Converting tab into sheet music

Associate
Joined
13 Jun 2011
Posts
1,487
Location
Kettering
So, I'm trying to change a guitar tab into sheet music for piano. I want to learn "The Last Baron" by Mastodon but I don't play guitar so have no idea where to start.

Obviously it'll have to be different, I mean I want to give it a kind of lounge feel, so I guess I'm just looking for a chord structure to play around with, but can't seem to find one. Tried working it out by ear but ya know, I'm not very good at that :p

Some of it I'll probably have to cut out, it's quite long, and a lot of it isn't "piano friendly".

I've worked out the first bit, that wasn't too hard. But seriously, how do you convert a tab into something I could read/understand? Has anyone else tried to play music on an instrument it was not written for?

For those of you who don't know the song, this is it.


It'll take a while, but I like a challenge!
 
Soldato
Joined
24 Sep 2008
Posts
10,448
Location
Edinburgh.
It's hard to explain over the forum but each fret on a guitar is a note that you can translate onto sheet music.

For example

--------
--------
---------
---------
----------
-0 0 0 0

It would be E E E E below middle C.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Guitar_notes.png

That shows what the notes are on the frets.

I hope this helps but it is hard to translate tab into notation.

Also much harder trying to explain it. :p
 
Last edited:
Associate
Joined
30 Dec 2008
Posts
1,940
If you had the guitar pro file you can use that for sheet music, however most people who transcribe into guitar pro never add key signatures(!) so you have accidentals everywhere but thats an easy fix, and in most cases rather than use dots indicating staccato instead halve the note value and add rests meaning that actually most of what is written is pretty much unplayable unless you have heard the song before AND can read tab!!!
 
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