Continued from the previous message...

by looking at the spaces between notes on the TAB, but this can only
be a rough guide. You will always have to check with the original track
to work out details of the rhythm.
 
A lot of other imprtant information can be included in a piece of TAB.
This includes hammer-ons, pull offs, slides, bends, vibrato and so on.
 
The standard practice is to write extra letters or symbols between notes
to indicate how to play them.  Here are the letters/symbols most
often used :
 
      h - hammer on 
      p - pull off 
      b - bend string up
      r - release bend
      / - slide up
      \ - slide down
      v - vibrato (sometimes written as ~)
      t - right hand tap
      x - play 'note' with heavy damping
 
 
For slides, s is sometimes used to indicate either an up or down slide.
Symbols for harmonics are explained below in Section 3.2
 
That last one, the x, is used to get a choppy, percussive sound.
You usually use your fretting hand to lightly damp the strings so 
that when you pick the note it sounds dead.
 
Note that the use of 'x' is *totally* different from the use of
an 'x' when giving chord shapes.
 
For example if you wrote the chord of D, you would see :
 
   EADGBE
   xx0232
 
 
where the 'x's mean do not play this string.
 
In tab it is implicitly assumed that a string is not played if it is not
marked.  So the same chord in TAB would be :
 
 
 
E-----2-----------------------------------------------------------
B-----3-----------------------------------------------------------
G-----2-----------------------------------------------------------
D-----0-----------------------------------------------------------
A----------------------------------------------------------------
E----------------------------------------------------------------
 
with no 'x'.  The x is is only used in TAB to represent a heavily
muted string which is picked/strummed to give a percussive sound.
 
There are a number of other symbols for things like whammy bar bends,
pick scrapes and so on.  There seems to be no particular standard
way of writing these - details should be given in the TAB to explain
what the symbols mean.
 
Bass TAB will probably need a few extra symbols to cope with the
different techniques used in bass playing - for example slapping
and 'popping' the string with thumb or middle finger.
You could use 's' for slap and 'p' for pop as long as you wrote 
them *underneath* the lines of tab to distinguish them from slide
and pull off which would be written *on* the lines of tab.
 
 
****************************************
***  2.2   HAMMER ONS AND PULL OFFS  ***
****************************************
 
 
With hammer-ons and pull-offs you might find things like these :
 
 
E----------------------------------------------------------------
B----------------------------------------------------------------
G----------------------------------------------------------------
D----------------------------------------------------------------
A---------5h7-----------5h7--------------------------------------
E---0--0----------0--0-------------------------------------------
 
 
which would mean play the open E twice, then hit the A string at the 
5th fret and hammer on to the 7th fret.

Continued in the next message...
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