Teach Yourself Guitar By Reading Guitar Tabs

If you choose to teach yourself guitar, being able to play your favorite songs as you learn to play is the most rewarding part. Weather your favorite music is hard rock, blues or jazz most people who begin learning the guitar do so with the dream of being able to play the songs that they love. When you decided to teach yourself guitar the real goal is to learn to read music, but unlike sheet music, the guitar has it's own notation call tablature or guitar tabs that a beginner can learn quickly with a little practice

Unlike learning other musical instruments like the piano, learning to play the guitar has it's own type of music notation that allows other guitarist to communicate a piece of music to each other. Many professional guitarist are self taught or have had just a handful of lessons. Although not perfect, tabs allow guitarist to learn to play a lot quicker than learning regular notation. guitar tabs are a perfect way to start if you want to teach yourself guitar.

Tabs are a representation of the guitar neck if it was on your lap and facing up. Notice that your guitar has six strings these are the six lines on the tab score. The string that is closet to your knee is called high e and will be the top string on the tab score line The next string is the B string, followed by G, then D and then A and finally the low E.


The next step to teach yourself guitar and learning tabs is to understand what the numbers mean on a tabs score. Once again lets look at the physical guitar again to understand. You will notice that your guitar has these raised bars that run underneath the strings across the width of the neck. these are called frets The first bar at the top is called the first fret and the second is the 2nd fret, then the 3rd fret...and so on. When there is a number on a line, that means that the string must be played at that fret position. For instance a 3 on the last line means that the low E is to be played at the 3rd fret

If you want to teach yourself guitar the most important skill to gain is the ability to read tabs. At first this will seem frustrating to do but just practice because the payoff is that you will gain the ability to play any song that you want to and this will make your practice sessions much more productive