Tablature is not a recent invention. It was used for fretted string instruments during the Renaissance—for example the lute, which was the most important instrument of its time, occupying the place then that the piano does today. Tablature thus has a very long and noble ancestry! Lute tablature took different forms in different countries. In France, frets were not numbered, but given a letter of the alphabet. This system was the one adopted in England also. The open string was “a”, the first fret “b”, 2nd fret “c” and so on. Spanish and Italian lute tablature were more like modern tablature since both used numbers. The difference between them was that Italian tablature had the 1st (highest sounding) string at the bottom of the tablature and Spanish had the 1st string at the top.
Click here to see a picture of French tablature.
An example of Italian lute tablature.
You can find more information on the history of tablature and an example of Spanish vihuela tablature here.
The vihuela was a guitar shaped instrument that had the tuning of a lute. It took the place of the lute in Spain during the renaissance. Here are some more photos of lutes and vihuelas.
With instruments like the clawhammer banjo, which frequently use a number of different cross-tunings, conventional musical notation is impractical. There are several different string tunings in common usage for the clawhammer banjo. Tablature can be used easily with any tuning--it simply indicates which fret to hold down. Using musical notation would mean re-learning the note for each fret every time the instrument was retuned, which can be as many as half a dozen times in a performance.
