Beginner Guitar Tabs

How to read Guitar tabs

You're a beginner and you're eager to start learning songs and you've heard of these things called 'tabs,' and you know that if you can learn how to play them you can learn thousands of songs. But there's only one problem...You don't know how to read tabs and you may not even know what they are. You're in luck. Google has led you to the right place for once. Take the time to read this short article and you'll be able to read any guitar tab in the world.

Guitar Tabs 101

The first question you might ask is: what the h#$% is a guitar tab?

Guitar Tablature, or 'guitar tabs' for short, is a shorthand notation system designed to make it very easy for guitar players to be able to communicate with one another about how to play a chord, lick, phrase, or song on the guitar. If you can write and read tabs, then you can speak the language, so to speak, and will be able to search the web or this website for millions of tabs to learn what you are trying to learn.

How to read tabs

Reading tabs is very easy once you know what you are doing. Essentially, one phrase or measure of tablature consists of six lines, each of which might look something like this:

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The key thing to grasp is that each of the six lines in a phrase of tablature actually visually represents a guitar string. And when we put six lines on top of one another like this:

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...we can visually represent each of six strings of the guitar. The lowest string is the low E string and the top string is the high E string. So now we just need a way to be able to designate which frets, or notes to play on each string, and we have ourselves a way to communicate about chords, licks, and songs. So how is this done using tabs?

Simple - we just write the fret number on a given string using plain old numbers (1, 2, 3, etc.)

So for example, if I want to tell someone to play the 3rd fret of the low E string, I would simply draw this:

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----3-------

Ok, easy enough. But what if I want to communicate multiple notes? Easy again. Now we just have to write the different notes, in order, from left to right. For example, if I want to tell someone to play the 3rd fret of the low E string immediately followed by the 5th fret of the A string (the fifth string), I can write this:

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----5-------
-3----------

Notice, however, that this form of notation does not indicate how long each note should be played. This is a drawback of tablature. Sometimes players will put more space in between the notes, like this:

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---------5--
-3----------

And this will indicate that you should leave more time (or rest) for longer before moving onto the next note. But that is the only way to communicate timing in this limited, shorthand method of notation.

And there you have it folks! You now know everything you need in order to read any tab in the entire world. Thanks for reading! Please feel free to browse our collection of tabs to start learning your favorite songs!