Guitar How-To

Archive for the ‘Guitar Tabs’ Category

If you want to learn to play songs just to play along with your singing, you will most likely be using lyrics with the chord names above them or sheet music with chord diagrams showing you where to put your fingers. There is another way to illustrate chords – it’s called tablature, or guitar tabs. As a guitarist you really should be learning how to read tabs but if you just want to learn the chords, here is a C major chord in the first position:

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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I had an enquiry via the Contact Form at the bottom of the page asking about a way to scan in sheet music and convert it to bass tab. I’m sure there are lots of others wondering about this kind of question so I thought I’d do some research and post the answer. Unfortunately the solution is not only inefficient but also expensive. According to what I could find out on some of the guitar forums, the only way to scan and convert sheet music to tab is to use a program called Finale Notepad to convert the music to tab. That program is twenty dollars. But that’s not all, there is a Finale program called PrintMusic which you will need to scan the music in. That costs about one hundred dollars. You will find the products at Finale Music

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!

Sometimes when you learn how to play the guitar you get the urge to compose, to make your own guitar tabs. That’s right, you don’t have to be able to read sheet music to compose your own tunes. Whether you have the desire to be a serious music composer or just want to note down in guitar tablature form the little tunes that newbie guitar players often come up with, it’s not difficult to learn how to make your own tabs.

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.