About Guitar Tabs

When we start off as guitar players we are dead keen and want to learn to play songs right away from day one and look to learn all about guitat tabs as a way of fast tracking our progress as guitarists. A Guitar tab is nothing more or less than a picture of the guitar’s neck. You look at the tab on the page and you see the guitar strings.  Although guitar tabs are not hard to read, many novice guitar players seem to be daunted by the prospect of learning to read something resembling  a new language.

The real difficulty with learning all about guitar tabs is more of a mental block than anything else. Even though tablature has a long history  it is generally regarded as a special musical language for guitar players. Guitarists all over the world are writing tabs using standard text editors and sharing their work with other guitar players through medias like the internet.

Of course for a novice guitar player this may be a bit scary but once you have learnt to read guitar tabs, which is not as hard as many people seem to think, you can be playing a few chords within a very short space of time . You will soon see some progress with your chord changes and you begin to look for other  songs in tab form. With half a dozen  or more guitar tabs you can keep going for a month or so, ffter twhich you will have passed the first stage of learning guitar and be ready to move on.

Here is tab for a few notes played on the guitar . . .followed by a video

e———————-|

B———————-|

G———————-|

D—–1-2—–1-2—–|

A–2——-2———-|

E———————-|

Easy Tips For Reading Guitar Tabs

Many guitarists are self taught, with no idea how to read music and learning all about guitar tabs make it possible for even players who cannot read traditional sheet music to enjoy playing guitar. Standard notation uses five horizontal lines to indicate what degree of pitch each note takes on.

Unlike standard notation guitar tablature consists of six horizontal lines, representing a single string of the guitar. This makes learning to read guitar tabs very visual eliminating the need to read sheet music. The lowest line of tablature represents the low E, or fattest, string on the guitar and each number represents a fret on the guitar.

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Often with guitar music, you won’t be playing single note lines, but rather chords and double stops (two notes at once, harmonizing). Learning how to read guitar tabs for chords is slightly different. Standard notation often falls short when writing for guitar. With a little practice, you’ll learn how to read guitar tabs quckly.

What Tabs Wont Tell you

• They will (usually) not tell you  note lengths - so in most
  cases you will need to listen to the song yourself to work out the ryhthm of the notes.
• They will not tell you which fingers you use to fret which note.
• They will not tell you anything about picking and strumming -
  you will have to decide for yourself where to use upstrokes/downstrokes
  and so on.