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How To Read Chords In Guitar Tabs

gyorgy — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 01:02:33 +0000

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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Converting sheet music to tab

gyorgy — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 23:28:18 +0000

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!

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How To Make Your Own Guitar Tabs

gyorgy — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 20:12:13 +0000

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.

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How To Read Guitar Tabs

gyorgy — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 07:34:12 +0000

Beginner guitar players who do not know how to read guitar tabs are often worried that it means that they will need to learn some complex system of symbols and codes. To understand what tab really is, it is important to understand the difference between guitar tab and regular music notation. Conventional musical notation, or what we refer to as “sheet music” belongs to music theory. Music theory gives us an overview of what we understand by the term “music” – octaves, keys, scales, modes, note values, and much more. Guitar tabs skip over the whole body of music and go right to the nitty-gritty of telling us where to put our fingers to play notes.

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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Learn How To Read Guitar Tabs

gyorgy — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 11:44:07 +0000

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.

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How To Read And Play Easy Rock Guitar Tabs

gyorgy — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 10:05:52 +0000

Photo by Tim Psych
Before getting a collection of rock guitar tabs to play, you need to buy a nylon string acoustic guitar.Your first guitar should have nylon strings because they are easier on your fingers when you first learn to make chords. An acoustic guitar is a little harder to play in some ways than an electric guitar which is an advantage in that it will be better training for you. When you start searching for easy rock guitar tabs to kick-start your guitar playing career, remember that you will be just strumming simple chords on your acoustic at first, rather than playing scales and riffs, but you will also need to find the tabs to some popular songs that your audience will recognize and enjoy.

Let me list some songs that I found by searching the web for “most popular songs”. There are actually hundreds of songs that people all over the world think are the most popular, but here is a list of songs that you could say fall into the Rock N Roll category: Old Time Rock and Roll by Bob Seger, I’m a Believer by the Monkees, American Pie by Don McClean, Born To Be Wild by Steppenwolf, Johnnie B. Goode by Chuck Berry, Angie by The Rolling Stones, Blowin’ In The Wind by Bob Dylan, Brown Eyed Girl by Van Morrison, I Remember You by Skid Row, Come As You Are by Nirvana, Wonderful Tonight by Eric Clapton, Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door by Bob Dylan, Horse With No Name by America, A Day In The Life, Here There And Everywhere and Hey Jude by The Beatles, I Walk The Line by Johnny Cash, Tears In Heaven by Eric Clapton, Gloria by Van Morrison, Hotel California by The Eagles, Behind Blue Eyes by The Who, White Room by Cream, Stairway To Heaven by Led Zeppelin, Proud Mary by Creedence Clearwater Revival, Maggie Mae by Rod Stewart, Thank God I’m a Country Boy by John Denver, and Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix.

The reason I am giving you this list of songs is after your guitar playing skills have grown beyond the beginner stage, you will be looking for some crowd pleasing songs. Out of the above list, the easiest to play are: Angie by The Rolling Stones, Blowin’ In The Wind by Bob Dylan, Brown Eyed Girl by Van Morrison, A Day In The Life, Here, There And Everywhere and Hey Jude by The Beatles, I Walk The Line by Johnny Cash, Tears In Heaven by Eric Clapton, Gloria by Van Morrison, Hotel California by The Eagles, Behind Blue Eyes by The Who I Remember You by Skid Row, Come As You Are by Nirvana, Wonderful Tonight by Eric Clapton, Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door by Bob Dylan, Horse With No Name by America and White Room by Cream. According to some guitarists, Horse With No Name is THE easiest rock song to play, using only two chords.

For the easy rock songs I have listed, you just need to know the chords of G, C, D, Am, Em and, for playing Horse With No Name, F#m7sus which is harder to write down than it is to play. So armed with your list of easy rock guitar songs and your short list of basic chords, you can buy your tabs in a music store or take advantage of the wealth of free guitar tabs available on the internet.

All the chords you need to play Horse With No Name

E —————0——————————————-

B —————0——————————————-

G —————0——————————————-

D —————2——————————————-

A —————2——————————————-

E —————0——————————————-

F#m7sus

E —————0——————————————-

B —————0——————————————-

G —————2——————————————-

D —————0——————————————-

A —————0——————————————-

E —————2——————————————-