Easy Guitar Tabs

A Guide to Easy Guitar Tabs

Guitar tabs are a method of symbolizing the notes on a guitar and where they should be played in the context of a song or piece of music. They take the form of six lines, diagrammed, and interspersed with some numbers, usually zero up to about seventeen or eighteen. The lines represent the strings on the guitar and the numbers represent the frets on the neck of the guitar. These numbers indicate what strings need to by fretted, and at what fret positions. There is an abundance of easy guitar tabs available, both online and offline. They are an excellent means to learning the songs that any guitarist would like to play. However, some disadvantages to guitar tablature are worth mentioning.

The Problems with Guitar Tabs

Although guitar tabs are easy to read, they are, unfortunately, not the perfect method for learning to play tunes on the guitar. Some of the problems that are associated with guitar tablature are:

• The tabs tell you what strings to fret and where, but gives no indication of the fingering required.
• The tabs can tell you roughly where the notes fall in the beat of the song, but lack the precision of sheet music.
• Tabs can lack the ability to translate the subtleties of a phrase in the music normally captured in sheet music, such as grace notes, triplets, etc.

Guitar Tab Advantages

On the other hand, using guitar tabs can have some advantages over sheet music:

• Techniques such as bends, hammer-on’s, pull-offs, etc., are much easier to understand.
• When used in conjunction with playing by ear, tabs can create a strong neural link between the notes played and their position on the fret-board, making muscle-memory development much stronger.
• Tabs can make tricky chord shapes much easier to understand as they are a more visual representation than sheet music.

Where to Get Good Guitar Tabs

There a multitude of great resources for easy guitar tabs on the Internet. Some websites will have a large database of guitar tabs for various songs by various artists. Others will have guitar tabs ranging from easy-to-play through to advanced levels. For the beginner guitar player, it is probably best to stick with those

songs that sound easy to play (they usually are) and songs that the guitar player likes to play. This last part ensures that the player will stick with learning the song, even though some parts of it might tough to master. A short list of sites that offer guitar tabs should get any guitar player on the road to playing their favorite songs well:

• Guitar Players Toolbox - a wide variety of guitar tabs, specifically collected for their ease of learning and playing.
• Guitar Music Tabs - a diverse collection of tabs, including the all-important “Smoke on the Water”.
• Tabs for Acoustic Guitar - a website for those who like their guitars a little less electric and a lot more mellow.

Overall, the easier it is to learn the music, the more proficient a player will become in learning new techniques and mastering new songs. Guitar tabs are an excellent step to becoming not only a competent player, but also even a very good guitar player. The availability of guitar tabs, on websites and in published books in music stores, allows even the most basic player to put together a repertoire of popular songs that will delight everyone, as well as impressing them with the guitar player’s ability to play.