So you wanna learn how to read guitar tabs? For me, reading guitar tabs is far easier than reading standard musical notation, but there are a few tricks to it…
What are guitar tabs anyway?
Guitar tabs are a way to read notes that are easier to understand for people playing the guitar, the positions on the guitar are noted rather than standard musical notation, so your brain has less translation to do between the notes on the page and playing it with your fingers. For instance, a “3″ means the third fret.
What is a Fret
The frets are the metal bars that go across the neck of the guitar. To play the first fret means to put your finger in the middle of the first space you can press down on with the string.
Because there are six strings on a guitar, in a tab you will usually see a line for each string. The line on top is the highest pitched string and the line on the bottom is the lowest pitched string - This actually threw me off at first, because on the guitar, the top string is the lowest pitched one, so it is kind of the reverse in a tab, but you quickly get used to it.
for Example you might see something like this:
||—0—1—3— <– this is the highest pitch string closest to your feet
||—0—1—3—
||—1—0—0—
||—2—0—0—
||—2—0—2—
||—0—X—3— <– this is the low pitch string closest to your chin
Or, they might display the standard notes on the left;
E|—0—1—3—
B|—0—1—3—
G|—1—0—0—
D|—2—0—0—
A|—2—0—2—
E|—0—X—3—
So to play the first chord, you would put your fingers on the strings in the middle of the guitar and skip the two highest pitched strings and the lowest pitched string.
So string and position is covered by the lines top to bottom, and time is left to right. So first you would play the line 0,0,1,2,2,0 and then the 1,1,0,0,0,X
Notice the “X” in the line? this means to ‘mute’ or not play that particular string - in this case you would avoid playing the lowest pitched string. You can do this by avoiding it altogether, or resting one of your fingers on it.
So there you have it, the basics of reading guitar tabs. Now if you start seeing other things like “h” or “p” or “b” on your guitar tabs you might want to check out the legend below;
Basic Legend:
h -Hammer On
p -Pull Off
/ -Slide Up
\ -Slide Down
~ -Vibrato
x -Mute String
T -Thumb/Tap
More advanced stuff:
—————-
b - bend
pb - pre-bend
r - bend release (if no number after the r, then release immediately)
s - legato slide
S - shift slide
[n] - artificial harmonic
n(n) - tapped harmonic
tr - trill
TP - trem. picking
PM - palm muting
\n/ - tremolo bar dip; n = amount to dip
\n - tremolo bar down
n/ - tremolo bar up
/n\ - tremolo bar inverted dip
= - hold bend; also acts as connecting device for hammers/pulls
<> - volume swell (louder/softer)
x - on rhythm slash represents muted slash
o - on rhythm slash represents single note slash
Misc Legend
———–
| - bar
|| - double bar
||o - repeat start
o|| - repeat end
*| - double bar (ending)
: - bar (freetime)
$ - Segno
& - Coda
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