[kansface]

The funny thing is that standard notation is quite poor for the guitar because it has no notion of finger movements- all sorts of annotations are dumped into scores - numbers for fingers, circled numbers for strings, roman numerals for frets, empty noteheads for natural harmonics, and who knows what for artificial harmonics and friends.

I don't think its possible to reproduce a piece from only tabs (without having heard it) while standard notation makes sight reading unnecessarily hard.

[squeaky-clean]

I feel like I'm repeating myself too much in this thread, haha, but only because it seems like no one is acknowledging that you can combine both forms very easily and produce very clear results. You just replace the staff notation with tabs, but keep everything else.

I took a quick screenshot to show an example[1]. I think here you can tell very easily what fingerings to play, what the note duration is, and when you should sustain notes over others. The difference between slurs, slides and whammy bar bends (The V symbol you see next to notes like in meas 3), muting notes is an x, yadda, yadda. I'll stop going on about tabs now.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/yog4v5n.png

[baddox]

If you just want to know where you put your fingers to make the same sound as some other guitar made in a recording, tabs are fairly reasonable. If you want to know what's going on musically, staff notation is much better. Also, if you want to be able to play melodies from fake sheets, or arrange music originally written for another instrument, you'll need to know staff notation.

[palimpsests]

I know countless guitarists, myself included, for which sight reading is not hard at all, because we've practiced this for hundreds of hours or more. All the things you described as making this difficult simply become second nature with practice.

[markvdb]

Standard notation can help build a mental representation of how the music sounds. With some training, one can process the standardised fingering annotations into physical movement really fast too.

Tabs are physical movement instructions. With a lot of training, some people can process this into a limited mental representation of how the music sounds.

If you think about it, it's quite analog to the difference between vector and bitmap images.