After learning the basics of playing a guitar, the next step would be to Learn to Play Guitar Tabs. Whenever you hear a song you like and want to play it yourself, you need to either make the tablature for the song by ear yourself or look for it on the web. A tab consists of many symbols and to successfully read one, you must know each of them. Bellow, I will explain two guitar styles which are used more and more often.
First of all, a tablature is a method of writing down music that’s played on the guitar. Unlike other music sheets, the tab uses normal ASCII characters and numbers. Your basic tab has 6 lines, which represent the guitar strings, there are also numbers and letters giving you further instructions. If you really want to learn to play guitar tabs, it is crucial that you can read one smoothly and fast.
Learn To Play Guitar Tabs – Bends
Bending a note is exactly what the name says, you bend a string upwards. The symbol for bending on a tab is “b”. When a bend is involved you also need to know how much to bend that note. That is indicated by a number after the bending symbol. Here is an example:
E—————————————————————
B——7b9——————————————————
G—————————————————————
D—————————————————————
A—————————————————————
E—————————————————————
This means that you have to strike the B string at the 7th fret and then bend the note up two semitones (one whole step) so that it sounds like a note fretted at the 9th fret. Let’s see another example:
E—————————————————————
B——7b9–9r7————————————————-
G—————————————————————
D—————————————————————
A—————————————————————
E—————————————————————
This one is telling you to play the note at the 7th fret, bend up two semitones and then strike the note again while holding the string bent. Then release the bend so that the note has it’s normal pitch. Knowing how to bend a note can come pretty handy especially when you want to impress someone because they sound nice and look hard to do. But they aren’t really that hard to do if you exercise with them a lot.
Learn To Play Guitar Tabs – Slides
A slide is when you use a bottleneck to simply touch and slide the strings as you sing. There are two types of bottlenecks you can use, metal or glass. Pick the one that sounds better for you and also make sure that it fits your finger, as you will need to wear it there. You need to use the slide on a finger which you don’t use very much, so it wont bother you when play power chords and such. You don’t have to press down with your slide against the strings, just hover it over them. The most common symbol used for a slide is “/” for a slide up and “\” for a slide down. Here’s how a slide would look on a tab:
E—————————————————————
B——7/9——————————————————
G—————————————————————
D—————————————————————
A—————————————————————
E—————————————————————
These are but small examples of tabs and if you want to really learn to play guitar tabs you need a lot of practice. The bottom line is that if you want to learn to play the guitar, it is possible. You don’t have to have talent or be a musical genius. You only need a lot of hard work and proper lessons. If you have those two, then it will be easy to Learn to Play Guitar Tabs.
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