Guitar Tabs

LEARN TO READ TABS IN 60 MINUTES OR

LESS
An Advanced Guide to Guitar Tabs

-Guitar Head
GH@theguitarhead.com
www.facebook.com/theguitarhead/
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©Copyright 2018 by Guitar Head - All rights reserved.

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 Guitar Tabs – Guitar Head

Disclaimer

Please note the information contained within this document is for educational
and entertainment purposes only. Every attempt has been made to provide accurate,
up to date and reliable complete information. No warranties of any kind are
expressed or implied. Readers acknowledge that the author is not engaging in the
rendering of legal and financial, medical or professional advice. The content of this
book has been derived from various sources. Please consult a licensed professional
before attempting any techniques outline in this book.

By reading this document, the reader agrees that under no circumstances are is
the author responsible for any losses, direct or indirect, which are incurred as a
result of the use of information contained within this document, including, but not
limited to, - errors, omissions, or inaccuracies.

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Table of Content

Table of Content .......................................................................................4

Guitar Head Bonuses! ...............................................................................5
Want to have a personal chat? ............................................................................... 5
But Why?..................................................................................................6
The book is too small! ................................................................................................. 7
Is Reading Sheet Music and Tabs the Same? .............................................9
I can’t read music! ...................................................................................................... 9
What are Tabs? ........................................................................................................... 9
Tabs and Standard Notations? ............................................................................. 10
How Do Tabs Work .................................................................................. 11
The strings and frets ................................................................................................. 11
What About Time? .................................................................................. 15
The simplest way to keep time .............................................................................. 16
Duration Stems .......................................................................................................... 17
Measuring Pauses .................................................................................................... 20
Ornaments.............................................................................................. 21
Legato ........................................................................................................................... 21
Bending ....................................................................................................................... 22
Slide ............................................................................................................................. 23
Vibrato ........................................................................................................................ 24
Ghost Note .................................................................................................................. 25
Dead Note .................................................................................................................. 25
Palm Mute ................................................................................................................. 26
Let Ring ...................................................................................................................... 26
Harmonics ................................................................................................................. 26
Downstroke and Upstroke ..................................................................................... 27
Exercises ................................................................................................ 29
Conclusion ............................................................................................. 36
 Guitar Tabs – Guitar Head

Guitar Head Bonuses!

This book comes with free audio tracks for the exercises in the book. You can
find them in the folder you downloaded. If you didn’t receive it by any chance, feel
free to reach out to me. My email address is mentioned below

Want to have a personal chat?

Want to have a personal one on one chat with me? I love connecting with my
readers. Feel free to hit me up on my Facebook page or send me an email at
GH@theguitarhead.com

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Chapter #1

But Why?
Most authors wouldn’t bother writing a book on reading tabs. I know there are
100s of videos and free content out there teaching you how to read guitar tabs. What
is the purpose of this book? Where does it fit?

My decision to write this book came from reading an offensive review on my book
“Guitar Exercises”. This person called the book trash and claimed that he put the
book in the trash in 10 minutes of receiving it. Apart from the emotional strings the
review pulled in me, I was deeply saddened! Not only by the aggression, but also by
the ignorance on the part of the reviewer.

I understand if you are a beginner and can’t read tabs; every person who can
play the guitar has gone through that, including me. But the solution is not to get
angry at the author and trash him in the review section. That’s like saying “I want
to learn to drive but I won’t learn to read the street signs, I’ll throw a stone at a cop
instead!”

I’m genuinely saddened by such people! They are missing out on such vital
information! Learning to read guitar tabs won’t take more than 30 minutes of your
time and is very essential skill to have if you are learning guitar! Every guitar site,
video or book on the internet communicates through written tabs and it is one of the
first steps I teach in my students and in my book “Guitar for Beginners”.
 Guitar Tabs – Guitar Head

I can’t stress enough the importance of learning to read guitar tabs! You
absolutely must learn to read tabs if you are serious about learning this amazing
instrument. Learning guitar without learning to read tabs is like crossing a busy
road - blindfolded!

