On Music Tabs
I love music. I love playing music. I love making musical instruments and music software. I don’t have formal musical training. I’ve never taken lessons, and honestly, I’m a pretty bad musician. What I do excel at, though, is hoarding musical instruments.
At this point, name any instrument, and there’s a decent chance I have it somewhere in my room. Some of these instruments never played anything better than “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star”, others featured in a recording or two, and only a few see regular play. Most, however, gather dust.
Why? Because I’m bad at music notation and I can’t memorise notes or chords of any song. I can read sheet music, but not fast enough to make it useful. However, when you start with a new instrument that requires you to learn fingerings, and I find it enormously difficult to have this translation pipeline in my brain: read sheet music, parse visually the notes, map them to some fingering chart, cover holes or press strings or move lips or perform some other physical action to the instrument.
That is why I love tablatures. I love ABC notation and Jianpu notation. Because there is already a trained part of my brain that can translate incoming bitmaps into meaningful tokens: I can read letters and digits.
