How To Play Guitar Tabs

Author: Krauser  //  Category: how to play guitar tabs


So you want to know how to read tabs and play them with your guitar, huh? I bet you can even guess some basic things, like the 6 lines representing the 6 strings, and numbers on the lines represent the frets you press. And maybe you already know how to play guitar tabs, and just looking for some clarifications.

In any case, I think I can help you. I’m gonna assume that you have little to no experience in playing the guitar and\or reading guitar tabs. Please stay with me on this one, all of you more experienced folks out there reading my blog, I promise I’ll be frank.

Let’s start with the most basic terminology, the guitar “slang”. Take a look at your guitar. It probably has 6 strings(unless you have a bass guitar, which happens to have 4 strings), and around 20-24 vertical metal things under the string. The metal things are called frets, and they reside on the fretboard.

The thinnest string is usually called the first string, while the thickest is the sixth\last string. Each string is tuned to a particular note. From the first to the last string: E, B, G, D, A, E. In most of the guitar tabs you will notice that before each string representing a line there is a note. There are different alternative tunings for guitars, each one makes it easier to play a particular style of music, but we will not dive into that, because it’s a topic on its own.

Tabs are read left-to-right, all strings simultaneously. That might seem obvious for some, but I’ve seen beginners with guitars that tried to play first the first string, then the second, etc. The numbers on the strings in the tabs indicate at which fret you should be pressing the string – and this is one of the advantages of the tabs before the standard notes – you don’t have to learn all the notes to play something simple. 0 means you play the string open, without pressing it to the fret.

One of the things tabs does not provide, is the standard and clear way of representing the length of notes. I mean, you basically can figure out the basic rhythm by looking at the distance between the numbers, but it isn’t as clear as it is in standard notation. This is one of the weak sides of tabs. Note: sometimes the numbers appear to be without any intervals, indicating non-existing frets, like 666 or 77788. Most of the times it is just compressed one-digit numbers without spaces. Play them as 6-7-8.

Sometimes you see X’s instead of numbers. This indicates palm muting. Palm muting is when you play the note while slightly muting the string with your palm, so it sounds a little percussive. It is a frequent technique in rock\metal guitar tabs. ‘h’ between the fret numbers indicates a hammer-on — you “hammer” the string to the fret with one of your fingers on the left hand(reverse it if you are a leftie). ‘p’ stands for pull-off, and is also found between the fret numbers, but instead of hammering the string to the fret, you actually quickly release the finger on the fret specified on the left while holding the fret specified  on the right. The tab most of the times does not indicate which fingers hold which frets on which strings, so you will have to experiment to find the best combination for you. Also, you don’t pick the string with your right hand when you hammer-on or pull-off, since each one of these adds a little energy to the string, so you can actually pick only the first note in the sequence and play the others only with your left hand, as in this sequence: 1h3p1h3p1h3p1h3p1

These are the most basic things you need to keep in mind to know how to play guitar tabs. Playing guitar good isn’t easy, and as most of the skills out there requires practice. In order to play some of the simplest tabs you won’t need much practice, but to tackle the intermediate ones you will have to repeat and repeat and repeat, until it finally goes well. When I was just starting to play the guitar I was fascinated by my progress. As I practised more and more, I began to notice that I’m actually playing better than I did before, and this realization always boosted my enthusiasm for practising. When you are a beginner and just trying out to play some of the more intermediate tabs, it probably won’t even sound like the original at all. But the more you practise, the more you will progress. So keep strumming those strings! ;)

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How To Play Guitar Tabs Now Has A Facebook Page!

Author: Krauser  //  Category: how to play guitar tabs


You are all welcome to visit it and to become fans, here it is, how to play tabs facebook page! :)

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How To Play Tabs

Author: Krauser  //  Category: how to play 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 8) 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 8) 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 8)

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 8)

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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How To Read And Play Slides

Author: Krauser  //  Category: how to play guitar tabs, how to play tabs

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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A Neat Video Shows How To Play Guitar Tabs

Author: Krauser  //  Category: how to play guitar tabs, how to play tabs

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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