This is the reason I decided to write this book. And I am giving this book away
at a very nominal charge. I know I can probably charge a lot more for this book, but
I genuinely want to help you as a guitarist! I know the importance of reading tabs
and I hope the low-price tag made you jump at it! A guitarist who does not know to
read simple tabs does not exist!

The intention of this book is to teach you to read tabs fluently and nothing
else! Hope you make the most of it!

The book is too small!

I know there will be a few comments on the book saying, “this is a pamphlet, the
author is cheating us, it is only 40 pages!” To those people – do you want a big book
or content without fluff? I can easily increase the size of the book by increasing the
font size, adding unnecessary information or writing about my high school crush.
But will that help you master tab reading?!

You’ll learn to read tabs from this book and that’s all that matters!

Inside this book, you’ll find everything you’ll ever need to read guitar tabs
fluently. From the very basic of “which string and which fret” to reading spacing and
harmonics. I’ve got you covered!

A word of caution

If you are a beginner, I would highly recommend you look at this book as a
grocery store - take what you want and leave, do not try to take everything home –
you may find it overwhelming! And don’t worry! - The things you don’t take home

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won’t go waste! You can always come back, even years from now and find value in
this book! That’s a fact!

With that in mind, a complete beginner can easily digest the content of this
book in less than an hour. You can learn all you need to read tabs less than 30
minutes if you wanted to! Take what you need and put into practice. You need not
learn everything the book contains!
 Guitar Tabs – Guitar Head

Chapter #2

Is Reading Sheet Music and Tabs the Same?

I can’t read music!

Much of the confusion and hate I get are from people who confuse reading music
to guitar tabs. People buy guitar books and see all the lines and numbers and get
instantly offended. I’ve even had people contact me saying “Why should I learn tabs?
I’m sure Jimmy Hendrix never read music!”

I am not sure if Jimmy Hendrix could read music. But you don’t need to read
music to read guitar tabs. They are two very different thing! Honestly, even I am still
in the process of learning to read music. You need not know to read music to read
tabs. Let’s crack down further on the differences between the two.

What are Tabs?

There are many ways by which music can be written down, tabs are one of them.
The term stands for “tablature” and it has a centuries-old history, having been used
to notate instruments from the organ to the baroque lute! It is now most commonly
found in contemporary guitar and bass notation, especially for more modern styles
such as rock, pop, and blues.
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Tabs and Standard Notations?

At some point you will have come across modern staff notation (or standard
notation), it looks like this:

While this is quite a simple example of such method, it still conveys a lot of
information that a beginner might not know how to interpret or quickly make use
of.

Furthermore, there is one key direction that it doesn’t give: where to actually find
those notes on your instrument. This is exactly the problem addressed by tabs, their
main focus is on how rather than what.

The same melodic phrase in tab notation would look like this:

Often the two systems are combined, as the wealth of instructions contained in
standard notation complements the simplicity of the tab system:

The most evident flaw of tabs is the absence of rhythm and duration values of
the notes, but there are ways to circumvent this problem, as we’ll see in the further
chapters.
 Guitar Tabs – Guitar Head

Chapter #3

How Do Tabs Work

The example from the previous chapter might just look to you like a bunch of
lines and numbers, no more decipherable than standard notation, but don’t worry,
the system behind it is incredibly simple and you’ll be reading tabs in no time!

The fretboard of your guitar works a bit like a grid, with strings on the vertical
axis and frets on the horizontal one. So, basically, all the information you need to
find a note is: on what string it is located, and what fret should I press down to play
it.

It’s somewhat like the game of “battleship” –find the string, find the fret, fire.

