Some folks have told me that they have trouble understanding tablature.
Well, here below is a very brief explanation.
This is about as concise as I can make it.
I hope you find it sueful, and will apply it to learning some of the "In The Style Of ..." transcriptions I have posted here at the BBF "Trading Post" area.
I hopeyou find this useful.

Cheers,

Hawkeye

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That's a good point about tabs being a supplement to standard notation. I started out doing a little guitar tuition a year or so ago, and briefly considered teaching kids the rudiments of reading standard notation (although It's not how I learned, and I never read for guitar, but I read for piano). I gave the kids the option, and none of them were interested (preferring instead to endlessly climb the Stairway to Heaven, or invite the Sandman to enter the lesson and, to be frank, outstay his welcome!)
I ended up using tabs exclusively, thus creating the problem of how to teach rythym.
Personally, If I look at a tab, I'll pick the notes up from the tab, and the rythym from the standard notation. I'm not teaching at the moment, but I do intend going back to it at some time, and am still not sure about how best to teach rythym - especially to kids who don't have a natural ear for it.I'd be really interested to hear how you use tabs in your teaching practice...

As you certainly know tablature has been the norm for plucked instruments for at least 300 years (roughly 1500 to 1800). As a lute player myself, I use tablature all the time and teaching it is no problem at all. I even think it is much more idiomatic than ordinary notation, as it indicates very precisely left-hand fingering, and facilitates the development of a clear mental image of the fretbooard.
The rhythm question is subsidiary and the system adopted by early musicians consisted in indicating the rhytm above the tab lines. The tab with letters was the so-called French tablature, but in Spain they had another system with numbers, similar to the one used for guitar nowadays.
Here's one example of french tab (16th century Elizabethan) followed by the same in spanish tab with numbers. Any guitarist reading modern guitar tab can read this very quickly. The rhytms values are shown immediately above the tab :

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here's the transcription with numbers instead of letters (spanish style). If you want to play direct from your guitar, you must tune down your G string to F# to have te same tuning as the lute :

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Not much new under the sun

LeftyJM - yeah, I looked into this last year, and was actually quite surprised to discover that tablature had been around for so long. The kind of tabs I used for teaching were Powertab ones, where the tab sits underneath the standard notation (although, as you point out, tabs are [U] a standard notation) and only indicate the notes, not the time values.
At the time, If wondered if would be possible to somehow create a form of tablature that included note values - and there it is!
However, at present I'm stuck with the Powertab format, and the problem of whether to teach kids to read standard rythym alongside tab (as Hawkeye says, using tab as a supplement), or to find some other way of doing it. My problem here is that I'm self taught, and learned entirely by listening to records and watching others play, so don't have the benefit of absorbing someone elses teaching style.

Delius, it's true that Powertab doesn't indicate the rhythm values above the tab, but other tab softwares do indicate them, for example Guitar Pro has a system of its own to indicate the rhythm above the numbers corresponding to the notes to play.
All the tablature softwares used for early music tabs obviously do that too : Fronimo or Django are the most commonly used. Django in particular is not too expensive and can be used for any sort of tabs you can imagine, early music or jazz, it doesn't make any difference. You can transform midi files into tabs very easily etc...
It's certain that tab represents a lot of advantages on ordinary notation especially for beginners or self-taught musicians : it's a system that anybody can use after a very short initiation and it can be applied to the instrument straightaway, another serious advantage.
I can read notation too but tablature feels much more comfortable and appropriate when it comes to playing plucked string instruments, no doubt about that !

Thanks again Hawkeye.

Thanks for the info leftjm - sounds like exactly what I'm looking for.

Just in case, here is the link to the web page of the Django software. From here you can download a demo version to test it. The full version costs $80 (= about £44). The fellow who developped this software is a Frenchman who lives in California, Alain Veylit, and is a very nice fellow, always ready to help if there are problems to solve.

delius Quote, "Personally, If I look at a tab, I'll pick the notes up from the tab, and the rythym from the standard notation"

I have been trying to teach myself guitar for just over a year now. With DVD's CD's and books. Rythym is very hard for me on Tabs but I can see Trips etc. on the notation above the Tabs even though I don't really know how to read music.
I agree with you about listening to a song, you get rythym, pauses, stops and little things that would be very hard to put on paper.

You could teach a short lesson on the basics of notation. Whole notes quater notes and rythym etc. Then see if there is any students who want to know more ?

BlusinBrotherGlenn

I have found using Powertab to learn how to play very useful. My usual mode of learning the song is to work on just playing the notes or chords and then work on the rhythm. Powertab includes 'standard' music notation which does show timing values and the ability to play the tab as MIDI, I am able to get the basic rhythm down.