How to Play Guitar Tabs

So you've bought a guitar and now you want to know how to play guitar tabs? Well, you have come to the right place for answers. Here at LoveToKnow, new guitar players are encouraged to stop by for instruction, ask for advice or just to hang out. When you get your very first guitar, the instrument can seem overwhelming. Even though you may have pictured yourself pulling the guitar out of the case and quickly rocking along with your favorite records, you will soon find out that it's not as easy as it looks. Learning to play songs on the guitar involves many things, but the most important thing you need to learn initially is where to put your fingers on the strings. Luckily, a great system of notation called tablature, or tabs for short, has been developed that allows novice guitarists with no musical training to conquer this all important step. The following information will help put you on the path from beginner to virtuoso in no time flat.

How to Play Guitar Tabs: An Introduction

When you first look at a song that is written out in tabs, it will look like a foreign language. What are all these numbers and lines, and how do you turn all this into music? Relax, reading guitar tabs is much easier than you think. All you need is to understand a few simple things about how tabs are organized.

Strings

When you are holding a guitar that is tuned in standard tuning, the string that produces the highest pitch is the bottom string, or the string that is closest to your legs. The string that produces the lowest pitch is the top string, or the string closest to your head. The notes of the strings, in standard tuning, are as follows, from lowest pitch (closest to your head) to highest pitch (closest to your legs): E-A-D-G-B-E. The low string is an E, and the high string is an E, too, just an E in a higher octave.

When you look at a piece of guitar tablature, you will see a series of six horizontal lines with numbers on them. These six lines correspond to the strings on your guitar. It's actually quite simple:

E---------------

B---------------

G---------------

D---------------

A---------------

E---------------

The top line corresponds to the E string with the highest pitch, and the remaining lines relate to the other strings all the way down to the low pitched E string. In a way, these lines in tablature are upside down from the way the guitar physically sits in your lap, but you should think in terms of pitch. The higher pitched strings are at the top of the tablature system, and the lower pitches strings are at the bottom.

Notes

If you have never studied music formally before, you probably do not understand musical notations and wouldn't be able to differentiate a quarter note B flat from a whole note F sharp. Again, you don't need to worry about any of that to learn how to play guitar tabs. Tablature uses numbers that correspond to the frets on your guitar to signify the notes of a piece of music. If you can count to twenty two or twenty four (depending on how many frets your guitar has) you can read tablature. Consider the following example:

E--------2-------

B--------3-------

G--------2-------

D--------0-------

A--------X-------

E--------X-------

Looking at this piece of information, you only see lines and numbers, but this actually tells you all you need to know to play an important chord on the guitar. Remembering that the lines represent the strings on the guitar, with the top line being the high pitched E and the low line being the low pitched E, the numbers indicate which fret to put your fingers down on. In this example, you need to hold down the string at the second fret on the high E string, and the third fret on the B string, the second fret on the G string.

Any string that has a 0 written on it means that you play that string open, or without putting your fingers anywhere on the frets of that string. Any string written with an X on it means that you do not play those strings at all. When you play the above chord, you'll only play the four highest pitched strings while omitting the others.

Congratulations! You've just learned to play a D chord. Following these basic instructions, you can also learn to pluck out a melody line when the fret indications are staggared along the lines, rather than aligned from top to bottom as they are for chords.

What Tabs Don't Tell You

When things are easy, there is usually a catch. One thing that is lacking from tablature is any sense of how long to play notes or how fast to play them. Traditional music notation has time signatures, rests, holds, ties, etc. that inform the player about how the music relates to time. Tablature has none of these features. Therefore, it is important for you to develop your inner sense of feel by playing along with records and figuring out for yourself how long to play each note, when to stop playing, etc. Tabs will tell you part of the story, but you will have to fill in the rest by yourself.

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