>> Learn Guitar Tabs

Learn Guitar Tabs

Hundreds of thousands of people play guitar. A very small percent of them actually know how to read music. The simplest reason that can be surmised is that reading music is hard. This is not true, but it is harder to learn to read music than it is to learn guitar tabs. A guitarist can learn guitar tabs, and play guitar without being able to read written sheet music.

What is a guitar tab, you might ask? Well, simply put, a guitar tab (short for tablature) is a shorthand way of writing music for the guitar or any fretted stringed instrument. While tabs have been around since the 16th century, they have become very popular in the last twenty or so years as magazines have begun to include transcriptions of your favorite songs. More people can read tabs than standard notation because of one simple thing: tabs are numbers.

A guitar tab is set up sort of like the standard notation staff, except that instead of five horizontal lines, it has six-one for each of the strings. Numbers are then placed on the lines to represent what fret the player should press down in order to produce the desired note. That's it. It's that simple. Any player with a modicum of ability can easily learn the guitar tabs to any song they want to learn, just by reading the numbers.

Numbers offer one major advantage over standard notation. On a guitar, there may be five or even six different places on the neck of the instrument that it is possible to play a certain note. This creates difficulty in reading standard notation since more marks are necessary to indicate at which point on the neck you are to play the note. When you learn guitar tabs, the choice of where to play the note is made for you, so you can concentrate on other aspects of playing, like how to shape the sound of the note you're playing.

One major drawback when you learn guitar tabs over standard notation is that there is not usually any markings referring to rhythm in a tablature. When tablatures were first conceived in the 15th and 16th centuries, rhythmic markings were written above the tablature staff so the player would know how to perform the piece. The problem is now being addressed by using modified markings on the tablature staff itself, melding numbers with standard rhythmic notation.