How to Read Guitar Tabs: The Basics

While it’s certainly possible to play an instrument well without knowing how to read music, understanding written music drastically speeds up the learning process while equipping you with a deeper understanding of how music works. It’s also much easier to refer to written materials instead of relying entirely on memory or audio / video materials. But sheet music can quickly get quite complex, featuring a smattering of symbols, lines, shapes, and squiggles. Thankfully, guitar tablature, more often referred to just as “tabs,” offers a simplified system of music notation for guitar.

Standard musical notation is written by positioning notes on an arrangement of horizontal lines and spaces, called the staff. Each line and space represents a specific note, or pitch. Notes are written on the staff from low to high, associating with ascension of pitch. Notes can be held together with beams to represent different rhythms. Notation can include lots of other symbols to better describe how notes should be articulated and expressed. It takes a lot of practice to read standard notation with the same fluidity with which you read words.

With guitar tabs, each line represents a specific string on the guitar. Although the thickest guitar string is at the top of the neck, it’s written at the bottom of tabs, with the skinniest string written at the top (refer to the image below to the left). This arrangement still allows for pitches to be written from low to high, just like with standard notation. Instead of placing notes on the lines and spaces, numbers are written on the lines to represent the fret to press down on that particular string. An open string is represented with a zero.

Fretboard diagrams, like the ones shown in our previous blog post about guitar essentials, are very helpful for representing individual chords, but they don’t depict rhythm or notes played sequentially. However, chords are also easily represented with tabs. The image below to the right shows how a basic chord is written as a tab, written as a fretboard diagram, and how the notes are positioned on the fretboard. Notice how the fret numbers on the tab are written right on top of one another, indicating the notes should be played at the same time.

The tab below shows a pattern played across all 6 strings. As the notes get higher in pitch, they get higher on the tab.

It’s also common for tabs to appear with standard notation written above. The tab below depicts the melody from the song “Seven Nation Army” by the White Stripes. See if you can play the riff by reading the tabs and finding the notes on your guitar. Hint: everything should be played on the A string, the second thickest string.

The tabs below include many more details about how the notes should be played, which we won’t cover here quite yet. But some of these other elements represent the picking direction (plucking a string down or up), hammer-ons and pull-offs, and sliding between notes. You’re not meant to understand everything here just yet; it’s just to show some of the possibilities!

Reading tabs fluidly takes a lot of practice, but with enough exposure, it will become second nature. Once you know how to read music in some capacity, you can dive into learning all of your favorite songs.

Looking for some additional guidance and to connect with other people just beginning to learn the guitar? Then you’re a perfect fit for our group guitar class, the Guitarist’s Roadmap. This class is designed for absolute beginners; no experience required. By the end of it, you’ll be able to play through songs, read guitar tabs, and have the fundamental skills required to begin creating your own music. It’s never too late to get started. Click the button below to learn more, or sign up for a trial guitar lesson at our music school in Boston today.