I'm not big on metronomes.  If you have a nice vintage acoustic one, maybe they are nice or something.  But I prefer to use a click track instead.

Audacity has a version for all the major computer operating systems (Windows, Mac and Linux) and it is free.  I forget if you have to also download plugins (also free) to get the option to generate click tracks or if it is included with the default install.  But either way, the price is right. 

Why click tracks?  Well, if you ever do any recording, you usually end up dealing with them anyway, so I figure it is best to just skip a step on the learning curve and use them instead of a metronome.  Also, click tracks can do time signatures.  Like instead of just "tick tick tick tick", they can do "TICK tick tick" when you are working on something in a 3/4 for example.  That can actually help a lot with some pieces.  And if you might want to record a bit someday or participate in some of the group projects, then click tracks are already home turf and you won't need to get used to them. 

Then you get yourself a little mp3 player and burn the click tracks to mp3s and load up the player so you can use it anywhere instead of just when you are near your computer.  A good assortment of tempos and time signatures and you can just scroll down on the player to whatever you need for practice at a given moment.

I will confess that I can certainly play from score on violin if I take it a bit slow, since I don't practice that skill.  Tab or something like Barry's notation, even easier.  But I focus mostly on learning violin/fiddle by ear.  The reason is that instruments where I put a strong focus on learning to play from written score first, I feel that when I compose or improvise on them, it comes out sounding more "safe" and predictable.  That isn't necessarily always bad or anything, but it isn't what I want for violin.  Instruments that I learned to play by ear at least first, I notice I tend to compose and improvise with some wider tonal excursions and I tend to make more interesting use of tension/release and less common modes and scales.  And it just feels like there is a bit more of "me" in the playing.

That's pretty subjective, and different people have different goals, so I don't claim it is "better".   It is just more what I personally want.

KindaScratchy said
 

BTW, I've played the guitar for years but never bought into the tab approach. Seems to me that if you're going to learn a system of symbols, why not just learn to read music?

Well, with guitar tablature, there is one significant advantage I can think of.  It makes it simple to show where a particular note is to be played on the fretboard.  For example, if you run into a note that needs to be played at 329.63 Hz, well that is the open "high E" string on a guitar (assuming modern "standard" tuning of A4=440).  But you can also get that note on a guitar by playing the B string at the 5th fret, the G string at the 9th fret, the D string at the 14th fret, the A string at the 19th fret, or the low E string at the 24th fret (if you have a guitar with that many frets).  Which one does the person who wrote down the bit of music want you to play?  Standard musical notation won't help you with that, whereas with guitar tab it is obvious. Is that actually important?  Well, it can be.  If you are trying to learn how to play a specific bit of music the way some particular player does it, it can be very useful.  Some bits can be quite easy played in one area of the fretboard but much harder when played in another.  There also is some difference in the timbre of the note if it is played at different spots on strings of different thickness, even though the pitch can be the same.

Also, guitar tab doesn't need or use key signatures.  At least for people who didn't take music theory or haven't already learned another instrument, that can be nice.  It is a system of notation that some people find more intuitive for guitar.   

Like all notation systems (including standard notation) it has drawbacks as well.  For example, it is harder to show timing, and music theory note relationships may be harder to see than they would be in standard notation or some other notation systems.

But as a specialized notation system developed for a single instrument, it isn't too bad.  Some guitarists feel it makes more sense to use a specialized notation system developed for their instrument than to use the one some think of as "standard", which was developed from a way of showing children how to sing a tune by pointing at fingers and spaces between fingers and sort of duct taped together with assorted fixes over time to allow it to sort of be used for many instruments but not really be particularly good for any of them.  Darn those innovators and developers. LOL

Tab for fiddle or violin.. I have to confess I don't know that system well, but it looks less useful to me than guitar tab.  While it would work great for showing someone how to play a melody or even a doublestop in "first position", I don't understand how it shows the notes in positions further up the neck.  It also has the same problem as guitar tab for being more awkward when it comes to showing the timing/duration of notes.  But it could be used to show a person who knows their "basic first position fingerings" (or has tapes installed on their fingerboard) how to play a bit of music with little or no time spent learning how to read music notation, and for that alone it is probably worth the maybe 30 seconds it takes to learn the basics of fiddle tab.  So long as the doublestop is in the first position, it would be pretty easy to write in fiddle tab so far as I understand the system

So yeah, I would agree it is still just learning a set of symbols, but symbols that are specific to the playing possibilities of a given instrument can be worth the bother of learning.  Most of us who learned standard notation tend to find other systems a bit awkward or confusing, and it can seem like it would be simpler for everyone to just learn "standard notation".  But the standard notation is just as arbitrary as any other notation system and has it's own drawbacks.  It is just more familiar to some of us.  But that may be kind of like the folks that expect everyone everywhere in the world to just learn to speak English.