Rhythm is the biggest problem you will encounter when reading tabs because there is no way to denote rhythmic figures. You’ll see the notes that you need to play but you won’t be able to tell by the notation how long to play each note. You will be better off if you can hear the piece or if you know the song you are learning to play. If you try to learn a new piece that you’ve never heard before, you’ll find yourself stumbling over the melody.

The other main drawback is that tabs don’t explain fingering. The tabs will show you what frets to put your fingers on, but not what specific fingers to put on the frets. This can be frustrating for technical personalities who want to be shown exact fingering for playing a song. If you find yourself frustrated by this tab limitation, you should probably consider learning to read traditional music

Even though these two limitations are present, they haven’t stopped guitar tablature from becoming the most popular way to read and notate guitar music, and by combining tabs with some other basic knowledge, you can be off and running in no time. To really get the hang of it, there are a couple things I would suggest you do right away.

First, click here to download my free guide to reading guitar tabs. It comes complimentary just for joining my newsletter (where you’ll also get loads more lessons — all free by the way).

Second, to really jumpstart your playing, pick up an inexpensive membership to one of the online guitar learning programs. There’s one that’s offering around a 50% discount for a limited time right now, making it less than the cost of a couple pizzas. It’s an insane bargain, and you can find that right here (click on the link to check it out. I think you’ll be impressed.)

And now onto the guitar tab tutorial…

HOW TO READ TABS

Many musicians have an ‘ear’ for how melodies should sound and don’t mind trading the lack of rhythmic notation for an easy way to look at the music without having to learn years of traditional music theory. Tabs are a visual representation of the fret board of a guitar. Six lines are present representing the six strings of the guitar with the bottom line being the lowest “E” string. The second string represents the “A” string and so forth.

E————————-
B————————-
G————————-
D————————-
A————————-
E————————-

Melody

Numbers are placed on the lines that simply represent which fret to place your finger on. So in the following example, you would put a finger on the 4th fret of the “B” string, and play that note twice. Then you’d put a finger on the 2nd fret of the “G” string and play that once. When the number “0” is used, it indicates that you are to play an open string. So, in this example, after the 2nd fret of the “G” is played, you would play the open “D” string.

E————————-
B——4—4————-
G—————–2——
D———————-0–
A————————-
E————————-

Chords

When numbers are stacked up vertically on the tab, it means you should play them all at the same time resulting in a chord. By definition, a chord is a combination of 3 or more tones played at the same time. So in this example, you would play 5 notes: The open “E” string, the first fret of the “B” string, the open “G” string, the 2nd fret of the “D” string, and the 3rd fret of the “A” string. This is the “C” Chord, and often it will be notated above the notation to help you out.

C

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

Other Symbols you might see in TAB and what they mean:

h - hammer on
p - pull off
b - bend string up – pluck first note and bend string up (or down).
r - release bend
/ - slide up- Pick the first note, keep pressure while sliding to the next. Don’t pick the note you slide to.
\ - slide down
v - vibrato (sometimes written as ~) – shake the note by toggling the fretting hand wrist.
t - tap (with strumming hand)
x - muted, struck string

These notations are to help you interpret the piece of music you are learning to play. You can consult magazine legends (keys, as to a map) to describe particular symbols you might see in magazines or online.

Bands from genres as diverse as heavy metal (Soundgarden) and folk / classic rock (Crosby, Stills and Nash) have tried tuning their guitars to different keys in order to unlock different sounds and break free from some of the standard ways of playing and songwriting.

What is an alternate tuning? In the widest sense, it is any method of tuning a guitar so that it differs from the standard EADGBE order of notes. The simplest types of alternate tunings involve changing only one string, such as de-tuning the 6^th string from E to D or to C in order to create a heavier sound or facilitate drop-D chording.

Even de-tuning each note on the guitar a half-step is a form of simple alternate tuning.

Expanding on the same concept is the idea of tuning the notes of the guitar so that an open strum forms a chord. Think of this as drop-D tuning taken to the extreme. Some of the most popular open tunings are open C and open G.

For example, open C would tune a guitar so that, in order of top to bottom the strings would have the following note values: CGCGCE. This means that on an open strum, a 6-string C chord would sound.

