I don’t think so, usually it’s both… There’s string numbers near notes and also Roman numerals denoting position. In most cases it is enough to have some such marks for player to figure out the rest. I’ve made a quick example:
There’s only position number and finger number to fret the first note, but it’s quite clear how to play this at just a quick glance, isn’t it?
Fair point. I still think it gets trickier to capture some of the physical aspects of playing in standard notation rather than tab; for example:
|------------------|
|------------------|
|---------5/7h9h11-|
|-4/5h7h9----------|
|------------------|
|------------------|
|-----------------|
|---------------7-|
|---------5h7h9---|
|---5h7h9---------|
|-9---------------|
|-----------------|…are the same notes, or at least SHOULD be if I didn’t screw up the tablature (I’m typing this at lunch without a guitar) but while I suppose you could argue that legato indicators would force you to find some other approach than the bottom to play the indicated pitches, or rather it would be notated differently for that reason, or alternately if needed you could notate the position shifts (though that would get cumbersome)…
That said - this is clearly only applicable to guitar music, so of course if you’re looking at arranging a mandolin or viola or piano part on guitar, or if this is the head of a jazz standard, all of this stuff goes out the window, and how you choose to physically lay a phrase out on the fretboard is as much a matter of personal taste, style, and the vibe you’re trying to convey, more than anything else.
So, I guess I’d say that tab is mostly useful for 1) fairly simple notation for guitarists who don’t read notation, or 2) a deep dive into the playing style of a particular player, where fretting choices are as much a part of the analysis as the actual note choice and phrasing.
Standard notation, though, does strike me as a remarkably elegant system, so while I’m carving out these two specific instances where tab makes sense, I think that in general standard notation is the more useful approach for most musical situations.
EDIT - and, since I’m convincing myself as we’re having this conversation that relying mostly on tab is a handicap, I really do need to spend some time this winter brushing up on reading standard notation. 
Slash ("/") in tab means slide? I guess it would look like this:
Of course to each his own. I’m just saying that standard guitar notation has all the means to indicate fingering as detailed as it gets. And in many cases it is absolutely necessary (see guitar transcriptions of Bach’s pieces, where sometimes very unusual and counter-intuitive fingerings are employed in order to maintain polyphony and voice leading).
I’m definitely not the best sight-reader, but what I like about notation is when I look at a more or less simple score, I can more or less make this music play in my imagination (especially monophonic scores, because I’m originally a wind player). It almost can be seen on a sheet of paper. And I can’t do that with tab. Maybe someone can. But as far as I see, there’s no note durations in tab? Or maybe I just haven’t seen it yet.
Oh, interesting - so, the 1 below the staff is a fretting hand finger indicator? The circles above I’m not really following, though, the (4) makes sense as a 4th position indicator, but shouldn’t the next be (5) and not (3)? Or am I missing something…?
And re: your second point - exactly. That’s actually a fairly recent realization of mine, that literally the standard notation is the melodic contour of a melodyline through its respective scale degrees, drawn out on the staff. Which is an embarrassing thing to be realizing at 37, but again, I’m a guitarist who primarily plays improv-heavy styles and materials, so it’s just a product of relative lack of exposure.
Tab, on its own, has no indication of note duration. However, normally you see it presented in conjunction with standard notation, where you CAN glean note duration.
1, 2, 3, 4 (numbers without circles) – fingers (from index to pinky).
Numbers in circles – strings.
Roman numerals – positions.
Living with a violinist has been enlightening on this general subject. At least for classical sightreading, it’s not a matter of taste, but totally standardized. The neck is divided into a fixed number of positions, and all the notes in those positions are memorized by location. This works well enough that you can mostly omit fingerings, and assume that the player will make the standard choices unless otherwise indicated.
If you see a fingering number on a note, that’s how you indicate that the intended position is not the standard one. And it also communicates which position it should be, i.e. by inference, because you could only reach that note with the indicated fingering in one other position, typically a neighboring one.
That’s pretty much it. Slur marks for legato, specialized bowing techniques are written in text above the staff.
The idea is that once you know your position, every note location on the neck is instant recall. There is no debating where it’s going to be. If you see a note, your finger shoots to that spot. You see a fingering number, you shift positions and everything is again automatic from that point on. It’s super fast and designed for rapid reading of unfamiliar pieces. It’s also designed to be the core intonation system on a fretless instrument. The positions are always in the same spot so you learn where those distances are and that keeps the pitches in tune.
It’s totally not for improvisation. There is no concept of shapes or moving them around. That’s actually an intonation nightmare. Trying to keep the same shape while moving it gradually up the neck and shrinking its size is alien on violin and screws with their core technique.
Y’all may already know all this but it was super instructive for me to learn. I get why string instrument sightreaders are super fast at it and I am not, and pretty much can never be without some kind of rapid recall system. And I get why sightreading is not an improvisational system and why mapping the connected shapes is just not something position-based players do.
Oh, interesting… Thanks!
Actually, I DIDN’T know that - that’s fascinating, thanks Troy. I guess in many ways guitar isn’t THAT different - if you’re in a particular position on the neck, you don’t have THAT many options with which to pay a particular written pitch, so if it’s something you’ve spent some time practicing then it should be pretty automatic, where you play a written note. I think the harder part as a guitarist would be your choice of which position to start in, and your choice of where, if anywhere, you should be shifting positions.
