Understanding Guitar Tabs

Tabs for the Guitar can be very hard to find on Google. There is a simple reason for this - Google cannot understand a search term if it just contains a letter. This is where finding tabs for the guitar becomes almost impossible. I searched for a regular "B chord" and nearly all the images that came up on Google were either variations of the standard B chord or not even the B chord at all, for example one result in the top results was an image for "E power chord" - oops!

Sheets of tabs for the guitar might be far easier to follow than standard sheet music, but when you are starting out learning the guitar as a beginner, you also need to be taught how to read tabs for the guitar properly.

When you are first learning how to play any musical instrument, trying to learn how to work out notes and so on in the music itself is difficult enough, aside from the instrument itself and this, sadly, makes many people give up, just as they were starting to pick it up.

Even though guitar tablature has been around for more than 600 years (dating back to Europe in the 1300's) the use of guitar tablature seems to have taken off in a huge way due to the internet.

For a guitar player who is just starting out, being told to play 0-2-2-1-0-0 is a lot easier than being told to play an E chord, but for some people, even this seems confusing in the beginning, so here are some basics for learning how to  figure out tabs for the guitar.

A little background on tabs for the guitar...

The word "tablature" comes from the Latin word - "table". Tablature simply means to put something into a table, which is literally what tabs for the guitar are. Similar to music notation, it dates back hundreds of years and it is widely believed that they were around for much longer than that, in Asia. To put it simply, tabs for the guitar are a far easier way to learn how to play music on the guitar as opposed to sheet music. Tabs are also available for bass guitars, banjos, mandolins and a wide range of other string instruments.

Understanding Guitar Tabs

The standard setup to tune a guitar is, starting at the thickest string, EADGBE. Each of these notes is represented by a number. For example - when a guitar tab reads 0-0-0-0-0-0 this simply means that you don't have any fingers pressed down on any frets and therefore the strings are all "open" and just strummed as they are.

If a guitar tab reads 0-3-2-0-1-0, it means:

- On the thickest string (E string) the string is not pressed down
- The next thickest string (A string) is pressed down on the third fret
- The next string (D) is pressed down on the second fret
- The next string (G) is not pressed down (played open)
- The next string (B) is pressed down on the first fret
- The last and thinnest string is not pressed down.

In the above example, you would be playing a straight C chord. This chord is considered harder to learn than the chords A, D, E and G because with the C chord, your fingers are spread out a bit more. After the chords A, D, E and G as mentioned, there is C which is harder, but then there is also F chord, which is for some people extremely difficult to learn in the beginning. The B chord is a similar thing.

Chords like F and B are harder to play than chords like C.
Chords like C are harder to play than A, D, E and G.

That could be shown like this:

Chord A, D, E and G = Easy
Chord C = Medium
Chord F and B = Hard

Yes, it can get extremely confusing. I searched Google myself just now as part of researching this article for a straight B chord and all I found were thousands of images of all different chords, the majority of them were not even a variation of the B chord but some other chord entirely.

Maybe Google cannot properly search for terms of only one letter long? I don't know the reason, but it is nearly impossible to do this without actually buying some sort of guitar tab package where it is all laid out in understandable terminology, from the start.

The best guitar tabs tutorial package we have found is available from the link at the bottom of this page.

Tabs for the guitar are also sometimes written in this format:

E|----3------|
B|----0------|

This would mean you are playing th B string open and the E string on the third fret. This only refers to the last 2 strings - how do I know that? Well, because there is only one B string on a guitar, next to the thinnest E string. So if you see two like in the above example, it means the last 2 strings. This is the last 2 strings of a G chord, although this same layout might represent many other variations of the G chord and even variations of other chords entirely.

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

This example shows an E chord, probably the easiest and first chord any guitar player learns.

Here, it is displayed in such a way that it is easy to see which fret is held down on each individual string. It is usually written like this with a few chords written in a row, divided by a couple of dashes. In the above example, there is just one chord. Since most straightforward songs normally repeat the same chords for each verse and then alternate for the chorus and bridge, it is easier to write out, for example, three verse chords and then three chorus chords, than writing it out individually.

Also, this format is normally used when individual notes are being played. Using the example of the part of the song “Dueling Banjos”, it can be seen how tabs for the guitar are used for individual notes...

E|-------------------------------|
B|-0-1-3-0-1---0-------------|
G|---------------2----0--2-----|
D|-------------------------------|
A|-------------------------------|
E|-------------------------------|

If you have never heard "Dueling Banjos"... well you will have heard the tune before but you might not know it by its name. This is one of the most technical guitar solo's I have ever heard, it isn't just fast, it is also very complicated at the same time. Here, typing out tabs for the guitar is hard, like in the above example the G and B strings are shorter than the other four and shouldn't be - this is why you really need a proper package where it is not typed but shows proper pictures of the tabs. I would say the learning curve is cut down by ten times if you learn from a purpose-made package as opposed to trying to understand tabs for the guitar typed out with notepad.

Also, on a lot of tabs for the guitar, in proper learning packages, because what they show you is a direct representation of a guitar neck and fretboard (an image as opposed to typed out with the notepad in Windows) they often do not even need to put a number on the fret, because you can easily see which fret it is just from the image. This is where buying a package with the proper images in it comes in - not to mention that it is all laid out coherently, as opposed to trying to search Google for things like "B" chord.