For those of you who aren’t familiar with guitar tab, it’s basically a simple version of musical notation for guitar players. In a nut shell when you’re looking at a tab for a song the lines you’re seeing correspond to the strings on your guitar, and the numbers you see on each line are the equivalent of the fret you must play on your guitar.
Tab can be used to show you an arpeggio, chord or a lead guitar piece.
Why learn Guitar Tabs?
Learning to read music if you haven’t learned to play any instrument before isn’t the easiest. It’s even more difficult if you’ve taught yourself a bit of guitar, but have never taken any formal lessons. Learning to read tabs will allow you to learn to play new songs and advance your skills without have to learn advanced music reading.
Of course, to really strengthen your skills learning to read music should be something you’ll want to do. I’ve read that something like well over half of the worlds best guitar players cannot read music it does come in handy especially if you want to play with a band or become a professional studio musician.
Where can you start
There’s a video below you can watch in a few minutes that will get you started on how to read tablature. It’s basic, but it will get you pointed in the right direction.
Next I’d suggest you Google a few of your favourite songs and look for a tabbed version of the tune. So let’s say you were looking for an Eric Clapton tune… go a head and google “Eric Clapton Layla tab” without the quotes. You’ll get a few results.
Here are some of the top tab sites I’d suggest visiting:
http://www.ultimate-guitar.com/
http://www.911tabs.com/
http://www.azchords.com/
http://www.guitaretab.com/
Each of these sites has a HUGE library of songs sorted by artist and then song to choose from. If you’re interested in learning more about how to read music I suggest you take a few minutes to check out these guitar lesson dvds. This program is great for beginners or someone who has started to teach them selves how to play guitar.
Here’s the Beginner Guitar Tab Video