Guitar Basics: How To Read Guitar Tabs

Not all Guitarists have the technical skill to play music by ear, it also helps to have the music you're playing in front of you. If you can't read sheet music then the next best thing is tablature.

The difference between tablature or "tabs" for short, and sheet music is that tabs indicate finger placement, whereas sheet music displays musical pitches, the two are alike in that they both display music but tabs are much more common for stringed instruments, and are generally preferred over sheet music nowadays due to the ease of use and access to them.

Below is an example of an empty guitar tab.

E|----------------------------------------------------|
B|----------------------------------------------------|
G|----------------------------------------------------|
D|----------------------------------------------------|
A|----------------------------------------------------|
E|----------------------------------------------------|

As you can see, the tab comprises of six lines of dashes, each of these lines represent a string on the guitar, typically, the top line will represent the High "E" String on the guitar and the bottom will represent the low "E" string.

Chords

Now that you understand the basics of reading Guitar tabs, let's throw in some numbers and spice things up a little.

E|-0--------------------------------------------------|
B|-0--------------------------------------------------|
G|-0--------------------------------------------------|
D|-0--------------------------------------------------|
A|-0--------------------------------------------------|
E|-0--------------------------------------------------|

On guitar tabs, open strings are displayed using a "0", and every other fret is represented by it's respective number on the fretboard, for example the 5th fret is represented by the number "5" and the 8th fret is represented by the number "8".

When the numbers are in line across the guitar strings on the tab, they should be played together with an up or down strum motion as you would a normal chord.

Individual Notes

Notes should only be played together in a chord-like fashion when they are in line with eachother, when notes are displayed individually and in the order they appear in the tab as shown below, they should be in return played individually.

E|------6---------------------------------------------|
B|-----5----------------------------------------------|
G|----4-----------------------------------------------|
D|---3------------------------------------------------|
A|--2-------------------------------------------------|
E|-1--------------------------------------------------|

What the above tab shows is a single-fret progression over all six strings of the guitar, starting with the "E" string. In layman's terms, play in order, the 1^st fret of a the low "E" string, the 2^nd fret of the "A" string, the 3^rd fret of the "D" string, the 4^th fret of the "G" string, the 5^th fret of the "B" string and finally the 6^th fret of the high "E" string.

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Click here to view an example of a full guitar tab.