A boatload of modern flamenco literature is written with both. It'll give an unedited manuscript with tab underneath to show what strings to play the pitches on, whereas classic guitar lit will show fingerings and string assignments next to notes and nixing the tab thing all together.

From what I've seen of Guitar Pro, its notation is often incorrect. Not wrong notes, exactly, but incorrect enharmonics, that sort of thing. It's a bit like an automatic translation of a foreign language - you can understand it, the words are right, but it's grammatically awkward or inelegant.

Not saying it's not a great piece of software - just don't rely on it to teach yourself notation. (Just in case you might have been thinking about that... ;-) )

Music reading is a unique type of skill, where you don't really see the full benefits of it until maybe a few, or several years down the road. Infact, in the early stages, it may actually be easier to learn something fairly advanced "by ear" or with tab or both. Music notation actually makes certain things HARDER to learn in the early stages. But then there comes a certain turning point....where all of a sudden it makes learning advanced music EASIER, much easier. Where and when that turning point happens will be different for everyone, based on the amount of time spent practicing it each day, and of course if you are doing it alone, or with help from a teacher or teachers. The absolute best possible way to learn to read music is to join your school band and/or choir, and then later study music in college. With the college study being much more intense.

Anyways, if you have the patience and self-discipline to constantly work on your music reading, down the road you will be so glad you took that route. Of my entire 6 year college career.....it is the only thing I am still using today, and I'm very happy to have learned it. Infact, I get such a satisfaction out of my reading skills, that it made the entire 6 years of college, loads of stupid useless classes, and thousands of dollars in tution well worth it....seriously.

One point I have to bring up, JonR you said that both have their advantages and disadvantages, and that neither tells you the whole story....that is fairly inaccurate to say about properly notated guitar music. In a well notated guitar score, there are no disadvantages, or any missing parts of the story. It is possible you may come across something where something was inadvertanly left out and therefore some confusion as to the execution or fingering may be a temporary problem, but that is a fault of the transcriber, not of music notation. Music notation as a system is complete and can account for anything you could possibly need to know. I have a large collection of sheet music, and I have yet to come across a single piece where the exact execution of the piece was not 100% clear. So I have to completely disagree with you on that point---at least your assertion that "neither tells the whole story".

I would agree with you that there may be some percievable disadvantages to music notation, and mainly in my opinion it would be as I already stated---music notation in the early stages actually makes it harder to teach something that is simple to play "by ear" or to learn by demonstration. So in the early stages it actually goes kind of slow, and is hard to see the benefits, especially when you learned something much more advanced "by ear". But like I said, once you get over that initial hump, the trend completely reverses. A good analogy would be like that huge roller-coaster ride where it takes you forever to climb up to the top, but once you get over that hump, you are free-falling at 100mph having the time of your life.

Despite my great appreciation and love for music notation, I think TAB can be useful with students at times and I'm not afraid to use it. I especially like TAB with the rhythmic stems, because at least your developing some music notation skills at the same time.