The strings and frets

Numbers from 1 to 6 are assigned to the strings, from the thinnest to the
thickest, like so:

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But in the tab, the thickest string is represented by the line at the bottom, and
the thinnest by the one on the top, as if, from playing the position, you had rotated
the fretboard towards you:

Frets are counted as shown, from the headstock towards the body:
 Guitar Tabs – Guitar Head

The fret number will be notated on top of the string to be played.

For instance, this tab instructs us to play the 5th fret of the 4th string:

The instruction to play an open string, i.e. plucking a string without fingering
any fret, is represented by the number 0.

The simplest forms of tabs do not give much information as to what the duration
values of the notes are, but they do outline the passage of time. Or, more simply, the
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order in which the notes should be played. Intuitively, in tabs time flows from left to
right.

A Liner Example

So, in the following example, we would first play the 1st fret of the 6th string,
then the 3rd fret of the same string, finally followed by an open 5th string:

It goes without saying that only one fret can be played on a single string at any
given time, but you can have multiple strings ringing simultaneously in what is
called a chord.

Multiple notes at once

That’s when the fret numbers are vertically aligned, meaning they must be
played at the same time. In this example the tab tells us to strum the 2nd fret of the
3rd string along with the 3rd fret of the 2nd string and the 2nd fret of the 1st string
all together:
 Guitar Tabs – Guitar Head

Chapter #4

What About Time?

Before we get full force into this chapter – a word of caution! This chapter might
seem a little intermediating if you are a beginner. You might need to invest some
time to nail down the concepts completely, but the good news is – You need not know
it all! Like mentioned in the introduction, look at this chapter as a grocery store,
take what you want and leave, do not try to take everything home.

Let’s Dive in

As previously said, while standard notation is very specific in its time/duration

description, tabs can be a bit hazy.

Most players use tabs as a tool on top of a known audio reference, which means
they know what their part should sound like, and once the position of the notes is
known it’s just a matter of emulating the rhythm of the song. All Guitar Head books
come with free audio, so you shouldn’t have a problem with timing if you are a
beginner.

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The simplest way to keep time

But the simplest tabs do give an approximation of the duration of the notes, and
they do so with the spacing between the numbers themselves: the bigger the space
the longer the note.

Take a look at our little melodic line:

The space after the first two notes is equal, so they’ll be held for the same amount
of time.

On the other, hand, the third note is followed by twice the space before meeting
the barline, which means its duration will be doubled.

(You can find the audio version of the above at www.theguitarhead.com/bonus)

What’s a barline

What’s the barline, you ask? It’s simply a mark helping us to keep track of time
by denoting the end of a bar (or measure), it’s a single musical cell of the entire piece.
All bars last the same amount of time, but the duration of the single notes inside
them can change.

The next bar of the melody contains two more notes compared to the previous
one, meaning that the duration of its single notes will be shorter if both bars must
add up to the same length of time.
 Guitar Tabs – Guitar Head

Duration Stems

So, we’ve just seen how, even without an exact representation of duration values,
we can still infer the rhythmic configurations in our tabs. Obviously, it’s easier if we
can listen to the song we’re learning, and it gets less challenging with experience.

However, there’s an unambiguous way to notate such elements in a tab, and it’s
borrowed from, you guessed it, standard notation! To understand how it works
there’s some basic knowledge of rhythm notation required.

Let’s learn a little about rhythm

Before we get into learning how we can use the rhythm notation, let’s learn a
little about rhythm and time.

Music has a pulse, a steady flow of beats that forms the rhythmic skeleton of the
song, usually what you would instinctively clap or stomp your foot to. Most popular
music is in 4/4-time signature, meaning that there are 4 of these beats in each bar,
which is why the duration value of a beat is of a “quarter note”.

I know, I know! You didn’t understand a thing! I blanked out when I heard this
for the first time. But it’s the easier than you think! It only sounds complicated! It’s
as simple as a bar of chocolate! A bar of chocolate was divided into 4 parts, each
called a quarter.

