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.

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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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e–0—————————-
B–1—————————-
G–0—————————-
D–2—————————-
A–3—————————-
E——————————-

The line of dashes with the lower case e at the end is the top E string, the thinnest string on the guitar (the first string). The line of dashes with the capital E at the end is the bottom E string, the thickest string (the sixth string). The numbers are the frets you need to place your fingers at. So the C major chord is made up of the following notes: C played at the third fret of the fifth string, E played at the second fret of the fourth string, G played on the open third string, C again, this time an octave higher, played at the first fret of the second string, and finally, E played on the open first string.

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And here is Joe Satriani explaining modes . . .

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Maybe you do not have the ability to read sheet music at present but somehow your friends and family are always talking about how you have an affinity for music. Perhaps the guitar, the piano, the violin and the triangle are closed books to you. You are able to talk about music with passion but somehow the time or the opportunity to learn music have not been available for you to spread your musical wings.

Can you remember melodies that you hear once? Are you able to make up tunes of your own in a special place in your head? Maybe you CAN play a musical instrument but have never had the need or the time to learn musical theory. If you can answer yes to these questions without crossing your fingers behind your back, the chances are you have a natural affinity with music.

So is there something else you need to storm the chambers of music and lift the sheets to see what’s under them? As I said, even if you think of yourself as a musical no-talent you can still learn to read music. The harmonies and melodies produced by learned musical ability are just as sweet as those produced by natural musical talent. You enjoyment of music and your need to make your own determine if you have in-born musical ability.

Think about learning to read music as another skill. If you learned to operate a computer or a motor vehicle, you will probably be able to learn to read music and play a guitar or another musical instrument. The same principles apply to learning music as apply to your hobby or career.

If for some reason you were not able to learn music during your childhood or didn’t keep up with the lessons you did take, it is not too late to keep developing your music skills. It is apparently easier to learn things like music when you are a kid, but if you really want to learn, you can learn. As you grew up you acquired the knowledge of what a musical background can do for a person. This is the kind of motivation that kids do not have access to but you can use it as your driving force.

Technorati Tags: sheet music

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Power Tab is freeware but you can’t scan the music in – you have to type it.

With both of these solutions you might end up with bass tab that has to be changed around to get better fingering, which would have to be done by someone who can read music and knows the location of the notes on the bass fretboard. Unless you are playing your own original pieces you might be better off typing in the title of the song and “bass tab” into Google. There are a lot of sites that archive bass tabs – if you type “bass tabs” alone into Google you will get over two million results!

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I have known self-taught guitar players who could play quite well without having learn to read guitar sheet music. But music theory, although it seems dry and uninviting for the novice who just wants to start playing, gives the guitarist a deeper understanding and a better working knowledge of music.

You will notice that the music notes are written on a staff which is five lines that have four spaces between them with a curly letter at the beginning. The letter is a G and the it is known as a treble clef. Guitar music starts at a point below the ledger lines with the note E.

The notes on guitar music are identified by their pitch and their value. The value is the length of time the note is held for. In order to give the notes their values the staff is divided into bars which are sections of definite numbers of beats. The number of beats in each bar is shown at the beginning of the staff next to the treble clef. 4/4 means that each bar has four beats in it, 3/4 means that each bar has three beats. The 4 under the stroke tells us that a quarter note gets one beat. A 2 under the stroke means a half note gets one beat and an 8 means that an eighth note gets one beat.

Also next to the treble clef are symbols that look like “b” or “#”. These symbols show where the sharps and flats, if any, appear. A sharp is a note that is played a semitone higher than usual. So B# is the note B played one fret higher on the guitar neck. So if a sharp symbol appears in the lowest space on the staff, which is where the note F appears, it means that every F in the piece is played one fret higher.

When notes are piled on top of each other, this tells us the notes are played together to form a chord. In the case of the guitar this could mean that the notes are plucked or they could be strummed.

These are the basic facts about a piece of music that you can discover in the musical notation. There is much more fine detail that can be included in guitar sheet music but to go on and explain these would be unnecessary. If you learn the very basics like the names of the notes and where they appear on the guitar fretboard, you will automatically learn much more about music as your interest is triggered by breaking the ice and learning to read music.

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Guitar tab looks something like this . . .

e———————-|

B———————-|

G———————-|

D———————-|

A———————-|

E———————-|

This tab was written in Notepad using letters, hyphens and whatever “|” is (the shift of “\”). Use 10 pt Courier New Regular for your font. You can add your notes by typing them between the hyphens or hit the Ins key before you type your note and it will type over the top of the hyphen.

You can extend the lines to fit more bars in each line. Another way of making your own tabs is to do a web search for blank tab pages. You will get plenty of sites that offer blank tablature and sheet music for download.

If you use tab editing software it makes your job much easier. These programs usually allow you to import ASCII or sound files to convert them to tab but if you just want to make tabs of your own music the program presents you with a blank tab page and you can add your music and play it back to make sure you have written it out correctly.

Guitar Pro is the best software for editing tab but you have to pay for it. Power Tab is a free program for writing guitar tab. You can write guitar or bass tabs with it. The Power Tab Editor also imports MIDI files, and can also export to ASCII Text, HTML, and MIDI formats. TuxGuitar is an open source software for writing and playing back tabs. TuxGuitar also has effects like bends, slides, vibrato, hammer-ons and pull-offs.

