How To Read Tabs (for Beginners)

Originally posted to S&R blog.

So, you have some basic guitar concepts down now. You can play your standard major and minor chord shapes and you have a sense of rhythm; but that is not why you picked up the guitar. No you picked up the guitar because of the fierce solos or gut busting riffs played by the greats. You madam/sir are no rhythm guitarist but a lead guitarist.

Well what is a player to do when they want to shred but only know chords? This is where tablature (a.k.a. tabs) come into play. If you are classically trained, can sight read and/or play by ear, this article will not be useful to you.

Side Note: Tabs are a wonderfully useful tool. However, do not make the mistake I made and rely on them too long or too often. This will hurt you in the long run and either limit your ability to play with others as well as develop bad habits. Relying on tabs too long will make learning by ear more difficult later on. I found myself in this very situation. 

Other than that, tabs are great! Tabs are super usefully in the early days of guitardom. Say you want to learn your favorite riff or solo from the song which inspired you to pick up the instrument in the first place. The internet of things that can most of the time tell the right notes to play (not all tabs are created equal) the tune until your heart’s content. Most of these guides come in the form of tabs. But if you don’t know how to read them, how are you to learn how to play the songs they are designed to teach?

Once understood, tablature can be transformed into a version of sight reading. But instead of studying notes on a treble clef, you will be examining numbers on a tab grid. This is what a standard tab looks like:

This is the first tab I used to learn to play my first piece of music on the guitar – the intro to Sweet Home Alabama by Lynyrd Skynyrd. To understand how tabs work, I have highlighted 3 main areas.

Box 1: this portion of a tab tells the reader which strings to play. Notice how each of the 6 letters correspond to the six string tunings of a standard tuned guitar. The capitalized E being the lowest in pitch E and the lower case e being the highest (pitched) e.

Box 2: This portion of tab tells you what chords are being played while the tabbed parts are going on. Here you have a D, Csus2, and G chord progression. These chords will be played by your other bandmates (via piano, rhythm guitar, didgeridoo…) while you play the notes from the tab. This is helpful to know what key the song is in and what notes will sound well with the rest of the song. (more on that in a later lesson).

Box 3: shows the actual notes to play when reading tab. These notes are defined by numbers and are to be viewed as frets. Therefore if a “0” appears on the D string – play the open D string. If a “7” appears on the G string, play the 7th fret of the G string.

Red Underline: See the section that is underlined in red? According to this tab (and this directly from ultimate-guitar.com) you slide in and out of the second fret to finish the riff. This is wrong, they should be written as hammer ons and pull offs instead of sliding. Beware of the inaccuracies of tabs.

In this example lets use the first part of the riff – first play the open D string twice, then the 3rd fret of the B string and finally play the second fret of the G string. Finish the rest of the riff by using the tab as a guide.

I bet you were a bit confused to read the “3 (0) 3” and “0/2” sections, weren’t you? Not all songs are played staccato – or each note being played completely separate from one another. Songs will often include a plethora of different techniques ranching form slides, pinch harmonics, bends, tapping, dive bombs and more. If you want to be a prolific tab reader, you must understand how tab annotates each of the guitar techniques. If you do not know these techniques, check out our Guitar Techniques guide!

These are the most common tab symbols used within the tab clef:

h – hammer on

p – pull off

b – bend string up

r – release bend

/ – slide up

\ – slide down

~ – vibrato

t – right hand tap

x – palm mute

(1) – ghost note – number inside () is correlated fret

./. – pick slide!

Some tabs use symbols outside of the clef. Here are the most common of outside the clef symbols:

There are some down sides to tabs though. Not all tabs are created equal. Tablature sites such as ultimate-guitar.com are created by the community meaning anyone can submit tabs. Now the submissions are reviewed by staff but not all tabs are accurate; some maybe be the right notes but not the right location on the neck, some might be in the wrong key, while others might be completely wrong. So tread lightly when reading tabs to play your favorite songs.

Another downside of tabs is the inability to portray rhythm and timing. Tabs are an excellent way to learn how to play your favorite songs, though they cannot accurate show the timing in between the notes and the rhythm of the song. This creates a problem if you are trying to learn a song you have never heard as you will not know how much space is in between each note.

Lastly, tabs can be used as a crutch to guitar playing. I certainly fell into that category for a few years. Tabs are great when you start out playing and if you are trying to nail a song before a show or learn the final passage to your favorite solo, but if used too much, you will find yourself relaying on them to learn everything. This is bad especially if songs you are trying to learn songs that have either poorly written tabs or no tabs at all.

Tabs are great. I still use them to this day! However, I will only use them to figure out trick sections or to nail songs quickly if i have many to learn before a show. Just like anything else in life, use them in moderation after you’ve learned how to play for a while.

Now you know how to read tabs, take a gander at playing some of your favorite songs! Let us know in the comments below what tabs you’re playing or what your first or favorite tab was!

Until next time, let the music play!