Lesson and Music Resources from Eddy Bugnut

Reading and playing standard music notation on a guitar, or any multi-stringed musical instrument, is more difficult than reading and playing music notation on a piano or other instruments.   The reason is there are many different places on a guitar where a specific note can be played.  On a piano there is only one place where a specific pitch can be sounded.  Because of this most guitar players learn how to read and write TAB (tablature) in order to share information and communicate ideas.  Standard music notation is written on a "staff" consisting of 5 horizontal lines, as follows.

TAB is generally written using 6 horizontal lines with each line representing a string, like this…

In order to better understand tab here is a picture of a guitar neck from the point of view of looking at it as it leans against a wall.  Here we have the big string on the left (6th string)  and the small string on the right (first string).

 If we take this neck and rotate it 90 degrees to the left we would get this…

Now if we place the TAB lines below this graphic we can see where tab comes from.

The bottom string is the ’sixth’  string and the top string is the ‘first’ string.  This might seem a little counter-intuitive at first since when you actually play a guitar the sixth string is generally on top.

Do you see the numbers on the TAB lines?   They indicate the frets that are to be played on the string holding the number.  In the above example, "6th string-7th fret",  "6th string-7th fret" again,  "5th string-6th fret",  "5th string-7th fret",  "5th string-9th fret".  These notes are to be played in order from left to right.

Sometimes you can have 2 or more notes played at the same time, like this…

Open strings ( no fretted notes) are symbolized like this…