Tablature

Tablature (or tabulature, or tab for short) is a form of musical notation indicating instrument fingering rather than musical pitches.

Tablature is common for fretted stringed instruments such as the lute, vihuela, or guitar, as well as many free reed aerophones such as the harmonica. Tablature was common during the Renaissance and Baroque eras, and is commonly used today in notating rock, pop, folk, ragtime, bluegrass, and blues music.

Three types of organ tablature were used in Europe: German, Spanish and Italian. There are several types of ocarina tabulature.

To distinguish standard musical notation from tablature, the former is usually called "staff notation" or just "notation".

The word tablature originates from the Latin word tabulatura. Tabula is a table or slate, in Latin. To tabulate something means to put it into a table or chart.

The first known occurrence in Europe is around 1300, and was first used for notating music for the organ.

While standard notation represents the rhythm and duration of each note and its pitch relative to the scale based on a twelve tone division of the octave, tablature is instead operationally based, indicating where and when a finger should be placed to generate a note, so pitch is denoted implicitly rather than explicitly. Tablature for plucked strings is based upon a diagrammatic representation of the strings and frets of the instrument, keyboard tablature represents the keys of the instrument, and woodwind tablature shows whether each of the fingerholes is to be closed or left open.

Tablature is more easily read by a novice musician but it has some significant deficiencies compared to standard notation.

Lowercase letters or "glyphs"are placed on each of these lines to represent notes. If it is required to play an open D course, for instance, a small a will be placed on the appropriate line. For a note with the finger on the first fret a b, a note on the second fret a c, etc. However, as mentioned above, j was not used since it was not considered a separate letter from i, and c often looked more like r. Thus:

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