How to Play Guitar Tabs     

How to play guitar tabs, in their basic form is very simple. You are probably already familiar with sheet music. Guitar tabs look very similar but the 6 lines now represent the six strings of a guitar, which may at first confuse you.

Guitarists created their own adaptation of sheet music, and their own way of writing guitar music notation, that is called guitar tablature.  This provides an easy to understand way to share guitar music with other guitarists. It is really very simple, and you'll soon understand how to play guitar tabs in no time.

Learning Guitar Tunes From Guitar Tabs

Many people who start to learn to play an instrument do so when they are young and often learn to read sheet music and their instrument from a teacher. Guitarists are usually different unless a parent buys a childs guitar to start on.  Guitarists find their instrument in their teens or later, are often self taught or have learned from watching and playing with other guitarists, and they rarely have the benefit of being able to read sheet music.

Instead they learn their songs by ear and perhaps by watching the fingering of chords from friends or on videos and then gradually they start working out the rest.

Learning to sight read sheet music takes a fair amount of study, with little immediate or obvious benefit, and self-taught guitarists rarely bother at first. Had you learned to be a pianist with years of private study, there would have been a heavy focus on sight reading.

It's never too late to learn and a serious guitarist wanting a career in the music industry, will eventually take lessons or learn from a book when they have the need for it. Meanwhile, guitar tablature which may not have as much detail as sheet music, is an  easy to read way of increasing your repertoire of songs.

Guitar tabs are exclusive to six stringed instruments and are of no use to a piano player or a saxophonist.  Unless they also know the note names for the strings on a guitar they cannot use guitar tab to play the tune. Depending on the tablature used, there is little indication as to how long a string should be played or in what kind of rhythm. So unless you have heard the tune and know how it goes, it may be hard to learn how it should sound just by reading guitar tabs.

Sometimes guitar tab is joined to standard notation sheet music.  The standard notation can be used to read the rhythm, while the guitar tab shows how and where to play the notes. Generally guitarists just want to learn how to play guitar tab, to play a song they like and guitar tab will give them sufficient information for this use.

How to Play Guitar Tabs

Those six horizontal lines represent the six strings on your guitar.  The bottom line represents your lowest E string, the second line from the bottom represents your A string, and the top line is your top E string etc. That's simple enough.

There are numbers centered on the string lines. The numbers represent the fret your fingers should be holding down. For a 3 on the fourth line down from the top,  play the fourth string on the third fret. When the number 0 is used, an open string should be played.

When the tab has a vertical stack of 6 numbers in a straight line, it indicates you should play all these at the same time as a chord. Often, guitar tab books will include the chord name above for fast recognition, but if the chord is unfamiliar, the guitarist can work out what to play using the chord notation in the vertical stack of numbers representing which fret and string need to played.  Still pretty simple isn't it?

When there is a diagonal line of numbers this indicates that the chord should be played one note after another, as guitarists often do to finish a song slowly. When all notes are evenly spaced, all notes are of equal length. A greater spacing is an indication of how much longer a note should be held.

There is more notation for how to play guitar tab but this is where it starts to get complicated and sometimes varies from one book to the next. The following link gives further information for those who want to understand more.

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