Should you stop using guitar TAB to become a better rock guitarist?

It’s easy when playing using tablature, sitting glued to following the numbers, focussed on hitting the right fret at the right time, to find that the eyes and brain are taking over what the ears and feelings could achieve with infinitely more success. Particularly when using tablature every time you work on a piece of repertoire, as I have had students prefer to do in the past, you can become preoccupied with executing a relatively crudely represented version of a piece as it appears on paper rather than connecting with the phrasing and musicality of the piece itself.

Consider, in the context of most rock music, that the songs and solos were never notated as a part of the original writing process. Take Jimmy Page for example, it is hard to imagine him playing with his brand of unique, and frequently difficult to grasp phrasing often only attainable through a semi-improvised approach, had he sat and composed tablature on paper. Nor are there any examples of AC/DC or Jimi Hendrix taking to the stage with music stands loaded with sheets of notation. And so, it stands to reason that if you want to master the music of artists like these, then tablature doesn’t need to be, and perhaps even shouldn’t be, part of your process either.

At first your journey of learning songs without TAB may be a little slower. You’ll find yourself having to go back over parts of lessons or sections of any given song multiple times to lock them into your memory. However, what many new guitarists may not realise is that this, like all of your skills on the guitar, will strengthen with time and you may soon find that you’re the kind of player who can quickly mimic a phrase with accuracy when shown it for the first time. Rather than telling yourself that you need tablature because you just ‘haven’t got a good memory’ – I would encourage you to reframe your memory as just another muscle that needs to be strengthened with exercise.

Meanwhile, as your ears are forced to work a little harder, they will also begin to improve. You’ll find that reading TAB may begin to be the thing that slows you down as you can quickly identify the idiosyncrasies of legendary players phrasing and may even begin to spot things you disagree with in other players transcriptions of songs you love. This, in turn, will ultimately make you the kind of player who is better able to jam with other guitarists, play songs in a musical and emotive way, and nail any repertoire you want without having to go searching for tablature.