Piano tabs

Piano Tabs vs. Guitar Tabs

Piano Tabs are basically the same as guitar tabs. Why is that fact important to you? simply because most chords/lyrics which are in tab form on the internet are going to be listed as "Guitar Tabs" and not necessarily "Piano Tabs". The chords to a song, the lyrics to a song are the same regardless if a guitarist or a pianist is playing it. So if you're looking for the "tabs" for a song on the internet, you may end up having to look at a guitar tab site rather than a piano tab site. But no big deal here!

Everything Chords

One big inequity with guitar tabs, which of procedure is short for "guitar tablature", is that the guitar diagrams are roughly always shown and these indicate what fret, string, etc. To play. Just ignore that part. You're only looking to get the lyrics and chords and disregard all else relating to guitar playing. A trainee of mine once pleaded with me to elaborate how to directly translate the guitar notation into piano. Here's the deal though, pianists Do Not waste time doing that exercise. Maybe it'll be fun for you but roughly speaking, it's a waste of time. Guitarists don't typically take a fully written piano arrangement and citation out each note to directly use that to achieve on guitar. So conversely, why whould you want to do this for piano? Just chords and lyrics my friends, chords and lyrics!!

By the way, many pianists never use guitar tab books or guitar tab sheets to work up songs. I easily do! They argue that the melody line is not included there but it is always found in "lead sheets". What I do for a song I'm familiar with, is I have already memorized the melody line, (a relatively simple task) so all I'm missing is the chords and lyrics. Case in point, recently, I bought a marvelous Billy Joel Guitar Tab book. I would assume though that very few keyboard players would reconsider picking up such a book. My concept though was that the fact that I know these songs so well, just having the chords in front of me would enable me to play the song. Additionally, I could now incorporate on working on my singing without being bogged down on the note for note piano arrangement. When you're on stage, chances are you have memorized all already, but if you have the guitar/piano tabs in front of you as a "cheat sheet", it enables you to still achieve the song with minimal diversion to "looking at the music".

But the most important aspect of this type of "tab" playing is that in my experience, with pop/rock band performance, the best, most productive information you can have to play any song and learn it swiftly are guitar tabs!! That is the hidden Weapon all these carport bands use to work up songs and they're able to do a great job playing these songs, regardless of how much original harmonic system they have been exposed to!

Lesson learned? Go Google or quest out your beloved songs and put "tab" after the song, and you're 80% on the way to perfecting that song in its entirety!

There are many sites on the web where you can find Piano Tabs. If you are able to find a good piano tab site or at least exact tabs for a song you're searching for, you are well on your way to playing that song. The major obstacles to creating that song from tabs are

Chords

1. Sites infected with Viruses - Unfortunately, this is a very tasteless qoute at tab sites. More often than you'd like, your computer can be infected so make sure your viral safety programs are up and running. If you do not have safety for virus infection, you can get free trail downloads at http://www.download.com.

2. Wrong chords and/or lyrics -
Many of the tabs listed on the web for your beloved songs have been put together by well intentioned amateurs who whether don't duplicate check that all the chords are exact or maybe are unable to distinguish in the middle of a exact chord and an incorrect one.

On a scale of 1-10, there are varying degrees of "wrongness" for any chord. Example, if the exact chord should be G7 and instead the chord is listed simply as G, well that's a minor offense and you could say it's a "9" in terms of accuracy. A tasteless mistake is listing the relative minor for a major chord or visa versa. For this error, we might reconsider it a 6 or 7 in terms of accuracy. In short, for well regarded substitutions for chords, one can live with that. However, with free piano tabs, you can often see wrong chords listed which are at the opposite end of the spectrum for what the chord should in fact be. The chord might be a B flat minor and the tab says that it's a G sharp major, not even close and wholly out there in "left field"! We'd give that infraction a "1" on a scale of 10. Then again, you will assuredly see chords that are that far off. Your final judge should be your "ear", engage your inherent musicality- if it sounds wrong or easily bad to you, there's a good occasion that it is in fact wrong.

Lyrics

For lyrics, again, the same requisite applies here - you will see major infractions and minor ones. Just take the posture that the lyrics are "guilty" until proven innocent, i.e., are not 100% exact until you proof them against whether an artist songbook or against a recording.

With No Written Reference for the Lyric: If a song has never been published or maybe is out of print and one simply can not find a written reference to check the song tabs against, then your guess is as good as anyone's really. In this case, you basically have to check it and proof it against the recording to find out how exact it is.

Missing Lyrics and/or Chords

Another tasteless phenomenon with free piano tabs or free tabs is that whole whole portions or sections of a song may be eliminated. It can be frustrating when this occurs so just check against the artist songbook if you have one or if one is available or check against other tab sites for that song. Speaking of which, "comparison shopping" can be a good idea with free tab sites, taking a consensus of opinion, using your own musicality as the ultimate judge again and determining which portions of a tab for any song is exact or attractive to you and which ones are not.

Piano tabs