The guitar tab is a four-dimensional graph disguised as plain text. Something so simple and understandable turns out to be way more complex than you imagined when you were 9 years old and tinkering with a guitar for the first time, and you picked it up almost immediately. All the shortcuts our minds take to translate into a spatial and temporal groove are expressed so elegantly.
The X-axis in our graph is time, infinitely complex but then reduced so that even the spacing between notes are not mapped — it relies on our human qualities of listening and timing, our inner sense of rhythm, to make something from it. It simplifies the complex part of time into a simple linear sequence.
The Y-axis is the string layout, read as if you were looking down on the fretboard while playing as is convention. Arguably this axis is the most true-to-life.
The Z-axis works on a per-note basis: each number represents a “depth” into the string, placed along the timeline of the song. These are sometimes combined into more complex relationships with slides and bends using some clever shortcuts and symbols. You could almost say the attitude, the expression, are encoded in just a couple of symbols.
But I said 4 axes — so what are we missing? The air above the strings. You could say we are stretching the definitions here but there are nuanced techniques which are critical to the soul which couldn’t be expressed otherwise: hammer-on’s and pull-off’s. A simple “p” on a tab tells you, “hey, we’re taking this note and then I want you to fling it off the map, it will be dope, I promise!”. Name something more rad than escaping the grid!
The crude diagram reveals itself as a record of the composer’s intent. She has marked out a map of movement in four dimensions to in some way match the soul of what she found in a moment of pure creative experimentation, alone with a guitar and a willingness to fail.