You hum it, I’ll play it – some thoughts about music and meaning
I’ve been thinking about guitar tabs lately. No, I’m not really sure why, honestly. I haven’t picked up my guitar to try to play it in almost a decade, and I never became skilled enough at it to spend a lot of time looking at tablature. Tabs, for the unfamiliar among you, are a form of sheet music specifically for guitar (versions also exist for other fretted string instruments). Six parallel lines on the page each represent one of the guitar strings, generally in the standard open tunings of E, A, D, G, B and E. Numbers written on these lines indicate which fret the string in question should be played at. The order (and combination, in the case of chords) they are written in, tells you which note(s) to play next.
It’s quite an elegant and simple form of musical notation. The instruction can be directly interpreted with relation to the instrument (for instance, play the third string from the top, at the fourth fret), doesn’t require musicians to be able to read traditional sheet music, or know where on their instrument a B-flat note can be found. But there’s an omission, and it’s a pretty important one – the tabs contain no information about tempo, rhythm, tone or volume. (This is a bit of an oversimplification – a number of indicative markers do exist but a lot of published or transcribed tablature doesn’t bother to use these). Just the notes, one after another, in order, but very little information about how to play them. That’s to say, they’re really only any good to you if you already know what the song is supposed to sound like.
In other words, if you hopped in a time machine, kidnapped a guitarist from the early 20th Century, and presented them with a copy of the guitar tabs for Stairway To Heaven, which they have never heard, it would probably take quite an attentive musicologist to work out what on earth they were playing, even if they sight-read the tabs beautifully. In order to be useful for their purpose (allowing someone to knock out a few recognisable bars of Led Zep and impress their friends) the tabs require the information contained on the page to be interpreted with reference to the necessary prior knowledge held by the player. You hum it, I’ll play it.
