How To Read Guitar Tabs Basic Understanding
Instead of telling you which pitches to play,
TABs tell players where to put their fingers on the guitar. Tabs were
created
by guitarists exclusively for guitarist to read guitar music. I’d like
to think
of the ‘T’ and ‘B’ in TAB as meaning Treble and Bass respectively. The
following diagram shows you the relation between TAB and the physical
guitar.
Figure 1: Strings on the guitar
The thinnest string
is also known as the 1st string and goes up to the 6th String as
the thickest string.
As you can tell in
the previous diagram, no music experience and no music
theory is required to learn how to read guitar tabs. All you need to
know is which
line on the TAB represents which string on the guitar and what the
symbols
mean.
Before we jump into
learning how to actually learn how to read guitar tabs we first
need to look for problems that we could be facing when using guitar
tabs.
How to
overcome the shortcomings of guitar TABs
Although using TABs
is the easiest way to learn to play the guitar, it is not perfect
all by itself. TAB only tells you where to play notes on the guitar. It
does not
provide a visual indication of pitch and dynamic like in standard
notation so it can
be pretty hard to tell how the song sounds like by simply looking at
TABs.
Guitar TAB also
lacks accurate information on rhythm and timing. Guitar TAB
writers sometimes provide limited rhythmic information by adding note
stems,
flags and beams above the numbers but this practice is not standardized.
Knowing the song you want to learn helps in understanding the rhythm
and timing
better.
Alternatively a
recording of the song helps learning a song using guitar
TABs faster and easier. Also you may initially need video for really
advanced
techniques if you don’t know the technique yet.
Now that we know
how to complement TABs so that it becomes easier to learn
your favorite there is still one more thing we need to do before we can
start to use
guitar TABs and that is tuning which we will cover in the next step.
Next Tuning To Read Guitar Tabs
Pages:
How
to read guitar tabs: The Basic Understanding
Basic
Guitar Tuning
How
to play guitar tabs: Single Notes
How
to play Chords on Guitar Tabs
Barre
Chords
Power
Chords
Strumming
Hammer-ons
and Pull-offs
Slides
and Variations
Vibrato,
Palm Muting, Rake, Harmonics, Tapping, Using a Capo
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