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Fun With Tabs!


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Posted

This is a little exercise I do for fun. Reading the other thread about playing by ear led me to want to share this.

It may be commonplace :idk:

 

Anyway, take a tab, any tab, but single note runs of melodic stuff is what I use more often than not and bluegrass works particularly well.

What a straight tab won't tell you is how to actually play the song in question like your ears or even sheet music can. It generally just gives you the notes and the rest is up to you.

What I like to do is learn all the notes in the tab then put them into a different style. Use the same notes, but turn them into a different melody. It's pretty neat turning Billy In The Lowground into a blues run. :lol:

I started doing this mostly just to learn about intervals and how they relate to good melody but it has turned into a bit of a regular hobby for me. The flexibility of a simple string of notes is a wonderful thing. Those same notes can be played a thousand different ways and morphed into styles much different than the originals.

Anyone else ever do this or am I just :freak:?

 

EG

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Posted

Hey, can you recommend any bluegrass tabs anywhere? Bluegrass is just smoking, and I'd like to get started with some.

 

Funny that you should mention bluegrass though. Check out "Strummin' with the Devil" by David Lee Roth. It's all old Van Halen tunes done in bluegrass style. It's really just amazing.

 

As for repurposing or reinventing a tune, this seems to be done a lot in techno where they'll take a song and do a techno version.

 

Apocalyptica doing Fade to Black:

 

[YOUTUBE]

[/YOUTUBE]

 

I remember one dance version of Fade to Black I have somewhere on some hard drive is particularly cool.

 

But as for actually doing it myself, only with some classical and baroque music done for metal. :)

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Posted

I always like to make a slight key adjustment to completely warp the melody. Take a song in a major key, for example, and flatten all the 3s, 6s, and 7s to make it into a minor key.

 

This frequently sounds awful, but on occasion produces some things that are pretty good or, at the very least, totally hilarious.

 

I don't know, it's somewhat similar to what you're doing.

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Posted

Done this for years! Moreso it was a great way for me to study song structure when I was younger. I'd track what the original artist was doing, and then play the exact same chords and notes in a differant way to come up with original songs.

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