Avoiding Bad Habits — Why Professional Guitar Tabs Have More Benefits Than You Think
Learning guitar involves more than just hitting the right notes. A good performance requires good technique, and that’s where guitar tabs can vary greatly in quality. Whilst many tabs might hit the right notes, many leave out how to play them. Professional guitar tabs do both.
It shouldn't be as complicated as music sheets
Guitar parts weave multiple threads of technique together. From unusual tunings to using a capo, there are many things which make a riff or chord progression sound a certain way. This is where bad tabs make things difficult. For example, trying to play a guitar part recorded in drop-d tuning without the tuning is a nightmare. Missing this kind of detail makes a huge difference.
What makes a "good" guitar tab?
Good guitar tabs not only teach you the notes, they teach you the techniques. Guitar playing is a physical activity and relies on making the best possible sound in the fewest possible moves. Professional guitar tabs include details like the ideal picking direction and the correct voicing of a particular chord. By leaving these details out, bad tabs undermine your technique and ultimately make it harder to sound like the piece you’re trying to learn.
Frustrated by little to no progress? This could be why.
Good technique relies upon good habits. By missing these crucial details, bad tabs produce bad habits. The consequence of this is twofold. First, bad habits make playing more difficult. For example, if you fall into the habit of accidentally muting strings due to poor finger positioning, that chord is never really going to sing. Second, inevitably this will hold you back from nailing what you hear on the record. And if there’s one thing that guarantees discouragement, it’s the frustration of feeling like you just can’t put your finger on that missing sonic ingredient.
Professional tabs avoid these issues. They help you to build good habits and develop the sound which captured your imagination in the first place. By ensuring you have your fingers in the right place and the correct tuning, good tabs save countless hours in frustration. Like anything worth doing, learning guitar is a challenge, but by learning from professionals, you can avoid making the same mistakes they did.
Where bad tabs foster bad habits and won’t sound like the recording, good tabs do the opposite. They improve your overall technique and remove the barriers to sounding like the piece you’re trying to learn, all while building confidence and helping you get better quicker.
On Paidtabs.com you can look for any song you'd like to learn. If you don't find it in the catalogue, you can post a request, and a pro musician from the community will write a high quality tab just for you. Not only this, you can even choose specific parts of the track you need tabbed and what instrument you need it for.
