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Comment by girzel | Hacker News Reader

I play the guqin (古琴), a Chinese zither-like instrument which I believe is the oldest instrument in the world for which musical notation exists. Like the Tibetan notation, it doesn't indicate rhythm or duration of notes, just succession. Until a hundred years ago or so, people were just assuming they knew what the melody sounded like, and to this day you will hear different interpretations of the same piece that simply make different assumptions about the duration of notes.

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Wouldn't that be equivalent to guitar tabs?

Tabs are actually written in beats and bars. Technically you are correct that the duration of each note is not entirely prescribed however as it's set into a strict rhythm notes in guitar tab don't exceed their max duration in context.

This image illustrates it well

https://i.stack.imgur.com/2hRnd.png

I'm not sure those rythm annotations below the notes are part of the "standard" tab notation.

But then, I'm not sure there's such a thing as a "standard" tab notation.

That style of notation is more of the "paid for" notation we're all familiar with. Something you'd find in a tab book along the front row of shelving at record stores (remember those!). For those of us who were in the internet tabs heyday: this was a delicacy - among simply things like having correct notation.

The whole point of tab is it's shorthand mentality (As I'm sure you're aware of). It can mean whatever you want it to mean. I grew up learning guitar on a tab system created by my teacher, which I've never really seen duplicated before, but was based off of chord diagrams (even for non-chords).

Yeah the books were great! I also discovered that Italians used solfa after seeing an Italian blink 182 tab book at a holiday camp!

So it had the chord names written like Do-M La-m...

The rhythm annotations aren't part of standard tab (I didn't intend to suggest that as a standard tab). My point of sharing that image was to show what the position of the numbers in the tabs implies.

It's true there's a very diverse range of tabs, but as far as a canonical version goes, they have bar lines and numbers are positioned in time.

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