Tablature, short for TAB, is a music notation for guitar. Instead of classical musical notation it uses numbers and characters. It will tell you on which exact spot on the guitar you have to play the note, easy!

All of the exercises and examples in this course are shown in tabs with rhythmic notation. Let’s take a look at how to read them.

GUITAR STRINGS
A tab contains horizontal lines and every line represents a guitar string. The bottom line represents the thickest string, which is in this case the 6th string a low E, and the top line represents the thinnest string, which is the 1st string, the high E. If you flip your guitar upside down the strings of the guitar and the tabs will line up. This might be a bit strange at first, but you’ll get used to it very quickly.

NUMBERS
The number will tell you which fret you need to press down on the string. 2 means press down fret 2. Though if you see a 0 (zero), play an open string. So 0 = open string and 1 to 24, represent the fret that you need to press down.

If there are notes written down after each other, you play them from left to right. If you see two zeros, play the zero twice. If you see four zero’s, play it four times.

If there are multiple notes stacked on each other, you play them at the same time.

BAR LINES & TIME SIGNATURE 
Something else that you will find in a tab are bar lines. They divide music into bars or measures. A bar is a segment of time and always contains a consistent specific amount of beats. This specific amount of beats are indicated by the time signature at the beginning of the tab. Most of the time this is a 4/4 (four four). That means that there are four beats in a bar. You count them like: 1 2 3 4, 1 2 3 4 etc.
But on some occasions this time signature can be different like a 3/4 (three four). This means that a bar contains 3 beats per bar and you count them like: 1 2 3, 1 2 3, etc.
This impacts the ‘feel’ of a song.

REPEATING SIGNS
Another element that you’ll find in tabs are repeating signs. You can recognize them by the two dots (image). The bars that lay within these signs are repeated at least twice. If there is a number above the repeating signs, it will inform you how many times you need to play the part.

PICKING DIRECTION
Some tabs indicate the picking direction. A downstroke is indicated with a N and an upstroke is indicated with a V.

There are definitely more signs and elements in tabs, but we’ll be going over them along the way in other lessons.