Understanding Tablature

There are lots of great software, lessons, tutorials, books, etc. for learning guitar, but they aren't going to do you any good if you can't read the music inside! Most modern guitar resources use something called tablature, which can be daunting at first, but really isn't that hard to understand. let's look at an example tab:
tablature(also called tab for short) is the numbers and lines on the bottom row, we'll ignore the actual sheet music for now. Tab has 6 lines, one for each string on the guitar. the bottom line represents the low E (a.k.a. the fat one) , and they move up to A , D, G, B, and the high E, respectively. a number on the line represents that fret, with '0' representing an open fret.


so the first six notes would be an open low E string, the 2nd fret of the A string, then the 2nd fret of the D string, and so on. this represents playing all of the notes of an E minor chord one at a time. If you want to represent a chord being strummed at once, you put the notes on top of each other, like the C major chord that follows.

tablature also includes various symbols for the different kind of inflection you can put on notes. the three symbols after the C chord represent a hammer-on, a pull-off, (both of which are playing two notes, then hammering on or letting go to let a second one play) and a slide (playing one note, then without picking again, sliding to a different fret).

These are just the basics of tablature, and you may run across some other symbols from time to time. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a question in the comments and I'd be happy to respond.

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