GUIDE TO READING GUITAR TABS:

By Travis Osterloh

 Guitar Tabs are a numerical way to write music or transcribe music for other people to play. Websites like https://www.ultimate-guitar.com/ contain libraries of free submissions for people to learn how to play their favorite songs. This is a great and easy way to learn how music is played even if we can’t hear it.

Now this a big DISCLAIMER not all free submissions are 100% correct. I have found over time it might be a close version to how a song is played. The best way to find exactly how to play the song and it’s entirety is to buy the sheet music. This lesson will show examples of both.

Here is a quick description before we get to the example. Tablature looks like you turned the guitar upside down where the body of the guitar is facing toward you. This will flip the neck upside down the 6th string “the low E” goes from being the top of the guitar to the bottom. The 1st string the “high e” goes from the bottom to the top and the tabs are written as such.

The numbers on the line indicating the associated string show you the corresponding fret to play. Example if you have a 3 on the 3rd line up from the bottom; the tabs are telling you to play the 3rd fret of the D string. This will become more apparent as you see the example.

Accents are defined by symbols like hammer on’s are defined by h, pull offs by p, forward slides by /, reverse slides by \, and many other. The key to figuring these accents out is to look at the symbol key from the tabs. Each person has their own way to define accents in tabs.

Guitar Tab:

In this example I chose a clip from a tab of 3 am by Matchbox 20. The strings are listed to the left of the dashes as standard tuning. The numbers stacked on top of each other indicate certain chords to be played. (some tabs are nice enough to give you the names of each chord) Look right after the first line chord Cadd9 we see our first hammer on starting with play the open A string and hammering to the 3rd fret. This is a pretty basic tab, but do you notice anything missing??? The music notation and duration are missing…. How do you know how long to play each note?? How do you know which fret is which note???  I’ve found through learning music in this way I had to listen to the section of the song over and over to figure out the part to understand what was being played. This could easily be misinterpreted.

So guitar tabs a good beginning but as you progress in your playing we will use guitar tabs including notation and tabs as shown.

GUITAR PRO TABS/SHEET MUSIC:

Guitar Pro tabs/sheet music shows more than just regular tabs. We see the same associate fret to string relationship. Any difference in tuning is usually called out at the start of the tab. These guitar pro files give you the tempo as 135 bpm to practice to. This also provides you with notation to show what note is associated to each fret. Lastly the time signature is shown as 11/8 showing you need 11 eight notes to complete a single measure. This might not all make sense at the time you read this. We will go over these specific topics in more detail later.

In summary this lesson was to give you an understanding of how to read and comprehend each tab as you see these. Practice interpreting tabs by looking up your favorite songs and seeing how these are tabbed out and listen to see if what you play and what you hear are perfect or just close.

This should give you a start to learning music on your own! If you have any questions shoot me an email osterlohguitaracademy@gmail.com and I’ll do my best to answer them! 

Sincerely,

Travis Osterloh