Guitar Tab. Learning the Basics
Guitar tab is a form of music notation, which is very widely used by many guitarists. The reason why this is the case is that regular music notation only gives you the musical pitch through symbols whereas with tab you are shown exactly where to play a note on the guitar.
Tab gives a musician a direct representation of the instrument he or she is playing with the notes indicated. The direct representation of the guitar that tab provides is through 6 horizontal lines that correspond to the 6 strings that you have on your guitar.
Guitar tab is read from left to right. As you read the tab the numbers you come across are notes that you need to play. Each fret has a number in tab for example the 1st fret is a number 1, the 12th fret is indicated by a number 12 and so on.
Putting tab onto the guitar is very simple. Lets have a look at an example.
||—————————————————
||-T————————————————
||-A——————————–1————–
||-B————————————————
||—————————————————
||—————————————————
Above is a single note. Where do you play it on the guitar?
There are two things you need to observe when reading guitar tab. The first thing is which line the note is on as this corresponds directly to a string on the guitar. For the above note it is on the 3rd line down which is the 3rd string.
The second thing you need to observe is the number. In the above example there is a number 1, which represents the 1st fret. The number tells you the fret that the note is played at. For example if the number was a 4 the note would be played on the 4th fret.
Lets have al look at what the note from the above guitar tab looks like on the guitar.
|———-|———–|———–||
|———-|———–|———–||
|———-|———–|———–||
|———-|———–|—–n—-||Â Â Â 3rd string
|———-|———–|———–||
|———-|———–|———–||
1st fret
n- represents the spot that the note is played at
To learn songs you should have a look at a guitar tab site. There are many descent tab sites that you can visit that offer tabs for many different songs. Before you do this however you need to learn the basics of the guitar. If you haven’t already done this you should look at visiting a beginner guitar site.
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