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Most people who think about learning to play the guitar are put off by the prospect of learning music theory. Theory is regarded as boring information that keeps us from the real job of actually playing the guitar. Strangely, nobody who has ever learnt music theory ever says, “I wish I had not learnt it.” The fact is that in spite of the popularity of guitar tabs, all professional guitarists who do not read music, have stories about how they missed out on gigs because of it. Anyway, whatever your feelings about theory and sheet music, tablature is not a no-effort substitute for learning to read music.

Guitar tabs tell you where to put left hand fingers to play notes and if any left hand technique like slurs or hammer-ons are needed. They do not tell you how long to hold notes for and what the rhythmic pattern of the music is. For that reason guitar players who rely on tabs to learn new music must also use resources like YouTube to learn how a song or instrumental piece they are learning is supposed to sound. But let us not get too carried away with what tabs do not tell us. Let us look at what tabs CAN tell us.

What we are looking at here is a piece of blank guitar tablature. If you have a guitar handy, pick it up and hold it so that the body of the guitar is to your right. This is the view of the guitar that tab shows us. The left hand end of the tab where the letters are is the tuning end of the guitar – the end of the guitar neck. The line of dashes with the lowercase e at the end is the thinnest string on the guitar, and the line with the capital E is the thickest string.
e|————————
B|————————
G|————————
D|————————
A|————————
E|————————

When you pluck these strings without placing any fingers on the frets, they both sound the note E, only two octaves apart. If your guitar is not in tune and you are still not good at tuning it, this online guitar tuner will show you how the open strings sound.

There are around twenty-two frets on your guitar. On the side of the guitar neck and between the fifth, seventh, ninth and twelfth frets are dots that are put there so you do not get lost on your way up the fretboard. The numbers on the guitar tab tell you where to put your fingers on the guitar. The tab below is telling you to play some notes on the sixth string. You are being asked to play the open string twice, then to place the first finger of your left hand just a little behind the second fret and play that note once. Next play the open string once, put your left hand first finger at the third fret and play that note once, play the note at the fifth fret using your left hand third finger to fret the note, and finally put your left hand second finger at the fourth fret and play that note once. Hard to explain, easy to play. Once you have played the sequence of notes a couple of times you will recognize it as the Peter Gunn theme by Henry Mancini.

e————————–
B————————–
G————————–
D————————–
A————————–
E–0–0–2–0–3–0–5–4–

That is it you now know how to read guitar tabs, but let us just touch on the symbols for some of the more advanced playing techniques you will encounter later on in your career.

Playing a note at the fifth fret and hammering it on to the seventh fret with a left hand finger looks like this:

e|——–5h7————-
B|————————
G|————————
D|————————
A|————————
E|————————

Sliding the note up instead of hammering it on is tabbed as:

e|——–5/7————-
B|————————
G|————————
D|————————
A|————————
E|————————

And if you tap notes with your left hand, it looks like this:

e|——–5t—5t—–5t–
B|————————
G|————————
D|————————
A|————————
E|————————

So now you know there is not a great deal of trouble to learning guitar tabs you can go on with your new life as a guitar player.

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The two sets of lines you see on piano music are the leger lines. The high notes are on the top set of lines and the bottom set of lines is called the bass clef shows us the low notes. The good news is that in guitar music we only need to read the high notes. In order to read these notes you will have to put in a few minutes every day. You can learn to read notes using many high-falutin’ methods but you really only need one of those music primers you can get at any music store.

The notes on the open strings of the guitar are (low to high) E A D G B E. The lowest note on the guitar is the thickest string played without your fingers at any fret. The next thickest string is the A string, the next is the fourth string – D, the third string is the G, the second B and the first string is E again. The two E’s are two octaves apart.

An essential tool for learning how to read the guitar notes is a guitar fretboard diagram. If you look at it for a while it will start to swim before your eyes. If you look at it for a little longer you will start to see some patterns. You will see that some notes have an empty fret between them and some are next to each other without a fret between them. The frets between the notes are the accidental notes – the sharps and flats. I do not know why they are called accidentals because their appearance is has its own pattern.

Let us take a look at these so-called “accidentals”. The note on the first fret on the sixth string is an F. The next note is not G, but F sharp which is written F#. It can also go by the name of G flat, written as Gb. The reason for this is that it is not only the note ABOVE F but also the note BELOW G. Accidentals do not appear between the notes E and F or B and C.

The guitar notes go along each string and from string to string. Part of the work of learning to read guitar notes is to put the guitar fretboard up on a wall and play the notes on your guitar. Looking at the notes on sheet music will show you that every note appears different as it progresses further up the fretboard. To learn the notes as they appear on the sheet music you can take note that the notes in the spaces between the lines spell the word FACE. The notes on the lines spell EGBDF. Nobody knows what this word is but you can use it as an acronym for Every Good Boy Deserves Fruit.

These few basic facts are all the material you need to begin to read and understand the guitar notes. It will be very rewarding for you to go on now and work out more patterns for yourself.

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