Learning how to read guitar tabs can look like a challenge to the beginning guitar player, but you’ll soon find out that it’s really not as hard as it might look at first!
When you begin to learn guitar, it is a great help to learn how to read guitar tabs, or the “road map” of the song you would like to learn to play. Whether your instrument is acoustic or electric guitar, the road map used is sheet music, and tab, or tablature, is a way of writing sheet music for stringed instruments which allows a player who has not been trained in reading the traditional music staff to read and write sheet music. On the traditional staff, which can be used for any musical instrument, there are 5 lines and 4 spaces, each of which represents a note, whereas each line on a tablature staff represents a string on the instrument.
Tablature eliminates the need to memorize the locations of the notes by having, in the case of the 6-string guitar, 6 lines, each of which represents a string on the instrument. The line at the bottom of the staff represents the heaviest (or lowest pitch) string, and the top line represents the thinnest (or highest pitch) string. Notes are written on the staff with a combination of numbers and notation symbols to represent the duration of each note, and where that note should be played on the fretboard. Other symbols are added to notate subtleties in each note; for instance, a note which should be bent up one half step will have a curved arrow pointing up just above that note. When you learn how to read guitar tabs, you need to start somewhere, and the best place is at the beginning- Let’s start there, and look at it in a little more detail!
These examples will apply to the six-string guitar, both acoustic and electric. The differences between this and other instruments, such as bass guitar, mandolin, or banjo will be in the number of lines making up the staff. You can see the Tablature staff at how to read guitar tabs
You’ll notice, first of all, that there are 6 lines, one for each string of the guitar. The line on the bottom represents the low “E” string, and the top one is the high “E” string. If you’re brand new to the guitar, the strings are, from low to high, E, A, D, G, B, and E. At the left, you’ll notice the TAB clef, which is just showing that this sheet music is written as tablature. Just after the TAB clef are the numbers on each line. Those numbers correspond to the frets that should be played in sequence on each string. To play what is written here, a basic E scale, you would first play the low E string open, followed by the note at the second fret on the low E string, then the fourth fret on the low E string, followed by the open A string, then second fret on the A string, and so on. To the right of the scale, you’ll notice several notes stacked one on top of the other with “E maj” above them. This is the way a chord is written in tablature. This specific chord is E major, and is played by playing the low E, B, and high E strings open at the same time as the B note (second fret of the A string) E note (played at the second fret of the D string, and the G# note (first fret of the G string.) These are all strummed together to play the chord. In this example, there are zeros written to indicate that a string should be played open- if a string is to be avoided, it is indicated by writing an “x” at that position on the staff, or by simply not writing anything there.
What I’ve just discussed are all the basics needed to read tablature sheet music. If you’ve heard a song that you would like to learn to play, the first step, when beginning to learn guitar and how to read guitar tabs, is to find a copy of the song in one of the many available sources of beginner guitar tabs online and download it, or better yet, copy it with pen and paper. The purpose for this is to get some practice at recognizing how the notes are written- when you learn how to read guitar tabs, it helps to know how they are written, and this is knowledge that will be good to know when you are ready to start writing out your own songs! You should be able to learn to play it on your guitar by listening and following along, playing each part slowly at first, and picking up speed as you become more comfortable. More detail is added as necessary to describe the duration of a note or chord, the length of a rest, when and how much to bend and release strings, when to mute the strings, and other techniques that will be described in other articles. For now, take this beginning lesson and run with it!
Happy playing, and best of luck for your success from free guitar lessons!
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