What to do with campanella?

wwelti said:

I want to point out that tablature is actually older than notes, especially for stringed instruments. Old notation for lutes was usually written in tablature. And even for an instrument which is called "renaissance guitar" today. One kind of renaissance guitars was very similar to the ukulele, with four courses and with GCEA tuning. Some of the tablatures (for example by Adrian le roy) are suitable for playing with the ukulele without any modification. Those are roughly 500 years old!

So, back then, it was very common to sight-read tablature.

In my opinion, for complex ukulele arrangements, tablatures are extremely helpful, since in some cases you really can't easily find out how they are meant to be played just by looking at the notes. This is partially caused by the re-entrant 4th string of the ukulele, but this is not the only reason IMHO. An ukulele is not a guitar. You can't simply transfer the idea "A good guitar player doesn't need tabs" into "A good ukulele player doesn't need tabs", IMHO.

Edit: I want to add that campanella technique was quite fashionable back then. Quite some of those old instruments had re-entrant tunings.

Best Regards
Wilfried

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stevepetergal said:

Wilfred, everything you say is right. It is clear, in the style of your arrangements, that tabulature works great for you. It works very well for most of us. Then again, we have a grand exception. James Hill uses standard music notation, and teaches using no tabs whatsoever. (Or, are you and I the exception?)

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