How to Play and Read Guitar Tabs

Learning how to play guitar tabs is one of the first steps as a beginner guitar player.

Guitar Tabs are the fastest way to learn to play a familiar song, solo and particular guitar lick. Since most of us learn guitar so that we can play our favorite songs it makes sense that beginners are often eager to pick up this skill.

In this article I am going to share with you how to play guitar tabs in three steps: One, understanding what a guitar tab is, two, how to read the tab and three the fastest way to use tablature to learn a full song.

Understanding Tab

Compared to reading music, which might feel like learning a second language to some, understanding guitar tabs is simple.

Here is how basic guitar tablature looks:

e--------
B--------
G--------
D--------
A--------
E--------

Each line of guitar tab corresponds directly to a string on your guitar. The top line corresponds to the bottom for first string on your guitar (the high e), while the bottom line of tab corresponds to the top or 6th string on your guitar (low E).

Reading Tab

Guitar tabs are simply a mix of numbers and symbols placed on different lines. Here's a simple example of a guitar tab for the E major chord.


e---0----
B---0----
G---1----
D---2----
A---2----
E---0----

The number correspond to the fret you press down on that particular string. So for the above example tab you would be playing the 2nd fret of the A string, the 2nd fret of the D string, the first fret of the G string and you'd strum the low E, B and high e strings open (hence the 0 on those lines).

You would know this is a chord because the numbers are all on top of each other in a line. If you say something like this:

e-----------
B---------7-
G-----------
D-----------
A-----5-----
E-3---------

You would be picking individual strings. In this case it would be the 3rd fret of the low E, followed by the 5th fret of the A string and finally the 7th fret on the B string.

While there are other symbols you can run into this is the basics of how to read guitar tab.

Fastest way to Learn a Song from Tab

This might seem straight forward but I have met many beginner guitar players who don't think of this basic technique.

When learning a new song it's important to break the song down into parts.

For example if the guitar tab has the verse, chorus and bridge parts all separated out then first practice the verse chords or what ever it may be. Learning a song in parts, first slowly, then adding speed next and finally piecing all the parts together makes it far more manageable then trying to just play through the entire song first time.