1.5 How to Read Guitar Tabs

| 1.4 Guitar Pickups | Back to Free Guitar Lessons | 1.6 The Guitar Pick / Plectrum |

If you have no previous musical experience, using guitar tabs to learn songs is the ideal option.

Tabs, short for tablature is one method of transcribing music. It consists of 6 lines (for guitar) representing the 6 strings. Certain numbers are noted on these 6 lines, which tells the player what fret(s) to play. For example:

Example Guitar Tab

This particular tab tells the player to strum the B string (the 2nd thinnest string) while holding down the 1st fret, then the G string while holding down the 2nd fret, and so on.

Tabs are written as if you were looking down at the guitar that you are playing , i.e. the top line is furthest away from you (top E string, often denoted as 'e'), and the bottom line is closest (bottom E string, often denoted as 'E').

There are many more notations that can be added to tablature to increase the amount of information given to the player. For example when to palm mute, vibrato or play harmonics, and these notations are shown throughout the site along side the lessons explaining how to carry out the particular technique.

Tabs have the advantage of being readily available on the internet and being very simple to read (good for beginners) and it is this advantage that also leads to it's fault. In most cases tabs don't give any information concerning the timing and rhythm of the piece. It is then up to the player to make what they will of the tab.

Another problem of using guitar tabs is the fact that most of them are written by normal everyday people, and therefore sometimes lack the accuracy of normal sheet music.

As guitar tab is so popular, there are now many tab editing software available such as Tabledit, Guitar Pro 5 etc... These allow you to easily write your own tab. Another advantage of these programs is the ability for you to download pre-written tab off the internet and learn to play songs using those tabs. This helps you get a feel of the rhythm of the song.

Try visiting our "Guitar Tabs" or "Guitar Pro Tabs" section of our site to check if there's any songs you are looking for. The reason we provide Guitar Pro Tabs is because we believe it is a great piece of software. You should give it a try as there is a trial version of "Guitar Pro 5" available (click here to be taken to their homepage).

Considering guitar tabs on the whole, we believe that they are the way to go if you are a beginner learning to play the guitar by yourself. The sheer availability of guitar tabs on the internet, and the ease of reading them give them a large advantage over sheet music.

| 1.4 Guitar Pickups | Back to Free Guitar Lessons | 1.6 The Guitar Pick / Plectrum |