TAB is a form of notation used by guitarists and is different from the conventional notation that you may have seen before. TAB does have many advantages as it aids you in getting playing straight away, however there are a couple of disadvantages that I will get to later. Firstly, lets have a look at what TAB is and what it does.
TAB uses a number system rather than musical notes to show us what we will play. Here is an example of TAB:
Notice that here we have 6 lines going across. Each line represents a string on the guitar. The bottom line is the bottom string (thickest) and the top line is the top string (thinnest).
The number is what we call the fret number. So, as you can see in the example above, the first note we have is a 1 on the second string. This means that we play the b string while fretting it at the first string. The second note we have is a 3 on the first string, meaning that we fret the first string at the 3rd fret.
We also may see a zero on a line. A zero (0) indicates that we play that string, but we are not actually fretting anything on the guitar neck.
If you see two numbers stacked on top of each other, this means that you play both of those notes at the same time.
Hope all this makes sense – if it doesn’t just contact me.
