Sounds like most of us play by ear.
The only time I've used another method recently was when I was messing around with Bach's Tocato. I tried downloading the sheet music and tabbing out the guitar parts from that. Then playing the tablature.
Didn't work!
Hey Dadfad, what's your take on this. I know you are probably the most knowledgeable in tabs of all people here.
(That could be taken as either a compliment or a dig, Jim! ;D)
I've tabbed a lot of tunes for others, and even done a few for artists to be used in their song-books or with their videos. But I'm really not a big tab kind of guy myself!
I typically learn by ear because that's how I had to do it waaaay back when. (Probably like most of us here.) A record on the record-player... a 78 rpm played on 45 rpm holding a guitar tuned waaay below standard to match. Or a 45 played at 33-1/3. (My old Chess 45-single of Johnnie B. Goode was almost worn flat I played that darn thing so many times!)
Back when I was learning (again, probably like most of us here) there really wasn't tab around. A few guys tried to use some kind or another of peronalized guitar notation on six strings they made up, but nothing "formalized" like tab is today. There were very few guitar-books available back then. Maybe a Mel Bay book showing the chords to "On Top of Old Smokey" or "Red River Valley" or something, but that was about it!
The first "tab" I ever did was for a guy in a band I'd played in where I drew six lines and put fret numbers on them for the lead-guitar break of "Strange Brew" (an old Cream tune) for him.
As I got more into blues, especially old country-blues, and I'd track down a few of those old blues-guys, I'd sometimes use a similar "guitar-shorthand" to make brief notes of this lick or that as they tried to teach me their stuff.
It was also useful to me as I sometimes got into trying to translate/transcribe old-time piano-jazz standards into fingerstyle guitar.
By the late 70s or early 80s I'd start seeing more and more things "tabbed out" in the various specific artist (or band) guitar-books that had gotten a lot more popular, and tab had pretty much become standardized or formalized somewhat in the way it was being notated.
And I also started to see just how crappy (or down-right inaccurate) some of the tab was. And I learned very little published tab was actually done by the artist himself. The rights were sold and a publishing company hired someone to tab the tunes, for better or worse. (Probably the worst tab I've ever seen was in a Skip James songbook where Skip's tunes were all tabbed in standard tuning, generally the correct notes but virtually impossible to play. Anyone even vaguely familiar with Skip's work knew he played almost exclusively in open-minor tunings. (The "credentials" for the person who'd tabbed the book was that he'd studied music at NYU, written a tune for a TV show (might have been "The Facts of Life") and done several sound-tracks for video games!) Yeah, a real pre-war country-blues master!
I started getting into tabbing more as the "unplugged" thing started up, and along with it a new interest in old country-blues. And someone, usually a younger guy, would ask me to tab... whatever... an old Willie Walker tune, or something pretty obscure.
I came to think of doing a tab for someone as kind of the nu-modern way of "just pass it on" which is what so many of those old-guys said when they took the time to show me a few things when I was younger.
But too many guys now use tab as a crutch, and not as a tool which is what it should be. Nothing replaces a degree of familiarity and expertise (at whatever skill-level one might be at).
I've seen young guys who can fire off a blistering piece of lead-guitar work note-for-note at lightning speed learned from tab, but can't even tell you what key their playing in. Totally tab-dependent, with tab as a crutch. (Closely related to the "note-for-note" dependancy by some who couldn't understand the piece they were trying to learn was probably improv'ed and played a bit differently every time the original artist ever played it. Even at the studio every "take" recorded was probably a bit different from the next. But the one chosen by the producer for the album-track became "etched in stone" for "tab-heads!")
Conversely you find guys (usually formally trained) who look down on and pooh-pooh tab, that standard notation is the only "legitimate" notation. (Sorry, but there are quite a few Bb-notes within those twenty-odd frets. Which one do you want? LOL) Both are tools, both are useful. And a guitarist can be just as "notation-dependent" as they can "tab-dependent."
But I've rattled on enough about tabs!
I generally learn by ear. You listen to a piece several times. From experience you
know this phrase or that can only be played in a certain way in a certain place, and so from just a few key pieces of input, you can begin to reconstruct a tune in your head before you even touch a guitar. And then when you do actually go to work on it, it usually falls into place.