How To Play Guitar Tabs

So I was hanging out with my friends recently, and then the guitar topic just came up. They asked how did I actually learn the whole guitar thingy, and what would be my advice to them as newbie players. Since the guys have zero experience with guitar, that was a good question to ask. Of course, I suggested them to learn how to play tabs first and foremost.

They are just like most of us when starting on the guitars and stuff we’re all like always wanted to try but never actually did. That was the same with me in fact I always liked styles of music that relied on guitar heavily, mostly metal. Heavy metal, power metal, death metal, black metal, all kinds of it. There is of course the rock parts as well. Rainbow, Scorpions, AC/DC, that kind of stuff.

In those genres learning how to play tabs is actually very important. There are a lot of fans of those metal groups, and fascinated by the guitars in these bands a lot of guys pick up guitars on their own and just start playing. Most of them never get to anything serious, but some of them become these types that teach you how to play tabs and creating their own guitar tabs for their favorite songs of their favorite bands. It takes a lot of practice and a lot of experience until you can finally pick advanced melodies by ear and arrange that to guitar tab.

At the time I started practising my guitar skills, my all-time favorite band was Children of Bodom – the melodic death metal band from Finland, Espoo. I was fascinated by the solos their songs included, and the guitar skills of Alexi Laiho simply amazed me. I still like Children of Bodom, but since then I moved on towards more genres and bands.

So the guys asked me, what’s it like, to start learning guitar and not knowing where to start? Kind of tough actually. You don’t know the whole guitar musical lingo when you are new, and I didn’t know any good guitarists to help me get started as well, which sucks, since they can give good advice from time to time which is sometimes worth in gold. Like the advice to learn how to play tabs

Since I started by learning how to play tabs, the progress was actually quite good. I picked up guitar pro, found some tabs for my favorite songs, and just started playing. I did make a mistake though – I picked up the Children of Bodom tabs. Those are very complex for beginners, and always require advanced techniques that not all guitarists have mastered, especially the newbie types that just learned how to play tabs

The thing is, the solos are not only rich with different techniques as I said before, they are also very fast most of the times. In the whole theory of learning to play guitar by learning how to play tabs the best thing is when you pick up easy tabs of songs you like you can achieve results pretty fast. And when you hear yourself play the melody of your favorite song, it motivates you very much. All I could do when I started playing, was so slow that I couldn’t recognize the melody I played until I played it in guitar pro at a regular speed.

So don’t forget, when you start learning how to play tabs, don’t pick the complex tabs. Get simple guitar tabs, that you can master pretty quickly, see the results, and practice more and more by that motivation from hearing yourself playing!

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Today we are going to talk about slides. How to play guitar tabs with slides? In short, a slide is when you hold a certain fret, say fret 4 on 6th string, and when you want to play the next fret, instead of releasing the 4th fret, you slide your hand towards the needed fret up or down. Note that you don’t hit the string in slide. You only hit the first note, and then you only adjust your left hand position on the fretboard.

In guitar tabs to indicate a slide most often used the backslash ‘\’ and slash ‘/’. Backslash means slide down, e.g. from fret 9 to fret 7, and slash also known as forward slash means up slide from 9 to 10 for example. Sometimes ’s’ is used to indicate slides. Generally you don’t need to indicate upslide or downslide specifically, since mostly it is obvious:

E----------------------------------------------------------------
B------6/8-------------------------------------------------------
G----------------------------------------------------------------
D----------------------------------------------------------------
A----------------------------------------------------------------
E----------------------------------------------------------------

However in some cases the upslide and downslide indications are necessary to figure out how to play the particular part. Consider this example:

E----------------------------------------------------------------
B------/6-8-6\---------------------------------------------------
G----------------------------------------------------------------


D----------------------------------------------------------------
A----------------------------------------------------------------
E----------------------------------------------------------------

Here you clearly see that you need to slide from a lower pitch to fret 6 at the beginning, and at the end you slide from fret 6 back to the lower pitch. You determine where to start and end the slide in this example. The desired effect is usually the swooping in from a lower pitch or fading towards a lower pitch.

You could have a whole series of slides chained like in this example:

E----------------------------------------------------------------
B------8/10/12\10\8\7\8------------------------------------------
G----------------------------------------------------------------
D----------------------------------------------------------------
A----------------------------------------------------------------
E----------------------------------------------------------------

Which actually means you strike only the first note, and all consequent notes of the slide are played using the initial energy from the strike by adjusting your hand accordingly.

Learning how to play guitar tabs is very easy, but almost every more advanced topic requires some guitar technique knowledge. For example, you can’t really understand how to play tabs with natural or artificial harmonics without knowing what harmonics are, how to play them and what are the difference between the natural harmonics and the artificial ones.

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As I was browsing lately, I’ve stumbled upon a neat YouTube video that shows some basics of how to play guitar tabs. The guy introduces mere basics, but it is a video, and is easy to pick up. Check it out:

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