Reprinted Articles

Once you have decided to learn how to play the guitar, you are very likely brimming over with excitement; you have your brand new guitar, some accessories and even some guitar tabs to get you off to a good start. You’re excited; at least until you look at those tabs and realize you haven’t a clue how to read guitar tabs! Luckily, reading guitar tabs is not terribly difficult. Once you learn how to read guitar tabs, you’ll be playing from tabs in no time! They are easier than sheet music and are designed specifically with beginning players in mind.

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.

When learning how to read guitar tabs, you will also notice that the tab has six lines, whereas a piece of sheet music only has five. Again, when reading guitar tabs, you will notice that it shows you the placement of your fingers. Therefore, because the guitar has six strings, the tab will have six lines, with each line designated as a guitar string. Therefore, it is most important that you learn the strings on a guitar before you begin reading guitar tabs.

As you are learning how to read guitar tabs, you’ll probably notice that unlike sheet music, guitar tabs feature six lines as opposed to the five seen in sheet music. That’s for a good reason - these six lines represent your guitar’s six strings. Once you know this, things should be much clearer to you.

The strings on your guitar correspond to the following notes: E, B, G, D, A and E. The first E is the high E string and the sixth string is the low E. When you are learning how to read guitar tabs, you need to know how the tabs translate to your guitar strings. The lines on these tabs are directly related, with the top line being your high E string and so on down.

You will find numbers in accordance to the guitar frets on the guitar tab; however, you might find a zero on the tab as well. This will mean that the string indicated will be openly played, instead of pressed. A good example of frets is if you were to see the number three on the A tab line, you would play the A note on the third fret.

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