Ditch The Tabs!

Okay, question – how many of you, when you're practicing or trying to learn a song, default to Google “xxxxx guitar pro” as your starting point? Or “xxxxxx power tab”? Or for those of us of a certain age, delve through the multitude of guitar magazines and music books acquired over the years?

How many of you sit down and start picking out the chord sequence and solo purely by ear? Or do you tend to shy away thinking that it's going to be too tedious, too time consuming when practice time can be at a premium anyway?

To be fair, if you've never done it before, it is a bit intimidating. You're trying to separate notes out purely on sound, with nothing to guide you – it could take forever to find the first note, and then thta's just one note, what about the rest of the song? Are you going to spend an entire practice session just to find one note? How does that give you value for time spent as opposed to working through a transcription?

Well, as with all things, it all depends on where you start. You don't, unless you're incredibly gifted or incredibly stupid, start with something like Eruption, or anything hyper technical – Dragonforce, Animals As Leaders, Allan Holdsworth etc. Start simple.

Now, as we know, pretty much all electric guitar technique can trace it's way back to the blues. The first wave of players like Freddie, Albert and B.B. King, Buddy Guy, Albert Collins, Chuck Berry, T-Bone Walker – these are the guys who paved the way for subsequent generations to build on. This is where you want to start.

The nice thing about a blues is, as soon as you've found the key, you straight away know where it's going. Yes, there can be variations (quick change to the IV in the second bar, long V or long I in the turnaround) but you've basically got the chord sequence down.

Not only that, but you're going to be using straightforward minor and major pentatonic, maybe a touch of blues scale. And with the early guys, they would stick pretty close to a basic “position 1” pentatonic fingering, for the simple reason that with no one to teach them, they were going to stick pretty close to their comfort zones, so these notes are going to be easy to find. If your 12 bar is in D, for example, expect pretty much all the solo licks to be around D minor pentatonic at the 10^th fret.

Now you're finding the notes, you can start to focus on the phrasing and articulation, and this is where transcribing really comes into it's own as a way of learning. Once you've sussed out that Freddie King is bending the C note at the 13^th fret B string (for example), you can start to focus on how he's bending, how he's using vibrato, the rhythms and timing that he's using... a whole slew of tiny, intangible things that really mount up that you skip if you're just following the tab. And these intangibles do work their way into your playing, making your phrasing more mature, more confident – you're learning to speak the language, as opposed to reading from the phrase book.

There's also the fact that you often find there is a lot less going on than you think – the old guys (often using thicker strings, no amp distortion) were not cramming notes into every corner of the song, they were working within technical limitations and creating the most exciting, evocative, expressive sounds they could with a very limited toolbox. You- all of us – can learn a great deal from this. To draw an analogy, you don't learn to drive in a Ferrari. You learn in something cheap and simple and low power, learn how to control it, and gradually work your way up.

Finally, there is a wonderful sense of satisfaction to realise you're not just playing “or something like that”, you're playing the exact licks that Freddie or Albert or B.B. Played, getting into the same zone that they were in, with no one dictating to you what to play. Before long you will notice your own improvisation become smoother and more confident as you get away from playing “by the numbers”.

Certainly, it's something I wish I had got into sooner in my own development, rather than chasing technique and speed goals. Still, it's never too late – for any of us! So go and chase up “The Best Of B. B. King” or whoever your favourite is, ditch the tab for a month and see what you can pick out for yourself.