Guitar Tablature, also known as Tab in the guitar world, is how musicians and guitar players alike write out their music to songs, leads, exercises and more.
Unlike traditional music notation, guitar tab is different because it doesn’t use much of any symbols.
This allows anyone without any musical background the ability to read and write guitar tab without knowing music theory and symbols.
It’s easy to learn and is universally recognized around the globe as the standard for reading guitar music.
In the previous lesson on guitar tuning, I talked about the names or each string. You have two E strings, a D, G, B, and A.
Tab is directly related to these strings so it’s important that you have memorized what each string is. Spend time learning each string because it’s important.
Let’s begin by taking a look at this image below. You’ll notice that it has the number 1-6 instead of the actual note of the string.
This is how tabs are read. They don’t use the string names.
But it’s still very important to memorize each string for other guitar playing purposes (like down tuning, scales, chords, etc.).
Now this can be quite confusing at first. But if you look carefully, you’ll notice that the fattest string (E) is number 6. The lightest and most high pitch string is the high E also referred to as 1 in tablature. Remember this also as it’s important.
When you take that image of the fret board with the frets and the string numbers to the written form, you’ll get the image below which is a standard tab diagram:
Remember that I told you how it’s important to remember the letters as well? That’s because some tab is written using the letters instead of the numbers like in this example tab I found:
The same rules apply for the strings as with the other tab example. The E on the bottom after the A represents the fat string on your guitar. So by looking at this picture, you would start off playing this tab on the 4th or G string of your guitar. Now let’s talk about what those numbers mean going across.
As you may have guessed, there are 6 lines and each line represents a guitar string. The top being the thinnest or high E and the bottom being the thickest or low E.
On the fret board, you’ll notice the metal pieces sticking up at various locations. These are here for a reason and separated at just the right distance to form the correct notes.
Each section of these frets as they’re called represents the horizontal numbers you saw above on the tab for ‘Silent Night’.
So to play that piece of tab in the example, your first note is shown at 0, also known as open. This means you hold nothing down when you pluck the string.
Then you press down that same string on the second fret and pluck again. Then it’s open again and you pluck it and so on and so forth. The number that you see on the horizontal lines or “strings” is where you hold down that specific string on the fretboard on your guitar.
Pat yourself on the back. You have just learned how to read guitar tab. When you see something like the following example, you’ll now have a general idea of how to play it:
This is the most famous song of Christmas, Jingle Bells. To play this song according to this tab, you start off holding down the 5th or A string on the 5th fret and continue from there.
This Jingle Bells tab is actually a perfect example that you should use to practice. Start off slow and go through the entire string. You’ll occasionally get confused as to which fingers to use and for that I have this answer:
Use whichever finger is most comfortable for you to play that note.
But do NOT neglect the pinky. Yes it might be annoying to use at first. But when you get used to using it, you’ll be thanking yourself later. It’s a great finger to use and absolutely necessary for playing anything intermediate or advanced.
I would love to hear your opinion: Did you like this lesson on guitar tabs? How could it be improved? What else would you like to know? What other guitar related questions do you have? Please leave comments below!
