Beginner guitar players who do not know how to read guitar tabs are often worried that it means that they will need to learn some complex system of symbols and codes. To understand what tab really is, it is important to understand the difference between guitar tab and regular music notation. Conventional musical notation, or what we refer to as “sheet music†belongs to music theory. Music theory gives us an overview of what we understand by the term “music†– octaves, keys, scales, modes, note values, and much more. Guitar tabs skip over the whole body of music and go right to the nitty-gritty of telling us where to put our fingers to play notes.
Most people who think about learning to play the guitar are put off by the prospect of learning music theory. Theory is regarded as boring information that keeps us from the real job of actually playing the guitar. Strangely, nobody who has ever learnt music theory ever says, “I wish I had not learnt it.†The fact is that in spite of the popularity of guitar tabs, all professional guitarists who do not read music, have stories about how they missed out on gigs because of it. Anyway, whatever your feelings about theory and sheet music, tablature is not a no-effort substitute for learning to read music.
Guitar tabs tell you where to put left hand fingers to play notes and if any left hand technique like slurs or hammer-ons are needed. They do not tell you how long to hold notes for and what the rhythmic pattern of the music is. For that reason guitar players who rely on tabs to learn new music must also use resources like YouTube to learn how a song or instrumental piece they are learning is supposed to sound. But let us not get too carried away with what tabs do not tell us. Let us look at what tabs CAN tell us.
What we are looking at here is a piece of blank guitar tablature. If you have a guitar handy, pick it up and hold it so that the body of the guitar is to your right. This is the view of the guitar that tab shows us. The left hand end of the tab where the letters are is the tuning end of the guitar – the end of the guitar neck. The line of dashes with the lowercase e at the end is the thinnest string on the guitar, and the line with the capital E is the thickest string.
e|————————
B|————————
G|————————
D|————————
A|————————
E|————————
When you pluck these strings without placing any fingers on the frets, they both sound the note E, only two octaves apart. If your guitar is not in tune and you are still not good at tuning it, this online guitar tuner will show you how the open strings sound.
There are around twenty-two frets on your guitar. On the side of the guitar neck and between the fifth, seventh, ninth and twelfth frets are dots that are put there so you do not get lost on your way up the fretboard. The numbers on the guitar tab tell you where to put your fingers on the guitar. The tab below is telling you to play some notes on the sixth string. You are being asked to play the open string twice, then to place the first finger of your left hand just a little behind the second fret and play that note once. Next play the open string once, put your left hand first finger at the third fret and play that note once, play the note at the fifth fret using your left hand third finger to fret the note, and finally put your left hand second finger at the fourth fret and play that note once. Hard to explain, easy to play. Once you have played the sequence of notes a couple of times you will recognize it as the Peter Gunn theme by Henry Mancini.
That is it you now know how to read guitar tabs, but let us just touch on the symbols for some of the more advanced playing techniques you will encounter later on in your career.
Playing a note at the fifth fret and hammering it on to the seventh fret with a left hand finger looks like this:
By @GamerChick14
