On tabs

I despise tabs, past the first few weeks of picking up their guitar my students never see them with me, many who use tab assume we don't like it because they have no rhythmic indications, however there are a number of reasons beyond that which lead me to dislike using it.

”You don't have a clue what you're doing”

Look at a piece of tabulature, and pick a random note, you should be able to tell me what that note is, tell me what chord it's over top of and what degree of the chord that is, when I see sheet music I can do that instantly, tabs however don't give you nearly enough information, the reasoning for knowing this comes in improvisation and decorating the melody.

”It's WAY easier to play like this”

I've yet to see any reasonably complicated song tabbed out in the way that I'd play it, most tabbers do what's known as “searching” moving up and down the fretboard trying to find the right note, they then skip the step of rewriting it into a more sensible position. Most tabbers break positional playing ideas constantly (I've seen it as bad as changing positions every few measures,) making your playing incredibly inefficient. And usually when tabbers DO follow positional rules they choose a position that isn't the most efficient place.

”It promotes 'parroting'”

Parroting is what some of my colleagues call playing everything note for note exactly the way it was shown to you, this is a style of learning that doesn't get you very far in the long run, this goes back to improvisation and melody decoration, but it also goes back to moving the same ideas across different songs, I've met a few people who learnt off tab that have learnt 8 different ways to play a ii-V-I progression without realizing they were relearning the same idea until I played it with my back to them, this won't happen with standard notation.

The Alternatives

Unfortunately there aren't many, it's hard to find notation for most rock songs. Transcribing the song your self is the most beatifically, but far from practical for beginner students, Powertab is a free alternative, however tab is written underneath you have to learn to ignore it, Guitar Pro is a similar (and in my opinion better) program, with the option to hide tab, however it runs about $60.

Conclusion

I generally recommend my students to learn a few tunes off tab or powertab when they start, this way when someone asks them to play something they can do something people can recognize, however, I get them to rewrite notes outside position into an easier place, then transcribe what they're doing into standard notation, creating, although a longer process, the student will gain MUCH more benefit in the long run. As soon as they have enough fretboard and theory knowledge to figure these things out themselves, they learn that way.