Acoustic Guitar Tabs

Jay — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 21:40:49 +0000

How to Read Guitar Tabs

or,

How the Heck Do You Read Guitar Tabs?

If this article were titled “how to read music,” it would begin by saying that it takes time and patience to learn musical notation. The same is true for guitar tabs – while the notation makes sense, it still does not make for easy reading.

In a nutshell, guitar tabs have six lines representing the strings. The low E string (the one closest to your face, unless you are Jimmy Hendrix) is actually at the bottom (which I find backwards, at best) and consequently the high E String (the one closest to your legs) is at the top. Basically guitar tabs are drawn as though you were bent over your guitar and looking at the strings upside down.

Maybe you do this a lot. I don’t want to judge.

On each line there appears a number. This number corresponds to the fret that you will finger. So, a “3” on the third line means that you will finger the 3rd fret of the D string.

This makes total sense, and for songs that use random chords that you’ve never seen like F#MajSus7Dim, it is extremely helpful to see the fingering. But, if you really don’t know the chord, are you going to look at the picture mid song and figure out the right fingering on the fly?

No. You are not. And, that is not the intent of guitar tabs. The intent is to show you the chord, and have you memorize it, along with the rest of the song, so that you don’t have to reference the guitar tabs while playing, or in fact, ever.

So, by looking at guitar tabs, what have you saved? You have saved all that time learning to read music. But, you can’t actually “read” tabs, except to learn a song, and you could just as easily learn the song from actual music notation. (Brings back memories of 6th grade band when I wrote the notes in letters above all the music notes.)

There is some advantage to guitar tabs in that they offer some notation for more advanced playing. Below is a list of some common notations.

Hammer Ons (h)
Pull offs (p)
String bends (b)
Slides (/ or \)
Vibrato (v or ~)
String Mute (x)
Harmonics (<>)

If you have not guessed already, I prefer guitar chords to guitar tabs. First, If I showed you the guitar tab at left, you could play it, but it doesn’t represent anything in your brain.

But, if I told you “play an E chord,” wouldn’t that be easier? And more memorable for next time you wanted to play. “Wait, the song went E, G, A” instead of “it was 002330, then 320023, then 022200” see what I mean.

Maybe I’m wrong. I should probably consult some acoustic guitar books to see what I am missing. If there are those of you out there that live by guitar tabs, please chime in and tell me what makes them superior to chords, or even actual music notation. Because, honestly, I don’t see the benefit of guitar tabs.

Acoustic Guitar Talk » Musical Notation

Acoustic Guitar Tabs