The first reason I really had to keep coming back to a computer
back when I first got access to a computer at home
was to go online and search ultimate-guitar.com for a TAB.
Now that I want to edit and print my music instructions,
I've come across TAB's natural shortcomings:
editing any string's line moves it out of time with the rest
and all the hyphens take up a lot of room.
I guess I never noticed these problems with TABs earlier because
they're easy to read scrolling down a wide screen
and I never wrote any TABs before.
I started rewriting TABs in a format that's easier for me to work with
and put them in a folder named 'lin', for 'linear',
in the same way I imagine 'TAB' is short for 'tabular'.
I type backticks (`) around guitar instructions,
which can be tuning instructions (`DADGBe`, `capo 5`),
or chord names (`G7`, `Ah`, `Dsus4`),
or fret numbers from string six to one (`xx0001`, `x13331`, `xx0233`)
for chords I don't know the name of,
or a string name and fret number (`-e7-`, `-e10-B12--e10-`)
for sequences of single notes
which I enclose in hyphens to differentiate from chord names
and sometimes pad with hyphens to represent short rests.
Lyrics go where they would be sung in time with the guitar,
with the word going after the guitar instruction
if it's sung at the same time,
so I have time to place my fingers before singing.
Parts that repeat, I enclose in brackets,
with a x2 or x3 or whatever
after the closing bracket to tell how many times it repeats.
I have a feeling everything would be better if I knew sheet music
or more about music in general,
but so far this format works well for me.
I assume I haven't run into anything like LIN
because there aren't very many people concerned enough
with TAB's limitations, or maybe there's a program
specifically made for writing and printing TABs.
I don't enjoy publishing, but because doing things this way
has solved my problems with TAB so well, I've published
a few songs I typed in LIN notation along with this explanation
and a directory of files named after chords listing one or a few
possible ways of playing the chord in standard tuning.
