PG Music Home Forums User-to-User Post your own Tips and Tricks here Potential Game Changer for Guitarists of the World--Forcing Tab in BiaB!

As someone who first picked up the guitar in his mid-teens, and then eventually took up playing the bass as well in my early 20s, I have always been a slave to tablature.

I am not a musician by profession, but it is my number one passion in life, and my time spent playing and learning is unfortunately limited. I've always wanted to learn the piano, various woodwinds, and string instruments such as the violin, cello, and others because each instrument is not only unique in its timbre and 'vocal' qualities, but they each have an inherently unique approach based on a number of factors-from the geographic locations in which their use flourished, he purposes for which they were employed, and many others (think Appalachian fiddles and banjos played against a backdrop of mighty mountains and earthy labor, the jazz saxophones blaring in Greenwich Village jazz cellars in the early 20th century, baroque orchestral strings played to the ripple of subdued claps of landed British gentry…). Each of those elements left their trace in their instruments, in their fingerings, etudes, exercises, scales, --in the notation itself.

As a guitar player who was always fascinated by the different approaches other instruments took in assembling melodies and phrases, I yearned to have songbooks that would display OTHER instruments in tablature. Yes, there are hundreds of fantastic jazz guitar players, but none of them would approach standard's fake sheet in quite the same manner as would Dizzy Gillespie or Miles Davis.

Now, even if I DID read standard notation, and hence could properly identify the notes to be played, it would require a tremendous amount of brain processing power (for me at least) to target where a given note should be played on the fretboard. For instance, a "g" note in given certain octave could be played on the third fret-6th string, on the eight fret second string, on the 12th fret-third string, etc. Which of those options to choose would, in turn, be contingent on the notes that precede and follow it, leading to more calculations.

Therefore, the option to display standard notation as tablature for instruments not generally notated in that manner throws the door open to entirely new musical horizons.

Then I stumbled onto a startling discovery when I had a Medley RT Guitar-Silence-Trumpet-[something else] playing and figured out how to replicate those results, so, without further ado, I present to you my findings.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Jyd1Y7u6MI

Enjoyed the tutorial and will be giving it a try.

What a great video - very helpful! Thanks for taking the time to make it and post it here

Very interesting tutorial. Band-in-a-Box certainly provides many learning paths to improve your musicianship. Thanks for sharing your find. It's a great tip!

Thanks guys, I'm glad you enjoyed!

FWIW, a while back I was considering recording and uploading and entire course/YouTube series on learning bass--everything from learning intervals by use of that incredible option to have the scale degrees display in the notes themselves), reading tempo notation (which I can do in tandem with the tab for the notes themselves).

The beauty of using BiaB to learn bass specifically, is that for bass you need to internalize different types of lines based on how many measures a chord repeats, and which chord degrees precede and follow the measure you are playing. With guitar, it's rare that you have to "bridge" the measures.

For example, just playing a root-5 pattern might work over 2 bars, but you'll have to throw something else in to spice it up if it goes on any longer than that. And when playing chord transition fills--you need to take into account how many degrees you are ascending or descending. Will you 'walk' up or down the scale or will you arpeggiate? Will you use chromatic notes?

With BiaB, entering the exact number of measures you like, and the specific scale degrees you select your chords from, you can have it generate basslines with just about any possible permutation. Forcing the track to simple is a great feature for beginners, and then they can use the bar settings to have the bass stop playing-or use the wood-shedding feature--to come up with their own lines...