Loudlon's Tab Corner!

I have a number of tabs in progress right now, and Winger's Seventeen is among them (so far I've got the intro and first verse). I'll also add Hungry and Down Incognito to the list.

New submission: Kickstart My Heart, by Motley Crue (requested by bobbi)

No problem, bro.

New submission: I Love a Rainy Night, by Eddie Rabbitt (requested by BovineHoboBass)

Not exactly. Triplets have nothing to do with time signature. Normal timing is 4/4; that's four quarter notes, or eight 8th notes, per bar. In your example, 12/8 means you're lenghtening the bar with four extra 8th notes. It's the same thing as 6/4 timing (six quarters per bar). Basically it would be like playing one and a half bars.

Triplets are a whole different thing. Normally where you'd fit only two 8ths per quarter, when playing triplets you're adding in a third note – but the time between quarters doesn't change. So all three 8ths would be slightly less than a regular 8th by 1/3.

Say you're playing a song which has three seconds between quarters. That means each 8th note would be 1.5 seconds long. With triplets, though, you'd be adding another 8th note between quarters but they all three have to fit into those three seconds, so each 8th would be only 1 second long.

This also applies to triplet 16ths (three 16ths per 8th note instead of two) and triplet quarters (three quarters per half note instead of two).

Check it out – This is a metronome which plays 8th notes (select any tempo) :
http://www.metronomebot.com/subdividing-metronome-duple.html

And this is a metronome which plays triplet 8ths. Set the same tempo as you used on the one above, and notice the difference:
http://metronomebot.com/subdividing-metronome-triple.html

I hope this helps.

That's true. I didn't know what the hell a triplet was when I first started playing. I'll tell you what helped me, though, was a program called Power Tab. I started writing tabs with that back when I played guitar, and it's really specific. It measures every bar and if the combination of notes don't come out to equal the exact time signature, it tells you how much that bar is over or under. It also has a crapload of notation and musical symbols available, so by trial and error I was able to figure out what all those little things meant. It also helped me learn time signatures, song keys…it even auto-generates sheet music above each staff for every note you enter. But I was too lazy to bother learning that. Numbers on lines work just fine for me.