By barring a finger across the entire neck of the guitar in this tuning, you can form a movable chord based off of the initial C that can be played anywhere on the fret board that you like. This makes for easy chording, but it also provides a unique tonal palette that can be used to create new patterns.

It also allows for the use of a slide to form chords and play licks based off of them without having to finger behind the bar.

Sometimes alternate tunings aren’t necessarily meant to facilitate the playing of certain chords or the use of a slide. Alternate tunings which adopt the styles used by other instruments from the past, or which represent certain musical relationships such as forming thirds, fourths or sixths between each open string are intended to change the way a musician approaches the guitar.

If someone re-arranged the roads that lead to your workplace every morning, it might be a bit confusing, or take a bit longer to get there, but you would still eventually arrive at work. Not only that, but you would see a few things that you would not have seen on your normal route.

Alternate tunings re-arrange your brain’s expected path to certain tones, but as long as you have an understanding of how the tuning is constructed, you can make excellent use of these new patterns to help you see something new on the very same fret board that you play every day.

However, finger slides have a limited amount of sustain – certainly it is possible to maximize the length of the played note by introducing a little vibrating at the end, but even that is limited. 

In blues guitar, it is not uncommon to hear slides that seemingly go on forever, with the player manipulating the tone of the notes before, during and after the slide.  The key to this type of playing is that the guitarists have a secret advantage – they aren’t actually using their fingers for the slide, but a device that can be made out of metal or steel. 

Unimaginatively named a ‘slide’, this small tube fits over one of the fingers of the player’s fret hand and is then used to fret notes, sliding up and down the next of the guitar in order to get the classic, wailing blue sound.  A guitarist can also generate a fairly sizeable vibrato through using a slide, due to the way the materials of the device interact with the strings.

Now, while it may have entered the popular consciousness through blues recordings, slide guitar is definitely not limited to that genre.  Hawaiian ‘slack key’ guitar also makes extensive use of slide techniques, as does country music – especially when it comes to ‘steel’ guitar, which is a guitar-like instrument that is played flat on the lap with steel slides. 

These two genres take things a step further than standard blues slide guitar by using open tunings to allow the player to not only slide individual notes, but also fret and slide entire chords.  An open tuning is when the guitar is tuned so that strumming it with no notes fretted actually generates a fully-formed chord instead of a jumble of disconnected notes. 

A guitar can be tuned to a wide range of open keys, making it a versatile way for players to experiment with different sounds and musical ideas.  Often just playing in a new tuning can stimulate the mind to come up with a different approach to an instrument that it might already know very well.

Whether you decide to use your slide in standard tuning on individual notes, or whether you choose to re-tune your guitar into a new key, the basic fretting technique is the same.  Wearing your slide on your middle or index finger, whichever is more comfortable, you should use it to apply pressure to the notes you want to fret. 

You can fret them down to the wood with the slide, although it will definitely feel different than what you are used to.  Once you have picked that initial note, you can move your slide up or down and get a feel for how that changes the sound. 

It’s as simple as that – try different wrist movements while sliding to see what kinds of effects and tones you can bring out in your playing.  As for whether to use a glass or a metal slide, that is completely up to you – both will have a different tonal quality, so try each of them to see which one you prefer.

No matter what I tried, I couldn’t get the same kind of tones out of my own guitar.  Even when I played up around the 22^nd fret, I couldn’t match these upper register sounds.  I was pretty discouraged and ready to give up on ever playing the songs that featured these sounds, when I happened to see the video for ‘Zero’ by Smashing Pumpkins. 

The main riff for this song had the same type of sound that I had heard in other tracks, and this time I was able to watch guitarist Billy Corgan play the riff.

It turns out that what I was hearing were harmonics.  In the video, Corgan kept his hand on the lower frets of the 5^th and 6^th strings and sort of glided it along from the headstock towards the body of the guitar.  As he moved from low to high, the sounds moved from high to low. 

Puzzled, I gave it a shot on my own guitar, and found that if I turned my gain up enough, I was able to duplicate the same sound by just barely keeping my finger over the fret without actually fretting the note while simultaneously picking.

Harmonics work by allowing the entire string to vibrate, unlike a fretted note which only vibrates between the fret and the bridge.  The different sound is a result of adding a new ‘node’ to the vibration – in addition to the two ‘nodes’ at the ends of the string. 

