Guitar Tabs

Guitar music has a musical notation all its own. Rather than the standard musical notation that other musicians use, with the staffs, notes, note values, ledger lines, key signatures and time signatures, guitar players use a more simple and operational type of musical notation, called a tab. The benefit of using guitar tabs is that you can learn to play guitar without having to learn to read music in the traditional sense. Tabs, or tablatures, are used for many stringed instruments.

Guitar tabs are a form of musical notation called tablature. When you look at a guitar tab, youre actually looking at a diagram of the strings of the guitar. The lines represent the strings, with the first string at the top and the sixth string at the bottom. On the lines, you will see numbers, which represent which fret youre meant to play. A zero (0) indicates an open string. An X represents a muffled string.

Just in case you arent familiar with what a fret is, the fret is the area between two metal bars on the neck, or fingerboard, of the guitar. There are usually between 21 and 24 frets on a guitar. The dots on the frets are just visual guides to help you know where youre at.

If you look at a guitar tab and all of the numbers are one after the other, all on one line, the numbers indicate which fret to use on that string, and you pluck only that string. The numbers noted one after the other, indicates that you play one note at a time.

If there is a number on each of the lines and the numbers are stacked one on top of the other, the guitar tab is telling you to play all of those notes at the same time, strumming all six strings.

You will also come across things such as hammer-ons, pull-offs, bends and slides when reading guitar tabs. Hammer-ons are notated by the letter h. You might see this noted as 7h9 on a line. Pull-offs are noted by a p in the same way. Bends are indicated by a b and slides are noted by a / (slash).

Once youve got the idea of reading tabs, do a web search for easy guitar tabs and pick out a very basic song that you know well and play around with it. Although reading and playing guitar tabs does take some getting used to, youll be surprised how quickly you can pick it up now that you know how to read tabs.

Being able to hear the song that youre working on learning always makes it easier to learn. Even if you think you remember how it goes, listening to it while youre learning it will help you with rhythm and detail.

Using guitar tabs to learn to play the guitar is a lot of fun. Before long, youll have several songs you can play at parties to impress your friends, or just for your own pleasure.