Monday, December 8, 2008

How to Play Guitar Tabs

Learning Guitar Tunes From Guitar Tabs

How to play guitar tabs, in its basic form is really simple. You are probably already familiar with sheet music and guitar tabs look very similar, but they mean something else, which may at first confuse you. Guitarists created their own adaptation of sheet music, and their own way of writing guitar music notation, that is called guitar tablature or tab for short. This provides an easy to understand way to share guitar music with other guitarists. It really is very simple, and you'll soon understand how to play guitar tabs in no time.

Many people who start to learn to play an instrument do so when they are young and often learn to read sheet music and their instrument from a teacher. Guitarists are usually different, unless the parent buys a child s guitar to learn on. Guitarists find their instrument in their teens or sometimes later, are often self taught or have learned from watching and playing with other guitarists, and they rarely have the benefit of being able to read sheet music. Instead they learn their songs by ear and perhaps by watching the fingering of chords in videos and then gradually work out the rest.

Learning to sight read sheet music takes a fair amount of study, with little obvious benefit, and self-taught guitarists rarely bother at first. If you had learned to be a pianist with years of private study, a heavy focus on sight reading would have been part of your training. It's never too late to learn and a serious guitarist wanting a career in the music industry, will be wise to take lessons or learn from a book when they have the need for it. Meanwhile, guitar tablature which may not be have as much detail as sheet music, is an easy to read way of increasing your repertoire of songs.

Guitar tabs are exclusive to six stringed instruments such as the guitar and are of no use to a piano player or a saxophonist. Unless these musicians also know the note names for the strings on a guitar, they cannot use guitar tab to play the tune. Depending on the tablature used, there is only basic information given as to how long a string should be played, or in what kind of rhythm. So unless you have heard the tune and know how it goes, it may be hard to learn how it should sound, just by reading guitar tabs.

Sometimes guitar tab is joined to standard notation sheet music. The standard notation can be used to read the rhythm, while the guitar tab shows how and where to play the notes. Generally guitarists just want to learn how to play guitar tab, to play a song they like and guitar tab books will give them sufficient information for this use.

How to Play Guitar Tabs

The letters TAB vertically written down the left side of the six lines indicates that the row is guitar tab and not standard notation.

Those six horizontal lines represent the six strings on your guitar. The bottom line represents your lowest E string, the second line from the bottom represents your A string, and the top line is your top E string etc. That's simple enough.

There are numbers centred on the string lines. The numbers represent the fret your finger should be holding down. For a number 3 centred on the fourth line down from the top, play the fourth string on the third fret of the guitar. When the number 0 is used, an open string should be played.

When the tab has a vertical stack of 6 numbers in a straight line, it indicates you should play all these strings at the same time as a chord. Often, guitar tab books will include the chord name above for fast recognition, but if the chord is unfamiliar, the guitarist can work out what to play using the vertical stack of numbers representing which fret and string need to played.

Still pretty simple isn't it?

When there is a diagonal line of numbers this indicates that the chord should be played one note after another, as guitarists often do to finish a song slowly. When all notes are evenly spaced, all notes are of equal length. A greater spacing is an indication of how much longer a note should be held.

There is more guitar tab notation for how to play guitar tab, but this is where it starts to get more complicated and sometimes this varies from one book to the next. The following link gives further information for those who want to understand more.

Bends, Slides, Hammer Ons & Pull Offs in Guitar Tab

1 comment:

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Good Day