Understand Guitar Tab Efficiently

By Rex Walters

Learn guitar tab, because its the simplest technique for teaching yourself how to play the smashing stringed instrument. I'll never forget the 1st time I even heard the word tab. All I could think about was that little piece on the pinnacle of a pop can. However, what I wasn't mindful of was the indisputable fact that 10 minutes of fast study was going to unlock the world for me on the guitar.

Guitar tab is a simple system that uses numbers to represent notes. I may not be able to give you the perfect visual of this by means of just words, but at least I can offer you an overall concept of how this system works. On the neck of your guitar, you find something by the name of a fretboard. The fret board is where you have seen people place their fingers to produce chord sounds.

On the fretboard are some small pieces of wire that run from top to bottom. In between any 2 pieces of this wire is a space, and this is known as a fret. If you glance at the neck of a guitar, you can actually count out a complete bunch of fret spaces, going from left to right. You'll also notice that these frets get smaller and smaller as you go up the neck. If you were to count them from left to right, naturally you would be pronouncing "1,2,3,4 etc". Well each fret is represented by a number in guitar tab too.

The guitar has six strings. In tablature, each string is represented with a line. These lines are stacked on top of one another which appears more like the guitar neck. A number will appear on a specific line, telling you which numbered fret to play, and on which string.

You also have other symbols that represent a way to produce certain sounds, and this in a lot of ways makes playing the guitar a lot more expressive than just using standard musical notation. There are loads of other symbols and things to know, but again this can all be done in a few minutes to learn and master guitar tab. Learning to read and write using tab as a replacement for standard notation, is certainly the 1st step to unlocking and learning the guitar for anyone. - 32526

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