Lauren Bateman teaches how to read guitar tab, a six-line system where each line is a string and numbers show which frets to play. She walks through the first eight notes of Ode to Joy on two strings, and explains that tab skips rhythm and finger choice, making it useful for quick learning.
And what we're going to go over in this Guitar Basics video is how to go about reading guitar tablature. There are a number of different ways to read music, and you can either use standard notation, which are the little balls and sticks that, if you took piano when you were younger, that might look reminiscent to you. Well, we will be using that notation to read rhythm. But to start off, we're going to use something that's called guitar tablature, which is basically a paint by number. It's a coordinate system for playing the guitar. And the reason I like using this with beginner guitar players is because it's just much easier, much quicker of a way for them to pick up the guitar and get them into playing. Most of the students that come to our school and most of the students that I've dealt with, of all my students, one of them went on to go to Berkeley. The majority of students are not taking lessons to become professional musicians. If someone wants to go down that route, absolutely, I would take them down that route and teach them how to do that, because it is an important skill. But for most guitar players, they're just doing it for a hobby and they just want to have fun with it. So I tend to use guitar tablature to help students with reading individual notes. We'll also go over something called a chord chart down the road, when we get into doing songs, a chord chart is another way to read music. So what we're going to do is we're going to go over to the whiteboard, and I'm going to talk about what guitar tablature is and how you go about using it to read music. All right, welcome to the whiteboard. So you will see here that I have this random thing written on the board. Excellent. So this is technically. Well, not technically. This is what guitar tab looks like. So guitar tab literature is the strings of your guitar. So each one of these lines represents a string, and the strings they represent. Actually, let me grab a blue marker here for you to see a little bit better. So this represents. This bottom line represents the fet string on your guitar. This is E, the next string above that is A. The next string above that is D followed by G followed by B followed by the E on the little string. This is the skinniest string on the guitar. So when you look at guitar tab, it's like looking at your guitar upside down.
So guitar tab will look like this. So the bottom fat string is on the bottom, followed by A, D, G, B, and E. So in this particular example, you see on the board. In this particular example, this song mostly is played on the bottom E string. Now, this is the first eight notes Joseon called Ode to Joy. It's a pretty popular song that most people know the melody to. And you'll see here that there's a bunch of numbers written down. Remember I told you guitar tablature is a coordinate system. It tells you what string to play and on what fret number. So the numbers you see here are your fret numbers on your guitar. So this example tells me that the first note I am going to play and this song is located on the bottom E string at the zero fret. Now the zero fret. What's that? So we call that an open string. That just means you don't fret any of the notes on the guitar. You just play the string open. So this first note is going to be the open bottom E string, followed by the open bottom E string, followed by the first fret on the bottom string, followed by the third fret on the bottom string. So the first four notes to this song are all on that bottom skinny E string.
The open E. Open E, first fret, third fret. Now, if we move on to the next four notes in this song, we have another three, which means play the third fret again.
A one. So first fret, a zero, open string. And then you'll notice that our last note here jumps down to a different string. So now we've got to change strings. So we're not on the E string anymore. We are on the B string. So we have to move and play the B string on the third fret. So this entire song, if I go back to the beginning, is open fret on the bottom E string, open fret, first fret, third fret, third fret. Again, first fret, open fret. And then we're going to switch strings. We're going to go to the B string and we're going to play the third fret. So if I got my guitar and I just happened to play this song, I'll hold it up here so that you can kind of see a little bit. Hopefully you can see everything. I am going to play open string, open string, first string, third string, third string, first string, open string. And then third string on the B string. So all of those first seven notes happen on the bottom string. 0, 0, 1, 3, 3, 1, 0. Then the last note happens on the B string third fret. Now you're probably going, Lauren, I see you're using different fingers. How do I know which fingers to use. That's the downside of tablature. It doesn't tell you what finger to use. You kind of got to figure that out on your own or your muscle memory will tell you as you get further and further. In general, guitarists are lazy and we want to move as little as possible. But in the beginning, just to get used to the fret numbers and where things are, don't be afraid to just use one finger. And then eventually you can use multiple fingers as you get further. But the basics of the guitar tablature is that it's a coordinate system. So first it tells you what string, and then it tells you what fret on that string. It doesn't tell you the rhythm. There's no rhythm here. And it doesn't tell you what finger number to use. So those are the downsides of tablature. But in general, I can get someone playing oh to Joy or some other similar yet fun song, I can get them playing something very quickly within their first lesson and having fun with music, which for most people is amazing. So this is guitar tablature. You will most likely come across it in your studies. It is most commonly used online if you're going to look up online songs. So getting familiar with guitar tablature is key. So just to repeat one more time, guitar tablature is a coordinate system. There are six strings. The fat string is the bottom. The skinny string is the top. The number is the fret. So this would be skinny string, E string, open, open string, open string, first fret, third fret, third fret, first fret, open string, then move to the B string and play the third fret. And this is how you read tab.
Lost.
Somewhere in this space.
