Beginner's Guitar Primer - How to Read Guitar TAB

If you've just started learning to play guitar, and you've been trying to do it the "old school" way, you may have discovered that there was one thing no one mentioned before you started: how to read sheet music! Don't fear, and don't put your dreams of rock stardom on the back burner just yet- there is a way of making sense of notes and chords, of writing them and reading them without the years of practice it would usually take to learn to read traditional sheet music! It's another type of sheet music called tablature, or tab for short!

Traditional sheet music can be read for any instrument because the staff consists of 5 lines. The spaces, from bottom to top, spell the word FACE, while the lines, from bottom to top, are E, G, B, D, and F. (My music teachers had a saying to help remember this: "Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge." ) This is fine if you're going to be taking regular music classes, and is good to know in the long run, but doesn't help much when you want to learn to play a song on your new guitar now!

This is where tablature comes into the picture. The staff is made up of 6 lines for the guitar, or 4 lines for bass guitar. Additionally, I have seen tab written for other instruments such as banjo, which has 5 strings in some cases. Each line represents a string on the instrument, with the line on the bottom being the fattest string. For the purpose of this article, we'll be dealing with guitar, so the lowest line on the staff is the low E string. The rest of the lines correspond with the other strings on the guitar, so from the second line from the bottom, they go A, D, G, B, and high E. No problem so far, right?

When looking at a sheet of tablature, single notes are represented by a number on one of the lines. These numbers indicate which fret the note should be played on. In other words, if you see a 3 on the lowest line of the tablature staff, you would play the note at the third fret of the low E string, which is G! In the case of playing chords, tablature will generally write them 2 different ways: as the proper name of the chord on top of the tablature staff, such as Emin, then immediately below that, on the staff itself, you would see zeros on the bottom line and 4th, 5th, and 6th lines, a 2 on the second line from the bottom, and another 2 on the third line from the bottom. The numbers will be stacked up, one on top of the other, indicating that those notes should be played all at the same time.

There are some other symbols involved with tablature, just as with traditional sheet music, but we'll discuss those in other articles. For now, take what you've learned in this article, find a tablature copy of a song that you'd like to learn, and start practicing what you've read here today. As you practice, you'll find that it will be easier and easier to get the hang of it!

Until next time, happy practicing!