Understand Guitar Tab Efficiently

Learn guitar tab, because its the easiest system for teaching yourself how to play the amazing stringed instrument.  I’ll always remember the 1st time I even heard the word tab.  All I could think about was that tiny piece on the apex of a pop can.  {However ,} what I wasn’t aware of was the incontrovertible fact that 10 mins of quick study was about to unlock the world for me on the guitar. 

Guitar tab is an easy system that uses numbers to represent notes.  I won’t be able to give you the ideal visual of this by way of just words, but at least I can offer you an overall idea of how this system works.  On the neck of your guitar, you something called a fretboard.  The fret board is where you have seen people place their fingers to produce chord sounds. 

On the fretboard are a bunch of small pieces of wire that run from top to bottom.  In between any two pieces of this wire is a space, and this is known as a fret.  If you glance at the neck of a guitar, you can actually count out an entire bunch of fret spaces, going from left to right.  You will also notice that these frets get smaller and smaller as you go up the neck.  If you were to count them from left to right, naturally you’d be saying “1, two, 3, four, etc”.  Well each fret is represented by a number in guitar tab also. 

The guitar has six strings.  In tablature, each string is represented with a line.  These lines are stacked on top of each other which looks more like the guitar neck.  A number will appear on a specific line, letting you know which numbered fret to play, and on which string. 

You also have other symbols that represent how to produce certain sounds, and this in a lot of ways makes playing the guitar a lot more expressive than just using standard musical notation.  There are plenty of other symbols and things to know, but again this may all be done in one or two minutes in order to learn and master guitar tab.  Learning to read and write using tab as a replacement for standard notation, is unquestionably the first step to unlocking and learning the guitar for any one.

If you ever enjoyed this post, then take a look at Guitar notes for beginners and guitar tabs for beginners