The Best Method For Learning Blues Guitar - Tablature Or Standard Musical Notation?

In the sixties, Stephan Grossman amongst others produced a kind of musical notation for guitar that was special to those years. Most of the first blues guitarists were dead and gone by this time, but a noteworthy few were still around, such as Son House, Mississippi John Hurt, Lightnin' Hopkins and Reverend Gary Davis. It was Grossman's meeting with the singing reverend that was the spark that started the quest for old style blues and ragtime guitar. Many young men in those years wanted to learn and pick the old acoustic blues in the authentic style, just like the blues masters. Blues guitar tabs were the backbone of this revival.

Blues music has a traditional root, and many variations have evolved from an original piece. Listen to Sweet Home Chicago by Robert Johnson, as one example. This was originally titled 'Kokomo Blues' and was written by Scrapper Blackwell. As well as the countless permutations around a theme, new pieces were produced in many different regional picking styles. Within the regional styles you can also find significant differences between guitarists, so producing a huge range of blues guitar music. Of course, in past years, blues musicians 'borrow' each others songs and also transformed traditional songs to their own individual style which added to the richness of the blues. How can these old guitar songs be recorded in a manner that future generations can learn to play in the same way? We have the sound recordings, but there's a huge amount of music so this isn't sufficient.

Traditionally, musical notation was pretty much the same for all instruments, and consisted of a stave, notes and an indication of timing. If we wanted to stick with this conventional way of writing down music, then we have to know how to interpret it - this is quite difficult! Actually, the only thing we have to do is to know where the fingers of each hand should go. If we had some way of knowing this, and hear the recorded orginals, it would represent a huge shortcut to learning the old picking styles. In fact, Grossman created a sort of musical notation called 'tablature', which speeds up up the learning process.

The guitar strings are pictured by six lines, and a number may be written on one of the lines. This means that the string should be plucked on the fret indicated by that number. A line extending upwards from the number means that the string should be picked with a finger, and a downward line means a thumb stroke. The chords may additionally appear over the tablature as well. Other symbols are also used, which help in defining the timing, slide or kind of strike.The system is simple and very simple to understand. Even it can seem a little clumsy when first used, most students are reading it within a couple of weeks.

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