This additional ‘node’ changes the vibration of the string in such a manner as to produce a harmonic sound, which in turn gives you access to higher registers than you could theoretically fret on your guitar.

There is a second way to produce harmonics on your guitar that also involves using high gain.  You might have heard a squealing, high pitched sound in heavy metal guitar, a sound that became fashionable in the 1980’s. 

These are called ‘pinch’ harmonics, and they operate on a similar principal, but use a different technique.  This time, you use your fret hand to actually fret the note, but you hold the pick so that only a small portion of the pick makes contact with the string.

When you sweep down with your pick hand, you use your thumb to make brief contact with the string right after it is picked.  This creates the squealing harmonic sound.  For maximum effect, try introducing some vibrato with your fret hand to really grind that sound out.

Harmonics are a fun way to add some color to your solos, and also dress up riffs or melody lines.  Make sure not to over use them, but don’t be afraid to punctuate your songs with these cool sounding electric tones.

he notes that came out of my speakers seemed almost too fast, too fluid to be played by a human being.  When I later learned that much of what he recorded was improvised, it became even more impressive. 

Hendrix’s playing at times seemed out of reach to me, especially as a beginner, but there were technical things that he did in his music that non-virtuosos can try out with their own.  Hendrix saw the guitar as more than just 6 strings and a fretboard – he was dedicated to getting new, strange sounds out of his instrument, and if that meant fiddling with the knobs and toggle switches in the middle of a song, then so be it. 

Hendrix’s use of a guitar’s tonal adjustments and pick up selection were at a level where they could be considered as important as the strings themselves.

One of the Hendrix tricks that you can try out on your own guitar is toggle fade.  Toggle fade is the use of the tonal difference between the pickup near the bridge of your guitar, and the pickup at the neck. 

The sound of each of these pickups is distinct, but you can make the difference even more apparent by using the tone control to set one of the pickups to zero, while the other stays maxed. 

Toggling the switch rapidly, or in time with the beat of the song you are playing will make any sustained notes sound like a wah-wah pedal – with the note sounding and then fading over and over.

Jimi Hendrix obviously used a lot of real wah-wah pedal as well in his playing – some of his tracks are practically dripping with it – but that doesn’t mean that he didn’t employ the toggle trick on top of his effects.  In fact, in the song ‘Voodoo Child’, he uses the toggle trick in the opening of the song despite the heavy use of the wah-wah pedal in the same segment.

Hendrix’s use of effects was also outstanding, and the lengths he would go to to get the sound he was after were extensive. 

While many musicians at the time might have viewed effects as something to be used in production in order to spice up a track or a solo, Hendrix used them as building blocks in the songs themselves, sometimes playing lengthy parts using effects that completely obscured the original tone of his guitar. 

When you are experimenting with effects, don’t shy away from a cool sound simply because it transforms your guitar into some kind of weird electronic device.  Embrace the fact that your tone is what you make of it, and throw any pre-conceived rules about what your guitar is ‘supposed’ to sound like out the window.

This was mostly due to the fact that my strumming hand was not precise enough to pick just the 3 strings that I needed for the chord, and my upstrokes and downstrokes were catching a good number of extraneous strings. 
 
While on an acoustic guitar, or even a clean, low gain electric, these strings didn’t have enough energy to make a lot of noise, at high gain even barely touching them was enough to create a dissonant racket.

At first I tried to simply target my strumming so that I would miss the extra strings.  However, the faster I played, the harder it became to do this.  

It was frustrating to try to keep a rapid strum going while at the same time missing the top and bottoms strings that I wasn’t using, and it distracted me from being able to actually play the chords that I needed to play.  There had to be a better way of stopping the extra noise.

Fortunately, there was.  A friend of mine showed me how to use the fingers I wasn’t forming the chords with to deaden the surrounding strings in order to prevent them from sounding. 

There were a couple of ways to do this.  I could take the fingers I wasn’t using, such as my middle finger, and lay it horizontally across the strings above the chord so that it kept a light pressure on them – similar to playing a barre chord, but without actually fretting the notes. 

Since most of the extra strings I was catching were on the downstroke, dampening the strings above the chord went a long way towards fixing the problem.  I could also use the fingers that were forming the chord to dampen surrounding strings by spreading them out a small amount so that they also touched the strings on either side of them. 

