What traditional brass parts look like:
What existing simple guitar tabs look like:
Understand Brass Tabs
The first step was to decide to use our harmonics or partials like strings in guitar tabs.
Brass Tabs pBone Trombone Example One – See You Again by Wiz Kalfa
Here we’ve taken a simple bass line form “See You Again” by Wiz Kalifa If this was written out in traditional notation it might look like the manuscript below the tab
• We used bar lines, like in guitar tabs, to roughly order the notes
• Just like guitar tabs we are not giving any guide to the rhythm, that’s for you to listen and copy
• The tabs are an “aide memoire” or guide chart
• The tabs do not offer the same information as traditional, written music.
You’ll notice that I’ve also offset the positions to give an indication of the pitch within each harmonic, so 4th is slightly lower than first etc.
Brass Tabs pBone Trombone Example Two – See You Again (shout chorus)
In this tab for the brief shout chorus in “See You Again” we get a little more complex. However if you listen to the riff in the song first all is simple enough. If you were to try to learn the riff first from the tabs, as you might in traditional brass learning, this would be really quite hard! So please remember these tabs are to aid informal, ear based learning not become band parts!
Brass tabs: pTrumpet
Simply exchanging slide positions for valve combinations will make the tabs work for any Bb pitch valve instrument!
