Learning guitar tablature

All beginner guitarists have to learn to read guitar tablature, it is a very important skill. You’ll be using tabs for the rest of your guitarist days, learning hundreds of songs through tabs, so it really is important.

At first sight, tabs may seem complicated. All those lines, numbers, what’s going on?

It’s really easy actually, here is a great video tutorial on the topic, and make sure you download this tablature symbol reference guide.

Once you know how to read tabs, a brand new world of opportunity comes your way.

Tablature sites and resources

There are lots and lots of sites on the net where you can find good (and also bad) tablature.

If you feel the urge to learn any given song, just open Google and search for “YOUR SONG’S NAME tabs”. You’ll be presented with a barrage of hits from all over the web.

The most popular sites for downloading tabs are ultimateguitar.com, classtab.org (for classical music), Guitar Pro is a great tablature playbanc/editing software, guitaretab.com, etc.

But as I said, it’s easiest to simply do a Google search for the song of your choice, append “tab” or “tablature” or “chords” to your search string, and you’ll be present with literally hundreds of tabs for the given song.

Tab quality

The quality of some tabs will be much lower than that of others. Some tab writers don’t take as much time to create their tablature, but those are very easy to recognize. A dead giveaway is when the tabs is really short, or when you know that the song has chords, but the chords aren’t listed at the top of the tabs.

Also, a good way to “prefilter” what you click on is by using the rating system of sites like ultimate-guitar. They have a star rating system, where you can see what rating other users, just like you, have assigned to the given piece of tablature.