How To Read Guitar Tabs

Ahh, the infamous question about guitar tabs.  Every single student I have ever had the pleasure of teaching has always asked me this question, and tabs are definitely an important part to your country guitar playing career.  Most of the licks, chords and more for songs are written in tab format.  When you move on to learning lead guitar, tabs will be your friend.

But first, I want you to be aware that many of the tabs out there are very incorrect.  However, there are plenty of great tabs, too!  So, when you are searching for guitar tabs, try to use ones that have a high rating and approval from other users.  Some websites, like Ultimate Guitar, offer this sort of approval and rating system that you should definitely use to determine whether a tab is good to follow or not.

Let’s take a look at this simple image that I pulled off of Google Images:

The first thing I want you to notice are the 6 horizontal lines.  These represent the strings of your guitar.  The top string that you see, the one with the small “e”, is the high e string on your guitar (the thin one).  The “E” that you see on the right in the low E string (the fattest string).

The Zero’s that you see are your guides.  These numbers tell you which fret of the guitar to play on.  For this case, Zero means that you don’t place your finger on any string.  You simply play the string open.  If there was a 5, you would place your finger on the 5th fret for that string and play it.

If I were to write a tab for my guitar warm up exercise that I discuss, it would simply start at 1-2-3-4 for each string.  After all strings have been played, you would then play 2-3-4-5.  I hope this makes sense to you because it is quite hard to explain.  I will post tabs of my warm ups in the future for you to refer to.

So, these are the basics of guitar tabs.  It’s not that hard to understand how tabs work once you get a feeling for it.  Simple place your finger on the fret and string that the tab tells you to.  Over time, you will get fast at reading these tabs.

Remember, each line represents a string, with the highest string in the images as the high e string.  Play the tabs very slow at first.  Do not try to ever play a song at full speed when you are learning.  Playing slow is the best way for your brain to work out a song.  Walk before you run

Tagged as: Guitar Practice, Guitar Tabs