| Hey there, easy on the guitarists. Guitars, like other string instruments, have multiple ways to play each note. Depending on the note progression, hand position needs to slide up and down the neck of the guitar to ensure the necessary groups of notes are all easily reachable from the current position. Tablature solves this issue by telling guitar players where to place their hands. Orchestral sheet music involving stringed instrument parts often include both the standard staff and tablature. Of course, the simplicity of tabs also make it a great way for the community to spread knowledge. A simple tab can be written down in notepad in minutes and passed along freely, whereas sheet music requires specialized software and hours of time. This makes it very attractive to beginners who aren't looking to become professional musicians, but simply want to mimic what they hear on the radio for their friends. I can either sit you down at a piano for two years and teach you sheet music, or give you a few weeks and tabs. Will you be playing perfectly? Of course not - but you'll be enjoying yourself. Mind you, piano notes are already in a 1:1 correspondence with the staff, so hand placement is greatly simplified and tablature would be redundant. When the bar to musical literacy is to learn how to read a notation optimized for piano, it becomes a pointless question to ask why piano players achieve literacy. |
Also the regular layout of the frets makes improvisation much easier as you just find the right starting point to whatever song you want to jam over, and start going up and down the same pentatonic scale pattern.
Of course all this only gets you so far, but it's enough for a lot of teenage rockstar wannabes to have fun. No harm in that at all.
By contrast most of the songs people seek to first play on the piano requires a much steeper hill to climb. Even Fur Elise can be very challenging to play at tempo for a beginner. Moonlight, while slow, still requires catching a lot of notes at once and reading a dense score with plenty of double sharps and what not (and God help you if you want to try the 3rd movement). Outside classical, it's much more difficult to get a good sound by just banging out chords, unlike strumming on a guitar. Some sort of separate melody and baseline is almost always expected on the piano.
Now if you want to rip out some mad Eddie Van Halen solos or perform classical finger-picking songs then all bets are off. In fact I'd say mastering multiple melodies at once (some sort of counterpoint) on guitar is much more difficult than piano.
And yes translating standard notation to guitar fingering is much more challenging, because it makes no sense for the guitar neck, and you have to know not just to hit say A3 but where on the neck it would be best to do that given your current position.