This is a bit difficult if you have small fingers, but with a little practice you can learn how to fret a chord and also mute strings with the same fingers.

A song like ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ by Nirvana is a good example of fast strumming that can lead to unwanted noise. 

This is particularly true of the chords formed off of the A-string, since the E-string is easy to catch with your pick while strumming quickly.  This song is the perfect way to practice string dampening with your middle finger. 

The song also offers the additional challenging of combining dampening with palm muting, since the chord changes use fast, muted interludes which require you to stop dampening the strings in order to get the full percussive effect.

You might find that over time, you need to use string dampening techniques even less, due to your increased picking proficiency.  By then, you will probably also be dampening subconsciously, as it is such a useful skill that it quickly gets incorporated into your standard repertoire. 

By combining precision and dampening you will soon get to the point where you always play only the notes you need to play, no matter how fast you are strumming.

A large number of significant composers and musicians in these genres felt the need to stretch their wings by writing and playing music which sheds the 4 on the floor straightjacket.

It is rarer to encounter these types of tracks in rock and roll but when you do, it might throw you off just a little bit. Sometimes, you might even hear guitar-oriented songs which use more than one time signature in the same piece.

A great example is the song ‘The Ocean’ by Led Zeppelin. Zeppelin were one of the most popular classic rock groups of all time, and a large part of their appeal could be found in the technical skill of their performances. The introductory riff of ‘The Ocean’ is written in 15/8 time. This means that each measure contains 15 eighth notes.

Counting out an odd number of notes while playing through a measure is not an easy task, given the amount of conditioning we all go through as a result of the preponderance of 4 / 4 music.

However, ‘The Ocean’ adds an extra wrinkle in that the bridge and solo section towards the end of the track switches back to 4 /4 , meaning that you have to bring your head out of counting to 15 and swing back into a 4 count. This challenging exercise really helps you to approach the rhythm in your playing as more than something which is just taken for granted.

Instead, it makes you approach the groove of the song on an individual basis, which will improve your overall playing ability – especially if you can apply it to other tracks.

Another classic rock song which uses a mix of time signatures is ‘Money’ by Pink Floyd. The introduction to the song is played in 7 / 4 – meaning seven quarter notes per measure.

This bass line, which can also be played on the guitar, is plucked along with the sounds of a cash register opening until the rest of the band joins in and solidifies the groove towards the first verse. ‘Money’ also breaks into a 4 / 4 solo three-quarters of the way through the song before coming back to the original time signature.

Each of these tracks uses a fairly easy to learn lead line on the guitar, but the timing of the playing presents a real challenge. Learning tracks like these which employ unusual time signatures is a great way to give your brain a workout along with your fingers, and it will help you gain a better understanding of the musical theory behind some of what you have been playing.

When you are first starting out, it might feel as though all you are capable of doing is making odd sounds that might not seem entirely ‘musical’, but that part of the learning process can easily give birth to entirely new concepts in both technique and theory.

Think of how different the world of music would be if Eddie Van Halen had never tried tapping his fingers on his strings, or if Jimmy Page hadn’t picked up a cellist’s bow.

One of the quickest ways to start making these types of sounds is to play around with your guitar’s whammy bar. A whammy bar can be found on guitars which don’t have a fixed bridge. Instead of a bridge which is integral to the guitar’s body, it is instead held in place by strong strings.

This means that it can be moved up and down by way of an angled metallic bar which screws into the bridge. A bar with a high degree of movement is called a whammy bar, while those which only move the bridge a little are usually referred to as vibrato bars.

If you have ever heard the guitar sound in a particular track suddenly take what sounds like a deep dive into the lower register, then you have heard a whammy bar. This bar lifts up the back of the bridge and effectively lengthens the strings. This deepens their pitch on the fly, and can create some very dramatic effects.

Surf guitarists were some of the first instrumentalists to take advantage of this feature, although in the 1980’s whammy bar antics became the province of hair metal and ultra-high gain distortion. The combination of these distorted effects with the whammy bar created a new range of sounds involving the use of harmonics and deeper bass feedback that can alternatively sound like high-pitched electrical current or the sound of a motorcycle’s rumbling engines.

