath control for rapid, continuous playing, especially in a long solo. (Yeah, I had to take a couple of breaths to write that last sentence!)
I used tabs when I first started learning but now I prefer to use a lead sheet to help me learn a new song.
@The Iceman, your anecdote resonates with what I have been doing lately. I am working with some young musicians who are playing band instruments. You should see the look of terror when I ask them to play without music. There is also a sense of accomplishment when after a few minutes they can play a tune having never seen the music.
I it also amazing how quickly, after spending a few minutes learning a blues scale, they can jam along to a blues backing track in the key we just learned. It may not be great but it is good enough for them to have fun with!
Last Edited by STME58 on Mar 15, 2015 8:52 PM
Learn the intervals. Apply them to your tabs. Use the intervals to remember what you need. Transpose, using intervals, your harp tabs to other harp positions, piano, vocals, tin whistles etc. Repeat over and over until fluent ----------
Last Edited by JInx on Mar 16, 2015 1:54 AM
To build on what Iceman wrote, I read an article analysing how many classical musicians use the sheet music, for a piece they know well and aren't sight-reading. What they do is remember the music in quite large chunks i.e. whole passages rather than just phrases, and use the sheet music as a cue as to how to start off that passage. It's more of an automatic thing than a conscious one, as when you are learning a piece you start of sight reading, and get used to having the music in front of you. The size of the chunks I guess depends on the musician and the nature of the music.
That squared with my experience. I'm not sure about whipping the music away :) but you can consciously do the 'chunking' and find another way to remember how to kick off each passage. Like learning the first few notes of the passage. Once the passage is in motion, your memory should take over. That's the theory! :)
Still, quite a skill in itself to sight-read tabs for the harmonica, you should be pleased! Because there is no information about the rhythm, you must be using a lot of memory anyway to reconstruct the tune.
I agree with Iceman and others who talk about the importance of the moment when you walk away from the tabs.
Obviously I'm an interested party in all this, because I've devoted a lot of sweat equity to the project of creating the most accurate tabs I possibly can. And I'm selling them on this website. But I also believe that you should use them in a particular way. Use them to feel your way carefully through the song; use them, once you've done that, to play your way through the song. Then memorize the song and put the tabs aside. The goal with any given tab sheet should always be to get AWAY from it as soon as you can--once you've memorized the piece of music that it represents.
I used the primitive tabs in Tony Glover's book very early on, but 99.9% of my own learning on harmonica took place in a non-tab dialogue with the music itself.
Correction: much later, once I was a good player, I learned a lot by trying to tab out music that I was able to play, or that I heard on records. So yes: slowly and patiently tabbing out harmonica music is a very good adjunct to your own learning process.
Last Edited by kudzurunner on Mar 16, 2015 5:02 AM
It's funny. I'm trying to figure out a harp line for a song I wrote. I was having problems figuring out where I needed to be on the harp- it's going to be the first time I play out with my Hohner 365 and I was having what I thought was an issue with muscle memory and figuring out which holes where which, especially since I'm making a big jump in a couple of spots (I'm playing the chorus on the extended low notes) and I was having a hard time finding the first note when I switched to the verse. I was sitting, trying to count holes and kept screwing up the verse. Usually I know all the words to our songs, or at least the melodies, since I write most of the melodies, but this one the guitar player wrote. I suddenly realized I was trying to play something I'd memorized by holes instead of by ear. I scratched my head and tried to think of the line he was singing and suddenly, 365 or not, I was able to jump to the right spot on the harmonica.
I think that's the key. Tabs are fine for figuring something out, but they don't necessarily help with that second skill, knowing your harmonicas intervals. If you want to learn a specific song tabs are fine, but you also have to spend time learning the intervals, and then have that moment like Iceman says where someone pulls the tabs away from you so you make that connection to the actual music. I was trying to think in terms of hole numbers (which I can do on a 10 hole) but what I really needed to do is think about the pattern of intervals. Once I did that, I got the jumps intuitively.
(Of course, I still need to figure out something that isn't following the melody so closely. I'd actually prefer to sit the verse out, but I was overruled.)
With about ten years learning harp, I use tabs more now than ever. Mainly Dave Barretts, Steve Cohen's and Tom Ball, although I have exactly $44 worth of tabs from Adam which helped me work out some unknown licks.
Tabs work best for me if its accompanied by actual examples of the song being played and backing tracks of that song left blank to play the song over. All examples of Barrett's, Cohen's and Tom's formats.
Those tabs have exposed me to so many songs, famous licks, tips, tricks, and techniques that would have otherwise taken me a lifetime to learn.
I've lost count the number of times I've had a Holy shit, that's how he did it! momemt using tabs. Besides the musical value of Barretts books they include hundreds of exercises using scales in different positions.
I learned harp from the beginning using all of Gindicks available tablature. I leaned all the standard riffs, the purpose of each note, wailing, resolution, etc; 12 bar blues, I IV V meaning and what notes to play when and where and a lot more all using tab.
I'm not dependent on tabs, if that's even a real thing? I can and do play by ear. I know tab has accelerated my learning way behind trying to figure it out on my own.
Last Edited by Harpaholic on Mar 16, 2015 2:52 PM
Last Edited by