"By ear" or reading music tabs

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I'm a harmonica player that can read tabs but never took the time to read music scores.

Over the years I have met many fine musicians that find it interesting that I can pick up and play with various musical genres. Non harmonica players ask me how I can get certain notes from a 10 hole diatonic harmonica. My usual truthful answer is I don't know. Part of the answer comes from a teacher I studied under. He could get 63 notes out of a 10 hole harp. I'm no where near that good.
Back to my original question I had in my mind when I started typing. Do you read or play your music "by ear"?

Depending on responses I might start another thread on harmonica/harp playing.

I can play a music sheet. When i play piano or cello, at first i read the music sheet.

As soon as i have learned the music sheet, the paper becomes purely decorative.

It is only the memory of movement and ear guiding me (together with current mood and feelings).

I often happen to play a music, thinking that it is the corresponding music sheet in front of my eyes, but it is not!
I only realize it after a while

Oddly enough, reading music is probably the one skill that I know I did have, but seem to have lost.

I played in the school orchestra as a kid (trombone), and sang in the choir until my voice broke - so I could read solo lines fluently (though not polyphonic material). Later on, I started playing bass in punk/math bands where everything was learned by ear and lots of gesticulating at fretboards! As no-one else was a music reader, it became of little use to me. These days, I can just about pore over a score, scratching my head over individual notes, but I'm mowhere near being able to read a line and be able to hear it in my head in "real time", which I know I used to be able to do.

Tabs, I find a little less scary, though I still can't interpret them in real time. I do use them to note down the fretting for new riffs that I come up with, but not for communication with other musicians (I work solo almost exclusively these days.)

Actually, I find the graphic 'piano rolls' on a sequencer much easier to read - the notes appear as rectangles with size proportional to time, on a grid of whole notes, arranged chromatically (so no need for key signatures and accidentals). That suits my way of thinking much better than having lots of different symbols to remember.

I also do mostly solo gigs.
For a whole I either wirjed with a Praise & Worship team or band in the community.

Problem was I found I was a bit ahead or behind the group. Practice and feedback (OK let's start over) helped.

And you.....

I'm a complete swine for rushing everything!

In my experience, a lot of bass players and drummers suffer from "death by mid-tempo" - songs that are not quite fast enough to get excited about, but a little too fast to squeeze any "fairy dust" into. When I'm drumming, in particular, I'm quite good at fast, intricate "break-beats" and also languid reggae-ish rhythms - but ask me to do just a straightforward four-time rock backbeat, and my limbs just seem to forget what they're doing after a while (I find the same thing when trying to dance to a lot of modern "dance music" - there's often not enough syncopation for me to get my teeth into.)

It's been along time, nearly 20 years, since I gigged - though I may be doing so again soon. A friend has suggested a one off re-union of one the bands I was in back in the day. The band was our "non-serious" alternative to the angry punk bands we used to be in - silly, raucous, comedy covers of cheesy 80's and disco. It'll be a good laugh, and the audience will be mostly friends anyway, so it's not so nerve racking.

I gave it up after a few years because I just didn't have the constitution for long journeys cooped up in the back of a van, or having to wait for after-gig parties to finish because I was dossing on the host's floor that night. I loved performing, and practices even more so, but gigs were often just too much time around people for me.

I would like to get back into it though - I'm getting pretty handy with my audio looping gizmos, and wouldn't mind doing just the odd gig here and there locally. I never wanted to go on stage and just be bent over a laptop the whole time, cueing pre-recorded riffs, but my current set-up feels more like a musical performance again rather than computer science.

I have never been able to make any sense of tabs, it just looks like a bunch of random numbers to me.

I read notated music (I'm a classically-trained musician), I was always a natural at this, while I have always been hopeless at playing from memory. I can count on one hand the songs I know the words to. Even if I am trying to learn a more contemporary song (i.e. non-classical, music that traditionally wouldn't be written in notated form), I will sit down and aurally transcribe the whole thing, as once that is done I will be able to play it straight away, as opposed to learning tiny bits at a time, then forgetting it all the next day. I have always been in awe at how non-readers manage to learn songs without it taking forever.

Even when rehearsing with a blues/soul band I have a few bars of each song written down, just to trigger my memory. When they call out a song name, that doesn't mean anything to me, it's only when they start playing that I recognise the song that's being played and go 'oh, that one'.