Whammy bars are a lot of fun, but they do have a somewhat negative affect on your guitar’s ability to stay in tune. With all of the lengthening and bending of the strings, they can easily stretch out and drop in pitch.

Repeated whammy dives can leave your guitar sounding like a mess, so if you are playing live, make sure you keep on top of your tuning in between songs. A locking bridge or a Floyd Rose bridge can help to fight these types of whammy effects, so if you find yourself using that feature of your guitar quite often, it might be a worthwhile investment to make.

I started to look around for songs that I could play, songs that weren’t complicated but still sounded cool and presented a bit of a challenge.  As a result, I began to listen closer to some of the rhythm parts I had previously ignored in rock and roll music. 

I noticed that a lot of them involved using simple skills such as chording, hammer-ons and pull-offs, and bends, but all arranged in such a way that they became really compelling musical parts.

The intro to Alice Cooper’s ‘School’s Out’ is a good example of a rhythm part that has the feel of a lead, but is really just hammer-ons and bends played repetitively.  The song starts out with an open sixth string, or E, which plays twice and then hammers-on to the 5^th fret before going back to the open string. 

The open sixth string is played twice again and this time the hammer-on is for the third fret.  The third repetition leads with the open string twice, before hammering on to the fifth fret and then quickly pulling off to the third, which has a small bend and a moderate amount of vibrato. 

This simple riff all takes place on one string and only uses 3 notes, but it sounds great and was a huge hit for Alice Cooper.

 ‘La Grange’ by ZZ Top is a slightly different example of the same musical concept.  The guitarist quickly strums a fairly simple 12-bar blues rhythm which is based on three chords. 

By themselves these chords are nothing special, but it is the energy imparted by the insistent strumming which gives the riff a life of its own, forming the backbone of the entire song.  The clean-sounding introduction is instantly recognizable despite a lack of any dazzling musical pyrotechnics.

While these examples are easy to play, and do not make difficult demands on your skills, they have the side effect of developing both your picking and your dexterity.  By practicing the rhythms, your picking will learn not only how to play the actual notes, but how to find the fluid groove of a song. 

This will help your playing sound more fresh and alive.  Likewise, you will be able to exercise your fret hand so that it becomes more used to moving around the fret board.

Rhythm guitar is a whole lot more than just strumming chords and keeping time.  It can be your portal towards learning how to improve your overall guitar skill set. 

With some bands, the incorporation of lead and rhythm guitar is almost inseparable, particularly with more modern rock and roll music which has eschewed the traditional guitar solo.

With an effect like distortion, this doesn’t always sound all that bad, but when you start getting into time-based effects such as echo or delay, the extreme settings can quickly turn your guitar’s sound into a muddy mess.

The song ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ by Guns n’ Roses has a blazing introduction which employs the subtle use of delay in order to create a sense of urgency and drama that sucks listeners in to the hard rocking main riff of the track. Guitarist Slash uses a repeated open string in order to help create a haunting sonic background for the introduction, which is based around a fairly simple descending pattern.

Set your delay or echo unit to play triplets, and then, starting with the open B-string, play through each of the notes in the sequence while alternate-picking the open B in-between each of the other notes. This added plucking of the open string is what adds the harmonic consistency to the entire riff, making it the live wire which electrifies the introduction.

Delay might be confusing to work with at first, but soon you will be able to work out when you should and shouldn’t be picking in order to let the delay unit create its own sound in the space between your picking. It helps to think of delay or echo as an extra set of fingers, because what it helps you to do is play more notes with less picking. In essence this allows you to create patterns of sound which seem much more complex mechanically than they actually are to play.

As a beginner, learning the introduction to this song is a great way to polish a few different skills. The first is using alternating picking, which is the quickest way to move back and forth from the open B-string to the descending notes of the introduction.

It’s good practice for keeping your palm hand far enough away from the strings of the guitar so that the open string continues to ring out even while you are picking the fretted notes. The palm muting of the initial open B-string is also a good technique to get used to using, since most of the palm muting you have encountered at this point has probably been applied to fretted notes. Finally, learning the picking pattern can help you build up the dexterity of your picking hand’s wrist.

If you don’t have a delay unit, you can substitute playing the open-B string with just playing triplets yourself on each of the descending notes in the pattern. You won’t create the detailed sound that Slash did in the recording, but you will be able to play out the melody in a recognizable fashion.