Guitar Lesson #3 - How to read guitar tabs??



Yo! Today's post will be about reading guitar tabs.. I hope it helps! Well, what you generally see in guitar tabs is:


E--------------
B--------------
G--------------
D--------------
A--------------
E--------------

I hope by now you should already know which note is what. Once again let's refresh, E A D G B E, the thickest string, or the string nearest to your eyes when you look down the guitar, that's the low E. After which the second thickest string/second nearest string to your eyes is the A string. Followed by D G B E. :)

Looking at the tab, you see six horizontal lines which represents the guitar strings. And then we see numbers. Now the numbers you see represents the fret number on the fretboard. So if you see a number 1 on a low E string, you have to press that note on the guitar. We read guitar tabs from left to right. Let's take for example the diagram above. From the left, you see a number 5 on the low E string. Therefore you press the note down on the fifth fret, and then you pluck it. The next note would be on the same string, but this time as the number is 3, you place your finger on the 3rd fret, and once again you pluck it. Moving further, you'll see that on other strings there are other numbers, so you do the same. If you see a number 0, it means you dont have to press anything but you have to pluck the open string. And there, you'll form a melody.

I hope you understand what I just tried to explain. If you do, let's try to play this simple tab:

E---------5--5--6--6--5--1--1--0--0----------
B---1--1-------------------------------2--2--1-
G------------------------------------------------
D------------------------------------------------
A------------------------------------------------
E------------------------------------------------

Did you get it? What song is it? I hope your answer is Twinkle Twinkle Little Stars. Wahaha.. It's pretty simple.

Ok let's move on.. If you see a tab that's like this with the numbers in the same vertical row:

E-----
B---1--
G-----
D---2--
A---3--
E------

This means that you form all 3 notes together, and play it at the same time. If you figured out, this is actually a C chord. What you have to do is to form the C chord, and then strum it.

So I just went through the basics of reading tabs. Hope you learnt something today!






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