Well, that was easy! But I apply the same thing to a musical bar, and you can’t
remember? Now, that’s unfair to the musical bar! (I’m just kidding, let’s move on!)

This value (the quarter) will serve as the basis of our naming system, so all other
notes are named in relation to the “quarter note”. For instance, a note lasting four
quarter notes will be called a “whole note” (taking up a whole bar), and one lasting
half a quarter note will be called an “eighth note”.

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These duration values are notated as stems above or under the fret number on
the tab, and these stems are modeled after the duration symbols in standard
notation.

Here are the five most common subdivisions in music notated in tab form:

“Half notes” and “quarter notes” share the same stem, but the space between the
notes themselves is doubled in the former.

(You can find the audio version of the above at www.theguitarhead.com/bonus)

Ever come across a dot?

The dot next to stem simply means that the overall duration is worth the length
of the original value plus another half of it. For instance, the note in the following
example lasts for a quarter note plus an eighth note

The same instruction could be given by linking the two notes with a slur like so:
Guitar Tabs – Guitar Head

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Measuring Pauses

Pauses are as important as notes in music, and their duration can also be
notated.

Here are the rest symbols for the five most common rhythmic subdivisions we
looked at earlier:

Triplets

When you see a “3” written above a group of three notes, that means you’ve
encountered a triplet. This is a special kind of subdivision where three notes are
crammed in the time-frame of two. For example, three eighth note triplets equal in
duration to two eighth notes.

So, one could see it as subdividing the beat (quarter note) into three rather than
two:

The resulting effect is very characteristic, and you’ll learn to recognize it and
implement it with practice.
 Guitar Tabs – Guitar Head

Chapter #5

Ornaments
Ornaments or articulations are what adds character and expressivity to the
music, they are instructions for the player to embellish their part with special
techniques.

Let’s see together how to notate the most common guitar techniques on tab.

Legato

This articulation is found in virtually all genres of music and tells the performer
to smoothly transition between the indicated notes. In guitar playing this effect is
achieved by either using hammer-ons, for ascending pitches, or pull-offs, for
descending ones.

Legato is notated as a slur under the note numbers, and sometimes

accompanied by an “h” or a “p” to specifically denote a hammer-on or a pull-off
respectively.

Here is a short musical line that makes use of the hammer-on:

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And one employing the pull-off:

Here they are used in combination to form a scalar phrase:

Bending

An embellishment often used in solos, the bending is a very common technique

in guitar playing. It is executed by using the fretting hand to literally bend the string
played in order to increase the pitch of the note targeted.

It’s notated as an upwards-pointing arrow beside the note, usually associated to

a number indicating the desired increment in pitch. For instance “1” stands for a
whole tone, “½” for a semitone and so on.

Following an example of a note bent by a whole tone:

 Guitar Tabs – Guitar Head

Bringing the bent note back to its original pitch is called “release” and is notated
as such:

On the other hand, a “pre-bend” is when the note has been bent to its desired
pitch before being plucked, and it looks like this:

Slide

As the name suggests, the slide is a technique achieved by plucking a fretted

note and then, without lifting the finger used, sliding up or down the string towards
another targeted note.

A rising diagonal line is used to represent slide-ups, or slides ascending in pitch:

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And a sinking diagonal line is used to represent slide-downs, or slides

descending in pitch:

Vibrato

This ornamente emulates the natural fluctuations of the singing human voice,
adding depth to the chosen pitch. It is obtained by subjecting the string to small,
repeated bendings and releases, in order to create a slight oscillation in pitch.

It is notated as a wavy line above the note:

A thicker, wider line simply indicates a vibrato with greater pitch fluctuation,
called “wide vibrato”:
 Guitar Tabs – Guitar Head

Ghost Note

This articulation, notated by parentheses around the note, tells the player to de-
emphasize said pitch, usually by playing at a lower volume, with a less accentuated
attack, or slightly muted:

Dead Note

Often confused with its cousin the “ghost note”, the dead note is an essentially
pitchless percussive effect. On the guitar, it is achieved by letting the fretting hand
rest on the string without actually pressing it onto any fret and then plucking the
said string.

