Ethan Iverson had some idle Sunday thoughts on tablature: scordatura, reentrant tuning, and pieces in natural harmonics are all arguments in favor of tab over against sight-reading snobs

I guess Ethan Iverson's idle Sunday thoughts as a pianist on guitar tab is a reminder that he's not a guitarist.

https://iverson.substack.com/p/idle-sunday-thoughts

 

As a pianist, I can sight-read almost anything within reason, including orchestral scores and choral music. I can’t get to first base with guitar tablature, which always struck me as the ultimate capitalist feint: “Here, we will give you something easy to start with that will ineluctably cripple your growth after a certain point and keep you walled off with the self-same community (other guitarists). Please don’t learn to read music, that is a distraction from our main interest, which is selling you more and more guitar gear to compensate for the fact that you can’t play in bands that use any conventional notation.”

Yesterday: guitar tab. Today: A.I.

…

Counterpoint one: Henry Kaiser on guitar tab.

Counterpoint two: Joni Mitchell’s Blue is the one of the greatest albums of all time, and she wrote a lot of it on guitar.¹

 

The real counterpoint can be summed up as "scordatura".  There are several layers to this counterpoint, as would be fit a "counterpoint" rebuttal.

a reason why chord theory matters for guitarists--translating a traditional tune into a bottleneck technique arrangement requires you to know your chord forms

Decades ago when I was in college and studying basic harmony and voice-leading I recall a fairly usual concern  coming up, "When are we ever going to use this?"  What's the point of learning root, first inversion and second inversion chord formations? At the time the instructor of the course said, "Well, there's no practical use to it at all, unless you want to be a musician."  That was the simplest answer a professor could give but as a guitarist I have had time to encounter, in my own experiments as a guitarist, plenty of real world reasons why knowing chord theory matters.  Let me give a for-instance that shows why you have to know your basic root, first inversion, and second inversion chord forms in order to do anything with bottleneck technique (more after the break).