How to Read Guitar Tabs to Master the Guitar
July 13, 2008 – 2:09 amSo, you have decided that you are ready to learn to play the guitar. You have chosen a few tabs to help you get started, but now you are wondering how to read guitar tabs. The good news is that guitar tabs are designed to help the beginner and are extremely easy to read once you get the hang of it. In fact, they are far easier than the alternative, the traditional sheet music.
You will need to understand the layout of the tabs when you are learning how to read guitar tabs, but once you do, you will find them to be very simple to interpret and play from. These are the best form of musical notation for beginners, being designed with the guitar in mind and will have you playing the guitar before you even have time to learn to read sheet music.
There are some similarities between traditional sheet music and guitar tabs; the most important difference is the layout of the tabs. Unlike sheet music, guitar tabs indicate the placement of your fingers while playing.
There are six strings on a guitar, E, B, G, D, A, and E again. The first E, is a high E, with the last E being the low. When learning how to read guitar tabs, you will need to know the placement of these strings on the tab itself. The lines go from top to bottom, the higher E will be on top, which is then followed by the B, G, D, A, and lower E on the bottom, in that order.
See those metal lines on the neck of your guitar? Those are the frets and on your tabs, they are indicated by the vertical lines you see there - your fingers are placed in between (not on!) the frets while playing. When you’re reading guitar tabs, there will be numbers - these tell you which fret your fingers should be on.
These numbers will be present in your tabs and correspond with frets on your guitar; however, you will also see an occasional zero on the tabs - this means that you should play that string “open”. Open means that you will not place your finger on any fret. To briefly explain, if you were to see the number four on the A string in your guitar tab, you would place your finger on the fourth fret of that string.
These numbers correspond to the frets on your guitar, numbered from top to bottom; you will also see when you are learning how to read guitar tabs that there are also zeros on the tabs - this tells you to play that string “open”, that is, with no fret being pressed. For example, if the line corresponding to the A string in your guitar tab says 6, then you would place your finger on the 6th fret and so on.
You’ll see many other symbols while learning to read guitar tabs, such as X, B, R, H, P, PM, T and /. These symbol each have a different meaning. X means to not play that string, while B denotes that you should bend that note, P is a pull off. The meaning of those other symbols is as follows - H is for a hammer-on, R for release, T means to tap the note, PM indicates a palm mute and a / tells you to slide. As you are learning how to read guitar tabs, you will come to know all of these symbols and to incorporate them into your guitar playing.
Tags: Music
Related Posts
Print This Article :
