How to Read Guitar TAB - A Better Way To Read Music

Now I've been playing guitar since I was 16. I actually started with sight reading music because that's what I did when I took piano lessons. And I absolutely hated it for piano lessons. And the thing was, when I learned how to read music a different way on the guitar, that's really what made the instrument finally make sense for me. So what I'm going to show you in this video is a different way to go about sight reading music without having to read standard notation. Now this is called tablature. And I think on guitar tableture is a much better way to go about reading music. Now, in terms of being able to read and understand rhythm, I think that is vitally important on the guitar because it is a rhythm instrument. And we'll be going over that in a later video in this series. But I want to talk about what tablature is. It's often referred to as guitar tab. It and all it is is a coordinate system. It's kind of like battleship a little bit for guitar. Okay, and what we're going to do is we're going to look at all of the strings in these blocks. Okay? So these blocks on the guitar are called frets and they all have their own unique number, starting at number one, two, three, four, all the way up. Alright, we have a special double dot here at the 12th fret. You'll notice that on the top of your guitar there'll be some single, single dots. Okay. My crafter unfortunately doesn't have dots on the front, but I do have dots on the, on the top. And your guitar will probably have dots on the top as well. I have dots at 3, 5, 7, 9 and 12. So this helps you kind of navigate your guitar. Now if you saw my video on how to tune the guitar, you know that each one of these strings has their own name. Okay, so we have the high E string, the B string, the G string, the. The D string, the A string, and then the low E string. Okay. And the low E string is the thickest of all the strings and it's going to be on the top of your guitar. So I'm saying the top of your guitar, directionally speaking, the top string and then the bottom string, directionally speaking, the bottom of your guitar. Okay, so top string, bottom string. Now bottom string, I usually number as string one and then two.

Okay. Now on the tablature, when you look at this, it can be a little confusing at first because it's the complete opposite of what you would think. So this high E string, and I like thinking it as the high E string because it is the high note and the high note goes higher on the tablature. So that top string on your tablature is actually the high E string. Okay. And then we have the B string, G, D, A and E is on the very bottom of the tablature. So it's a little bit opposite of what you would think when you look at the music. And I think they did that to kind of replicate sheet music as much as possible, because when you look at a piece of sheet music, the higher notes go up and the lower notes go down. So I think they probably did that to try and mimic sheet music. So something would be a little bit simpler. So what I'm going to do in this video is I'm going to show you how to read tablature, how we can use this coordinate system, just using the first eight notes of a very, very simple song. And then in the next lesson, I'm going to teach you how to play the entire song so that you can work on this sight reading skill. So we're going to be doing a song first eight notes of a song called Ode to Joy. So when we look at the sheet music, which I have in front of me here, we. Now, if you would like a free copy of the PDF to go with this song, you can just click on the link in the description below, go download that, print it out, and come back here. Okay, so let's look at the first measure. So a measure is that block in the music. Okay. You're going to see these two kind of horizontal lines inside that. We call that a measure of music. Think of it as a measurement. Okay. It's just one piece of the music. And you're going to see a zero, which we haven't talked about yet. So when you see a zero, you are going to think of open. Open string. What that means is we play the string. In this particular case, it's going to be your high E string. And we're just going to pick down with our picking hand and we're going to play open. Okay. That's an open string. It means my fret hand is not doing anything with the guitar. Okay. And we're going to do that twice.

One, two.

Okay, so that's open. Open.

So those are the first two notes of the song. Now what we're going to do, you're going to notice there's a one followed by a three. So that is the first fret followed by the third fret. Now, what most people do is they play the first fret with their first finger on the high E string, and then they just slide their first finger up to play the third fret. While it makes no difference in the sound of the instrument, what I would recommend doing is playing your first finger on the first fret and then using your third finger to play the third fret. Okay.

One, three.

Now, you'll notice you. You'll get more of a stretch if you leave your first finger down. And ideally, you want to get to that point where you could stretch that. But in the beginning, that can be quite a large stretch if you've never played the guitar before. So I recommend playing the first string, lifting, and then playing the third string with your third finger. Okay. And then over time, you can work on developing that. So let's take just these first four notes. It's going to be open, open, 1, 3. Let's give it a try.

1, 2, 3, 4. Open, open, 1, 3.

Let's do it again. Ready?

And open, open, 1, 3.

One more time. Here we go.

And open, open, 1, three.

There you go. You're already playing four notes of a song. Fantastic. So let's take the next four notes because you're going to notice we're going to be switching over to a slightly different string. So this is going to be our second measure of music or our second box of music. You'll notice we start on the third fret. Well, guess what? Our third finger should already be there. So we're going to play that again. Okay. And then we're going to head back to the first fret.

And then we have the open again on that high E string. Now you're gonna notice our fourth note. Here it is the third fret, but it's on a different string. It is one string down on the sheet music, which signifies that we are moving to the B string on the guitar. Okay. And we would play our third finger on the third fret of that B string. So again, those notes in the second.

Measure are 3, 1, open, 3. Again, 3, 1, open, 3.

So if we take all of these eight notes together, it's going to sound like this. We've got 1, 2, 3, 4.

Open, open, 1, 2, 3, 3, 1, open, 3.

See, even I play a bad note sometimes. Let's do that again. Ready?

We got 1, 2, 3, 4. We've got open, open, 1, 3, 3, 1, open, 3.

That's what it's supposed to sound like. And I like to leave those mistakes in just to show you. I've been playing the guitar for over 20 years. And even on a simple song like this, I sometimes make mistakes, and that's perfectly fine. Okay, you're gonna make mistakes, too. I still make them. I'm human. I'm not perfect. And I don't expect this to be perfect the first time you try playing it. But the more you practice, the better it's gonna get. Let's try it again. Ready? 1, 2, 3, 4.

We've got open, open, 1, 3, 3, 3.

One more time.

And open, open, 1, 3,. Three, one. Open, three.

There we go. And let's try it without me counting. Ready? One, two. Here we go. And.

So you can see why I like tablature so much better for reading music on the guitar, because I truly do think it makes it much easier to start playing the guitar and start having fun. You can see in one simple lesson, you were already able to start playing the melody of a song. And what we're going to do in the next lesson over there is we're going to learn this song in its entirety so that you already have one song that you can play from the.

Beginning all the way to the end.

To show you that when you have the right blueprint, when you have the right structure, playing the guitar can be a lot of fun. So go check out that lesson right over there.