Guitar Tabs are Your Friends - Learn to Read Them

Although it is not hard to read, many novice guitar players seem to be daunted by the prospect of learning something new. The real difficulty with learning how to read guitar tab is more of a mental block than a real challenge. Even though tablature has a history going back hundreds of years  it is generally regarded as a special musical language for guitar players. The internet has further promoted this view of guitar tablature. Guitarists all over the world are writing tabs using Notepad or another basic text editor and sharing their work with other guitar players.

Guitar tab is nothing more or less than a picture of the guitar's neck. You look at the tab on the page and you see the guitar strings. Of course for a newbie guitar player the strings on the guitar may be a bit scary. But there is no need to transpose this fear to the strings on the printed page. Rather than present challenges the one dimensional strings in the tab has information on them which tell you what to do to get the guitar to make music.

Here is tab for a few notes played on the guitar . . .

e---------------------|

B---------------------|

G---------------------|

D-----1-2-----1-2-----|

A--2-------2----------|

E---------------------|

The letters on the end of the strings are the names of the strings, or rather the names of the notes that sound when you play the open strings. You will notice that at the top is a lower case e and at the bottom is a capital E. The top e is the thinnest string on the guitar, also called the first string. The E at the bottom is the thickest string, also called the sixth string. Once you have absorbed this information you will realize that the tab is just a picture of the guitar fretboard as it looks when it is lying in front of you with the end of the neck pointing towards your left side. Why people feel the need to use a lowercase a for the top E and a capital for the bottom E, I will never know - how much easier can it get to tell them apart?

The strings with numbers on them are the A and D strings, and the tab is telling us to place a finger at the second fret on the A string and play that note. Next the tablature is telling us to place a finger at the first fret on the D string, play that note and then move the finger up to the second fret, or place another finger at the second fret and play that note. So using the language of music we know to play the notes B, E flat and E twice. It does not tell us which fingers to use to play the notes, nor does it tell us how long to hold the notes for. In this example we can assume the fingering and note values are up to us.

When we are learning a song the fingering is still usually left up to us but most of the musical notation software programs have the facility to show left hand fingering and/or the use of the right hand fingers when required. For manually produced tab it makes the tab very cluttered to include the fingerings. There are generally accepted abbreviations for left hand techniques which I have included here:

      h - hammer on
      p - pull off
      b - bend string up
      r - release bend
      / - slide up
      - slide down
      v - vibrato
      t - right hand tap
      x - damp the note

There is no way to show the note values in tab but if you are learning a song you are already familiar with this will not be too much of a problem. If you are learning a piece of music that you are not familiar with then guitar tab will not help you much, but there is an answer. If you have learnt to read tab you can download one of the guitar notation programs like Power Tab or TablEdit. It will import your ASCII tab or MIDI and play it for you as well as display it in standard musical notation in addition to tab.