Guitar How-To

Archive for the ‘Guitar Notes’ Category

If you are learning guitar you have probably heard about tablature, or tabs. As a new guitar player you are anxious to start playing songs, and you have been told that tabs are the easiest way to learn. That is good news. You do not need to spend weeks or months learning music theory.
Guitar tablature is a system of musical notation which is very popular with guitarists. With guitar tabs a composer can express most musical ideas on the acoustic or electric guitar in a clear, straightforward way.
If you want to start playing guitar right away, grab the tabs for your favorite song and take a look at what the tab consists of:

E—3——————

B———————-

G———————-

D———————-

A———————-

E———————-

You will probably believe me when I tell you that the tab is a representation of the neck of the guitar. You find out which frets to put your fingers at by following the numbers printed along the strings. If there is a number 3 on the top string, that means you put your finger at the third fret on the top E string – the thinnest string on the guitar. You have just played the note G. No problem. The guitar is your oyster.

Now let us move onto tabs for guitar chords. Here is an E Major chord:

E—0——————-

B—0——————-

G—1——————-

D—2——————-

A—2——————-

E—0——————-

Just for comparison, if you take a look at the sheet music for the same song you will be presented with a bunch of black dots that do not do a thing to help you play the song. The language of sheet music is not as simple as tab language. There is a whole background of musical theory behind the little black dots on the page. Learning theory takes time and effort, and unless you see some way you will benefit from learning music it is just going to clutter up your brain with useless furniture.

Guitar tabs fast track your learning of songs, but there is one condition: you must already know what these songs sound like. You see, there are some elements missing from tabs that are present in conventional sheet music. Tabs do not give you a time signature or note values. Basically that means you can play the notes but, without hearing the song played by somebody else, you will not know how long each note lasts. But the chances are when you are starting out learning to play guitar you will probably be wanting to play songs you have heard before.

Tabs are available on the internet for acoustic, bass or electric guitars. If you plan on playing guitar with a group of other musicians, you might encounter some problems sharing your guitar tabs with them unless they are also guitar players. If you work with a keyboard player he or she probably learnt to read music as part of their keyboard playing course, and they may not be able to make head or tail out of your guitar tab.

So there are some faults with relying exclusively on tabs to learn songs but if you work at learning your guitar tabs you will find that you will be able to play guitar just as well as a guitarist with a knowledge of musical notation.

Reading music is not a priority for many new guitar players. The guitar at the height of its popularity attracted millions of young music lovers who wanted to become folksingers, rock stars and instrumentalists. There were many more people looking for a fast track to guitar playing than there were those willing to spend the time and effort to learn to read music and to absorb the minimal amount of guitar theory needed to play guitar music.

In general the fastest way to get started on the guitar is to learn to read tab. This is a form of music notation which evolved hundreds of years ago and is heavily in use today by guitar players of all genres. We usually associate guitar tabs with popular music but a search on the internet will yield tablature for classical, folk, jazz and flamenco pieces. The popular wisdom is that tab gets you playing faster than sheet music, but is this true? It is true that if you get tabs for a simple melody you can get the basic principles to tab reading in a few minutes and you will probably be able to pick out your tune after about an hour but by the time you have learnt the extra symbols for trills and hammer-ons, and pull-offs and other techniques you probably will not have spent too much less time than you would have learning sheet music.

Another consideration with playing the guitar is the development of your technique. The fact is if you learn to read tab only, your guitar playing ability is going to be lagging way behind your ability to read guitar tab so learning to read music notation may not be holding you back as much as you might think. Many tab-reading guitar players feel that they can play guitar and understand music and improvise just as well as anybody who has gone to the trouble of learning to read sheet music. But almost all of them have stories about how they were passed over for gigs in favor of guitarists who could read conventional notation.

Another advantage of learning to read music is the ability to sight read. Sight reading means you can pick up a piece of sheet music that you have never seen before and play it straight off. For some reason a person who has learnt to read musical notation and who has a little experience of playing can read music without having to stop and think. No matter how familiar you are with tab, you cannot sight read it. If you have not heard the piece you are trying to play, tab will not give you the note values and the rhythm of the song. You need to hear it or be coached in it. This is what puts note readers ahead of tab readers in the recording studio or in a band.

If you think of the guitar as an instrument with six strings and twelve frets, that is seventy-two notation symbols you will need to learn if you read music. This seems like an enormous job on the face of it, but if you ask anyone who has learnt to read music they will tell you that it is not nearly as hard as it seems. It is a job that looks big until you have started to do it.

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