I’ve always said that guitar was just an instrument that didn’t lend itself terribly well to sight-reading, but I suppose it’s just as plausible that the real issue is just that I suck at it! 
Technically, the guitar is just a neck with strings on it, so there’s nothing stopping you from establishing the exact same system that classical players use. You set up seven or eight standard positions and then start memorizing where the notes are in each of them. If you haven’t done this yet, then I would suggest you don’t really “suck” at sightreading, it’s that you haven’t really done it in any kind of formal way.
One issue is that tuning and repertoire affect how well this works. As an example if you try to sightread classical violin pieces on guitar you will quickly run into scenarios where you just can’t find a fingering that works at first. Baroque pieces have all these triad triplets and they just don’t map easily to a guitar tuned in fourths. So you have to try twenty different arrangements of certain bars before you can even play it. There is no way to do that in real time. Once you find a way that works, and memorize it, you’re not really “sightreading” any more, it just becomes the same as memorizing tablature.
What I am getting at is that the stuff people like Bach wrote for instruments like violin was clearly done with deep knowledge of what is technically possible on the instrument, and the awkward stuff was intentionally avoided. If you want to sightread common scales and chord shapes on guitar you could probably do it exactly like bowed players do it and it would work fine. But it would have to be, as you say, “guitar music” to really guarantee that it’s going to work in real time.
Excellent points, Troy. Still, it’s more fun to just make fun of myself than to point to valid reasons why something isn’t automatically easy, haha.
So please, pleaaaase, let’s make a “manual” of what’s possible on the guitar according to CtC knowledge and let some composer write some dope virtuoso music with it!
My point with all of this was to explain the key signature system, show how it is diatonic, and show how key signatures and notation have more to do with the piano than the guitar. That being said, another quote:
“To view consonant triads against the background of chromatic space is to decline to interpret them in terms of the number of diatonic degrees that separate their root from some tonic. This choice cuts across the multiple denominations of classical tonal theory and their pedagogical offshoots, which all teach that chromatic harmonies are primarily to be understood as transformations of some underlying diatonic one. The idea that the diatonic collection conceptually precedes and regulates the interpretation of the chromatic one, already implicit in the names of notes, their position on the staff, and the system of key signatures, became canonized with respect to classical tonality in the early nineteenth century, at roughly the same historical moment that musical education became institutionalized in conservatories…”
-Richard Cohn, from Audacious Euphony
Most all of the music I try to sight read is jazz, and rarely do I run across a tune that is firmly in one key; there are invariably chromatic notes. Realistically, unless you’re a classical guitarist, key signatures end up being a loose framework to put all the chromatic notes in, as far as the jazz tunes I see. I see it as a conceptual system that we are always working around, accommodating, for the sake of notating it.
The other positions would likely be introduced gradually through more advanced material, and indeed, with both classical guitar and violin, position playing aids in sight reading.
FordScales came about because of the number of permutations dealt with in jazz. I sight read within a framework that remains consistent for each key all over the neck. In essence, I deal with 12 patterns instead of 12 times the number of positions–just like on piano. My interest in Holdsworth (and violin actually!) kind of drove the idea that a more open hand position could make more possible.
When actually improvising, I’ll play wherever, but the active practice within the framework has me covering a wide variety of possible fingerings.
Trying to sight read bop heads I found myself crippled by too many fingering choices, and the chromatic approach has worked well towards eliminating that concern entirely.
In the eighties many of us were introduced to jazz through a modal lens, thinking of one chord at a time. As my harmonic conception has advanced on guitar and piano, the mental musical map of each key has become more relevant. My focus has switched from playing notes over a chord, towards serving a tune with more options through better understanding of the harmony. I find the relationship of secondary dominants, borrowed tonalities, etc., to the primary key in a standard, fascinating. And mainly because I used to think of chords in a disjointed manner.
Honestly, this isn’t really necessary - we already have decades of music already written for guitar, so we already know what’s “easy” for the fretting hand. For our part, we’ve started to unpack the picking side of things in our material so now hopefully it’s a little more obvious how to tackle certain common things in the picking hand too.
I realize this is somewhat off-topic for this thread about key signatures! Back on track…
Even a jazz standard like “All the Things You Are,” basically in A-flat, goes through several key areas, so you have to do some planning, and the diatonic key signature of Ab is just a starting point to “cram” the song into for notation or reading. Learning the song by ear is just a matter of following the thread, and I remind you that jazz started out as primarily an “ear” art. Disagree with me on this if you wish…
The diatonic notation system, and key signatures, have for me, become just something I have to work with, work around, accommodate, and tolerate. Jazz is really the music that carried on the advancement of modern musical thinking in the twentieth century, not notated “classical” music.
My purpose in going into this subject was not just to chat about key signatures, but to expose and be critical of it as well. There are newer ways of thinking about music out there, and I’m trying to “turn on” the guitarists who are unconventional enough to accept any “outside the diatonic box” ways of thinking, especially in the area of jazz and rock.
One such source is the book “A Geometry of Music” by Dmitri Tymoczko, who, by the way, is a guitar player, and was one of those music students “alienated” by the whole system of music pedagogy. I highly recommend this book. He discusses and is very sympathetic to jazz, devoted the last chapters to it. He basically “rewrites” music history from Medieval times onward, in this “new perspective” approach.
