Guitar How-To

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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