Before we go much further, I'll briefly cover guitar tablature. I'll be transcribing exercises and showing you various chord shapes throughout the forthcoming lessons, so I need some way of imparting the information on where you put your fingers.
Now, I can't read traditional sheet music to save my life (which, I'll freely admit is a real hinderance) but fortunately, most guitarists prefer to read tablature or "tab" instead. This is a simple system of notation, where instead of showing notes on a musical staff, it depicts fret numbers on strings. The advantages of this approach are obvious - you can start reading the notation straight away, and it shows you exactly where to put your fingers. As we'll see later, you can play the same note in several positions on the guitar neck, so tablature removes this confusion. In addition to all this, symbols can also be added to show guitar
specific techniques such as slides, bends, muting and much more.
The drawback is that you can't show the rhythm of a piece of music - you can only show the pitch. This means that a piece of tablature on it's own is largely useless; you have to either know the tune or have some additional means of working out the timing, such as showing the tablature alongside traditional notation. This is the approach taken by most guitar magazines. In the case of these lessons, I'll place a link under each piece of tablature you see - when you click on it, it will link to a MP3 sample of the tab being played. That way you'll be able to hear what you should be playing, and follow it along on screen.
Continue reading "Introduction to tablature"
