How to Read Guitar Tabs - Tips and Tricks

When trying to learn how to read guitar tabs, it can often be quite daunting with the sheer amount of online guitar lessons. Some people when first learning how to play electric guitar find tabs to be very complex, in fact they are quite easy if they are explained in an easy to read manor.

Due to this fact, we have put together the following tutorial to help you to better understand exactly how tabs work and why they are useful. If you pay attention and follow these instructions carefully you will be reading tabs in no time!

For those of you who don't know, guitar tabs (tablature) are a method of reading and writing music. This method was created and developed by guitar players in order to have an easy way of sharing music with people who had not studied traditional theory.

While reading and writing in traditional theory uses the names of notes in addition to key in order to tell the guitarist where and what to play, tabs use a different method that is based on which string and fret you are playing.

This method has proven to be a lot easier for children to comprehend. However, lots of great guitar players learn tabs as way of building technique prior to studying traditional theory.

Guitar tabs are actually quite easy to understand. First you have a basic grid that we'll refer to as the staff. A tab staff consists of six horizontal lines that represent the six strings of your average guitar.

The strings that the lines represent can be any note depending on the tuning that you are playing in. Typically people that are learning how to play electric guitar with online guitar lessons play in standard tuning. The notes of standard tuning, starting with the lowest pitched string, are E, A, D, G, B, E.

Since this is the case, the bottom horizontal line of the tab staff will represent your lowest string which is an E in standard tuning. This is referred to as the "6th string" in tablature. The next horizontal line, the 5th string, will be your second lowest string, the A and the rest follow suite accordingly.

E--------------------------------									

B--------------------------------									

G--------------------------------									

D--------------------------------									

A--------------------------------									

E--------------------------------									

The next thing to learn when reading tabs is the fret board. The frets are relatively easy to understand. They start at the 1st fret which is located at the top of your guitars neck. This will be the fret that is farthest away from the body of your guitar or your strumming hand. From there they simply count up 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, etc.

Once we have learned this, all we have to do is combine the frets with the strings of the staff. In order to denote where to play on the guitar, the number of the fret will be placed on the string of the tab staff.

The horizontal lines simply represent the string while the number placed on top of that string represents the fret where that string is to be played. So if there is a number 7 on the bottom line of the staff (the low E), this is telling you to place your finger on the 6th string or the low E on the 7th fret.

This is the easiest way to learn how to read guitar tabs for people that are trying to learn how to play electric guitar. Other online guitar lessons often confuse you by introducing many advanced tablature techniques into the learning process. However, as long as you know the basics that we have just discussed, the rest will come somewhat naturally over time with practice.

E--------------------------------                                    

B--------------------------------                                    

G--------------------------------                                    

D--------------------------------                                    

A--------------------------------                                    

E--7-----------------------------                                    

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