Olly’s Guitar World

You are now all set up to begin to learn the guitar. Obviously there is a lot to learn but the great things, and I mean the real great thing, about learning the guitar is it is very easy to read and write guitar music.

I am sure you have seen standard musical notation before. This can be very daunting to a new musician however, whilst it is good to learn this, a better start for the guitar is to learn how to read guitar tablature.

Take a look at this:

E |—————————————|
B |—————————————|
G |—————————————|
D |—————————————|
A |—————————————|
E |—————————————|
This is what empty tablature (or tab for short) looks like. each line represents a string. You can see the names of the strings as per our previous lesson on the names of the notes.

You read tab just as you are reading this sentence - left to right. Check out this example:

E |———————0—————–|
B |—————-0———————-|
G |————-0————————-|
D |———-2—————————-|
A |——2——————————–|
E |—0———————————–|
OK, so the numbers here represent which note to play by telling you which fret to put your finger onto. On the bottom E (remember this is the E nearest the top of the guitar) there is a 0. This is easy as it meas you just play the note with no fingers on any frets. This is an open note.

The next string (the A) has a 2 so you place your finger just before the 2nd fret and pick the note. Moving on to the next string (the D) it again has a 2. Place your finger on the second fret and play the note. All of the rest of the strings have a 0 so do not fret any notes just play them one after the other.

Congratulations! you have just read and played your first piece of tablature.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 21st, 2007 at 1:16 pm and is filed under Guitar Lessons. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.