Tablature

Correcting people who use the terms wrong when asking is not that big a deal.

But searching the internet for Tabs and being lead to 95% pages of chords and lyrics is a PITA.

Most of these pages dont have chord diagrams though, so I think that misusing the term for chords in general rather than for chord diagrams is more common.
 
Unfortunately, it's an on going problem, most people don't understand the difference, & even call lead sheets tab - what can you do? Nothing! it is so ingrained now, your on a hiding to nothing. :(
 
Unfortunately, it's an on going problem, most people don't understand the difference, & even call lead sheets tab - what can you do? Nothing! it is so ingrained now, your on a hiding to nothing. :(

Thanks. You gave me something new to look up. I'd never heard of a lead sheet. I was wondering if you meant sheet music. It is a different beast. I just learned something new.
 
Lots of terms get thrown around fast and loose here. Why single out "tablature?" I'm just wondering. I mean, I agree with you, that it gets misused a lot. But it isn't the only one.
 
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Thanks. You gave me something new to look up. I'd never heard of a lead sheet. I was wondering if you meant sheet music. It is a different beast. I just learned something new.
It wasn't until I started playing in my church band, with guitar players, that I heard them called lead sheets. Lyrics & chords. My monthly uke groups just called them music sheets. Always something to learn....terminology, technique, chords, tabs, chord melodies, etc. It's all great fun to me.
 
It wasn't until I started playing in my church band, with guitar players, that I heard them called lead sheets. Lyrics & chords. My monthly uke groups just called them music sheets. Always something to learn....terminology, technique, chords, tabs, chord melodies, etc. It's all great fun to me.

Just so we agree, lyrics and chords alone dont make a lead sheet. You need standard notation for the melody line as well, right?
Like you see it i song books fake books etc.
 
Adding fuel to the fire, what about FAKE BOOKS? LOL.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_book

Do you know what they are?

When I was in the jazz scene decades ago, these were the only thing on offer (if you were lucky) in order to learn new songs, and those fake books, had so-called 'lead sheets' which were literally just a time signature indication, chord NAMES, and BARS (or 'measure marks'), and was an extreme short-hand.

In the ones used at the time, there was no melody line on a staff or any other written indication, these were just chord NAMES and not chord pictograms like in many music sheets we know for ukulele (or guitar).

Only the singer got a sheet with the lyrics below the chord changes, and everyone else only got the chords...

Purification by fire for sure if playing a song the first time ever on stage and you only got the lead sheet 5 mins before, and you just had to wing it...
 
The Wikipedia link suggest that it has the melody line.

My old high school teacher told us the the term derved from "the fake book", which was some kind of makeshift collection of jazz standards cirkling around back in the time. Probably corresponds well to your story.

Now Hal Leonard has a lot of different "fake books" for different genres and artists. They all the melody line, chords and lyrics. So I assume that most people who play music these days has at some point come across one of these and share the Wikipedia impression.
 
Hmm, but 'tab' is where the notes position are shown on which string, for stringed instruments, where the notes are in which hole for harmonica, show which holes are covered for flute/whistle/recorder, etc.

It is a well established convention, that is why calling anything else 'tab' offends so many people - it is 'wrong'.

Ignorance is no excuse, people should learn the correct terminology.
 
Just so we agree, lyrics and chords alone dont make a lead sheet. You need standard notation for the melody line as well, right?
Like you see it i song books fake books etc.
Here's where it gets tricky. The term "lead sheet" seems to be very loosely applied. Our singers have music sheets with standard notation. Myself & the guitar players get what they call a "lead sheet" which is lyrics & chords. Sometimes there's a intro at the top with chords & measures written out. There are often repeats marked ll: :ll But mainly just lyrics with chords above them. They call them lead sheets. They seem pretty much like what we use every weekend at uke jams & we just call them music sheets.
 
Hmm, but 'tab' is where the notes position are shown on which string, for stringed instruments, where the notes are in which hole for harmonica, show which holes are covered for flute/whistle/recorder, etc.

It is a well established convention, that is why calling anything else 'tab' offends so many people - it is 'wrong'.

Ignorance is no excuse, people should learn the correct terminology.

It would be nice if language were more exact and people learned their p's and q's. But whom to teach them? Is Wikipedia the final word on "tablature"? The cat is already out of the bag. Why? Because if I "google" something like "ABC ukulele tablature", I will likely get many more hits that are just lyrics and chords, even though what I want is the more specific tabs showing strings and fretting.

When I go to my ukulele group meetup, there are so many more people without musical backgrounds there and time is better spent teaching them to play the uke than ensuring proper use of musical terminology so someone is not offended.
 
"But whom to teach them?"

I saw what you did there. Very ironic! ;)

John Colter.
 
To me, "jamming" is when a small group of musicians informally gather together to improvise or play unrehearsed music. That's not my definition, I cherry picked that off of the internet. But to most people here, thirty people in folding chairs all playing out of the yellow book is jamming. That's fine with me. I mean, someone comes up to me and says, "we're going to jam Sunday, you wanna come." I'll ask them what they mean by jamming. If they say that twenty or thirty people get together at the library and play out of the yellow book every Sunday, I'll know what they mean. I'm not going to argue with them about the use of the word. If I'm playing a song and someone asks me for the tabs, I'll give them what I have. If they want to argue that what I gave them is not tabs, I'll tell them that is what I have, take it or leave it. But unless they are prone to getting stalled out by a word, they will make use of what I give them

Anyway, I agree with Bill1. Believe me, I know about the use of words, but sometimes you have to get past it if you want to move forward.
 
An anecdote to go with this thread. In my previous life my job included working with the Latino community in our city and many of the people I would deal with either didn't speak English or were limited. I used to say "en regardo de" for in regards to all of the time. There was an Ecuadorian grad student that was also working in that community and she kept correcting me because regardo is not a word in Spanish. But it was a habit that I had fallen into and no one was saying to me that they didn't want my help because I was using a word wrong. So after a long time she came up to me one day and told me that in two days six people had said "en regardo de" to her. She told me that I was singlehandedly changing the Spanish language. Same thing I think, you use it enough it becomes the common use of the word.
 
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I think of lead sheets as what appeared in The Real Book or the first jazz fake book I ever saw in the early sixties.
Georgia from fake book.jpg

Tablature began as Bill1 implied as a way of writing down lute music. In the forties, Pete Seeger revived it as a way to teach 5 string banjo. (He also invented the terms "hammer on" and "pull off") This is a way of indicating where to place your fingers in order to play a musical instrument that was popularized by folkies, but now has crossed over to many genres. Sorry, this one is for 5-string banjo, but ukulele tabs are very similar.
001_1.jpg

Chord/word sheets are very common for uke groups or sing-along groups. They have the lyrics with the chords over top at the appropriate places or sometimes placed within the songs like this:

I'll [Bb] see you in my [Bbmi6] dreams,
[F] Hold you [C+5] in my [F] dreams. . .

I like to do chord sheets like this because I have trouble lining up the chords otherwise.
 
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