Learning Guitar Tabs Efficiently and Effectively
Thursday, January 14th, 2010Know the intricacies of your guitar neck in order to easily figure out the operation of a guitar and the basics of how to play the guitar.
The frets are the horizontal lines you find evenly spaced among the neck. Holding down the string along any point in these frets will produce a note when plucked, and many of these together comprise a song. Guitar tabs are used to briefly and simple describe exactly which strings you need to hold, and which you need to leave open. You’ll be able to see what fret you need to depress in order to get the note right.
Before you can play using tabs, you need to know what each guitar string can do. Starting with the skinniest string and working to the biggest the names will be E, B, G, D, A, and E. Many times these are also referred to by number which would be 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, again going from thinnest to thickest. The frets are the boxes on the guitar neck, they are referred to by the numbers 1-19, starting with topmost fret being 1 and the the bottom most fret being 19. You have to know which string to press against which fret if you want to learn guitar tabs. For instance : your tab notation might say ‘1-2′. This means that you should press down strings number ‘1′ inside of fret ‘2′.
If you want to play a guitar chord, it is necessary to press several strings against the fret board in unison. Using guitar tabs, chords become easier to lean. A C chord would be tabulated to say 2-1 4-2 5-3. 1-3 2-2 6-3 is how to play a G chord. If you study chord charts, you will be able to start playing by tabs faster. When the notation describes an ‘O’ next to any string, this means that you use the string by itself, without pressing it down anywhere.
You have to comprehend many other pieces of notation in order to learn guitar tabs effectively. Hammer-ons are denoted by an h; pull-offs are the reverse of that, and a g on the tab denotes that particular movement on the string. Anytime there is a “b” notation, you need to bend the string to cause a wobble effect. The “r” notation represents the release of one note and start of the next. Finally, a ‘/’ indicates that you need to create a ’slide’ by moving to the following note described by your tabs.
Although we can’t go into sufficient detail here on how to learn guitar tabs, there are some great online guitar learning programs out there such as Guitar Superstars which are excellent resources for learning guitar.