Piano Tabs

Use piano tabs to play the piano without sheet music

Piano tabs are an alternate way of representing piano music. Instead of the traditional sheet music, piano tabs are a text version of how to play a song. Since the practice of using piano tabs is not standardized and piano tabs do not represent all the information that writing an accurate musical score, a good deal of information can be lost along the way. As a result, you should already know what a song sounds like before you try playing it using piano tabs.

Piano tabs are used for several reasons:

* Tabs can be written/read anywhere without any special software

* Tabs are interpretations of music so piano tabs of popular songs

will appear on the Web long before the sheet music is available on the Web.

* Tabs use much less disk space than a fully scored piece of music.

* Tabs use little screen space.

* Tabs allow for commentary and consequently let the tab writer who is not fully fluent in writing music, talk his way through information instead of communicating through accurate musical notation.

So, do piano tabs let you play music without knowing how to read music? Not really. You must understand how to locate the notes on the keyboard, understand the key you are playing in, how to measure the beats, etc. Tabs are simply"quick and dirty" shorthand that lets people get music out on the Web fast.

Here is an example of piano tabs in a piece created by Tor Undheim to demonstrate his tab shorthand for his site users at http://www.pianotabs.net/rwinfo.html

REM: Nightswimming (Automatic for the people)

tabbed by: Tor Undheim, tor@pianotabs.net

intro:

4|-ga--g--|g---|-ga--g--|a---|

4|d----d--|e---|d----d--|d---|

2|g--g-h-3|c--2|g--g-h-3|d---|

b|1-2-3-4-|1234|1-2-3-4-|1234|

It may take some time to get used to playing by piano tabs, but once you become accustomed to reading tabs, you'll be able to play all of your favorite songs without the sheet music. There are a wide range of piano tabs being offered on the Internet from classic to pop. By learning to play with piano tabs, you can take advantage of this huge resource and become a piano playing wonder. Next time you invite your friends, dazzle them by playing your favorite pop songs for them without the help of sheet music.