Many beginner guitar players are put off by the prospect of learning to read music notes by means of guitar tabs. The fact is, it's easy to understand guitar tabs as long as you remember a few basic ideas. The idea behind guitar tabs is to give guitar players a common language they can use to show each other where to put their fingers to play songs and other pieces of music. So, if you hear a song and want to learn how to play it, you do a search for it on your favorite search engine. If, for example, you want to learn the notes for the Smoke On The Water guitar riff, you type "smoke on the water tab" into your favorite search engine. This will give you thousands of links to the tablature for your song.

Guitar notes are shown on tabs as numbers on lines. The lines are simply the guitar strings. The numbers are the guitar frets. The guitar tab below shows the C major chord. The top line represents the thinnest string on the guitar, so if you are holding the guitar in the playing position, the thinnest string will be near your leg. The bottom string on the tab is the thickest string which will be at the top of the guitar as you are holding it in playing position.

You probably already know that the guitar strings, from the thickest to the thinnest, sound the notes E A D G B E. The first string on the guitar is designated with a lower case e. The top e string is played open in the C chord, so there is a zero on that string. The second string, or B string, is stopped at the first fret, the G string is played open, the D string is fretted at the second fret, the A at the third, and the E string is usually not played even though it sounds the E note which is part of the C major chord.

e-------------0---------|

B----------1------------|

G-------0---------------|

D----2------------------|

A--3--------------------|

E-----------------------|

Guitar tabs do not show you the rhythm or how long each note is played for, so they are really only useful for songs you already know the sound of. If you see tabs for a song by one of your favorite guitarists and you have never heard it, you can download one of the free tab editors like TablEdit or TuxGuitar.