It is notated as an “X” on the targeted string:

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Palm Mute

This technique is almost exclusive to the guitar and often used in genres such
as blues, rock, and metal. It instructs the player to perform the part with a muffled
sound, achieved by lightly resting the picking hand on the strings played, as close
as possible to the bridge of the instrument. On tabs it’s denoted by the presence of
a “P.M.” under the targeted note, followed by hyphen extending for the duration of
the effect:

Let Ring

Virtually the opposite of the palm muting, this instruction tells the player to
allow the strings played to resonate for the duration of the effect. In case of a fretted
note, the finger must remain pressed on the targeted string for it to keep vibrating;
in case of an open string, the guitarist must be careful not to make contact with the
vibrating string with either hand while they keep playing:

Harmonics

This technique takes advantage of the nature of the guitar, creating an artificial
“node” along the string for it to vibrate at otherwise inaccessible frequencies.

The most common way to obtain such effect is by lightly resting the tip of a finger
in the fretting hand on one of the specific points along the string called natural
 Guitar Tabs – Guitar Head

harmonics, and then plucking the string itself. While there are several, the most
commonly played harmonics can be found at the 5th, 7th, and 12th fret.
Unfortunately, there is no general consensus as to how to notate harmonics on tab,
some use a diamond around the fret number, others a circle. A non-ambiguous way
to do it simply specify with a “N.H.” standing for “natural harmonic” under the
targeted note:

Another type of the effect in question is the “pinch harmonic”, obtained by

following the pick stroke with a slight touch of the side of the picking hand thumb.
This technique is tricky to master, and when done correctly will produce a squealing
sound, especially if paired with distortion. Like the natural harmonic, it’s simply
notated as such:

Downstroke and Upstroke

The last element on this list isn’t technically an ornament, but rather a direction
to the player.

It simply instructs the guitarist to stroke the string with a upward or downward
motion of the plectrum. For strummed parts it’s intuitively represented by an

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upward pointing arrow for downstrokes and an downward pointing one for upstrokes
(remember, the tab is upside down!):

For single notes the downbow and upbow symbols for strings are borrowed from
standard notation. The downbow equates to the downstroke and looks like an “M”,
while the upbow equates to the upstroke and looks like a “V”:
 Guitar Tabs – Guitar Head

Chapter #6

Exercises
Here are a few exercises to seal the deal! Try playing them yourself and compare
it to the audio provided with the book. Don’t stress if you don’t get them right, you’ll
improve with time.

(You can get the audio at – www.theguitarhead.com/bonus)

1. Scalar phrase using only 8th notes

2. Lick using different subdivisions and rests

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 Guitar Tabs – Guitar Head

3. Lick using dotted notes and rests

4. Lick using triplets

5. Riff using chords

6. Lick using primarily h

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7. Lick using primarily p

8. Penta lick using both h and p

9. Blues lick with bending

10. Rock lick with pre-bend and release

 Guitar Tabs – Guitar Head

11. Fun slide line

12. Legato, Bending, Slide, Vibrato all together in solo

fragment

13. Funk pattern with dead

14. Popping line with ghost and dead

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15. Rock/Grunge riff with PM

16. Ballad arpeggio with LR

17. Dead, PM, LR all together in rhythm part

18. Rock ballad with NH

 Guitar Tabs – Guitar Head

19. Solo fragment with PH

20. Every technique combined in a short song

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Chapter #7

Conclusion
And that’s it! You’re now all set, this is all you need to start reading the tabs for
your favourite songs and, why not, even write your own!

I hope you enjoyed this short quick book. I had a lot of fun writing it! Make sure
you show some love by posting a review for the book on amazon.

Have fun! Guitar Head signing off!

 Guitar Tabs – Guitar Head

The End

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