Guitar tab can be an effective tool for learning songs, but the complex symbols may make it hard to use to your full advantage. By reading some basic chord symbols and learning a few of your favorite riffs you will soon be making music with guitar tab.
Vertical stacks of numbers represent chords; play them at once for maximum effect – something traditional music doesn’t account for.
Symbols
Tablature utilizes symbols to represent various musical techniques, such as bending (which lowers string pitch), trills, tapping harmonics and others.
Bending strings is an expressive guitar technique that can dramatically change your style and sound. Tab notation for this displays a curved upwards arrow to indicate which notes should be bent and by what amount.
Staccato notation indicates a note should be played quickly without holding its note for too long, requiring only minimal rests between notes.
Another useful symbol is the ‘x’, which represents a heavily muted string that should be picked or strung with an open finger to produce a percussive sound when plucked/strummed with an open finger. This technique is commonly used when playing funky power chords or when using a wah pedal to add some distinctive ‘wacka-wacka’ to their sound.
Lines
Tabs differ from chord diagrams by not providing direct instructions on which finger to use for playing each note in context of the chord and surrounding notes. Instead, using those cues, it requires you to figure out how best to play it using context of chord and notes around it as guides for finding how best to play it.
An example would be reading guitar chord tabs to know which strings to strum depending on what chords are present in a song. Knowing this information will allow you to read chords accurately.
Tabs typically combine musical notation with graphic symbols to depict guitar tabs. You’ll often see a diagram depicting all six strings starting at low E and moving up through all frets to high E; horizontal lines represent each string while each fret has a line separating its frets; any number in a tab indicates where to place your fingers; an open string can be represented as 0, while numbers followed by either “w” (whole note) or “h” (half note) indicate where to position fingers for finger placement on frets 1s.
Rhythm
Many songs require more than the chords displayed in a guitar tab to complete them successfully, including single notes not part of any chord and strumming patterns. Because of this, many songs utilize both chord charts and tabs.
If a number in a tab does not include a dot, this indicates playing that string open. A “t” symbol indicates tapping technique – tapping your finger against the fretboard for rhythmic effect to make your playing more full and rhythmical.
As you play music, curved lines (slurs) may connect one note to another to indicate their playing together. For instance, when using a hammer-on technique it involves hitting the string with your finger in an abrasive fashion until it sounds without needing your picking hand; usually followed by a pull off technique whereby your finger is taken off so the lower note can sound out unimpeded by finger.
Chords
There are various guitar chords, each designed to create songs in different genres of music. Rock and metal musicians frequently employ power chords – which combine three notes with the root note as its base note, followed by its higher fifth. Power chords are easy for beginner guitarists to learn because they do not contain bar chords.
When numbers appear stacked vertically on a tab, this signifies fretting all notes at once in order to form a chord – its name may also be written beside each note.
Learning to read tabs before creating one yourself is essential, and UG provides two templates you can download when preparing to submit them (screenshot). They can be found on our submission page: one is tailored specifically towards guitar tabs while the other caters more towards bass tabs.