Learning How To Read Guitar Tabs
You’ve decided to learn to play the guitar and are very excited about this new endeavor. You’ve picked out a few tabs to begin practicing with, but you’ve realized that you don’t have any idea how to read guitar tabs! Fortunately, it’s not hard to read guitar tabs; they are made with the novice in mind and once you learn how, you’ll have no trouble whatsoever using tabs. They are far easier to begin using than sheet music.
Once you have learned how the tabs are laid out, you’ll find it incredibly easy to read guitar tabs. For the beginner, these are the method of choice, since it is a musical notation which is guitar-specific, letting you begin to learn to play guitar long before you have learned 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.
The six strings on your guitar are as follows: E,B,G,D,A and E. The first is E (or high E), the last also E (low E). When learning to read guitar tabs, you will need to know how these strings are transposed onto the tab. These lines are from high to low (unless you are looking at your tab upside down!). The lines go from highest string to lowest from top to bottom, with high E being the top line.
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.
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.
To briefly run down the other symbols, an H denotes a hammer-on, R release, T is for tap, PM means to palm mute that note or chord and a / means to slide. When you are learning to read guitar tabs, you will gradually become with all of these parts of playing and reading tabs - frets, symbols and everything else.