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Introduction to tablature
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.
The guitar neck
Let's take a look at your guitar's neck. Each fret on the fretboard corresponds to one half-step in musical terms (see the previous lesson). So, taking the bottom string (the fattest one) first, this is normally tuned to an E. We can see the sequence of notes as we go up the neck will therefore be :
| Fret # | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 |
| Note (sharp) | E | F | F# | G | G# | A | B | B# | C | C# | D | D# |
| Note (flat) | E | F | Gb | G | Ab | A | B | Cb | C | Db | D | Eb |
And once we reach the 12th fret, we've gone up an octave so the sequence will repeat. That's incidentally why some guitars come with 24 frets; it does make the neck longer and has implications on tone, but means that you can get a whole two octaves out of a single string. Note that '0' when referring to a fret number means that the string is 'open' , in other words you play the string without fretting it anywhere.
In standard tuning, the rest of the strings on a guitar are arranged in the following order, thickest to thinnest: E A D G B E. Often, this is written as E A D G B e to show the difference between the high E string and the low. As an exercise to complete for the next lesson, try mapping out the notes on the rest of the strings. I'll post the solution to this next time, which will also serve as a handy fretboard reference but it'll greatly help your knowledge if you can tackle this yourself.
Tablature
As mentioned previously, tablature is a system of notation for guitar that uses 6 lines drawn across a page :
These lines represent the strings on your guitar. The bottom line corresponds to the lowest string on your guitar (the thickest), while the top line corresponds to the highest string. To show notes then, all that happens is that a number is written on a line to show exactly where to play.
The following example shows two A notes - one played on the open A string, the other played by fretting the E string at the 5th fret. You'll notice they sound the same - this is a useful check to see if your guitar is in tune.
Listen : lesson1-1.mp3
Again, '0' refers to an open string. To show two notes or more played at once, they are written above each other. The following example shows an open A chord, and then a simple melody based on a blues scale :
Listen : lesson1-2.mp3
We'll cover what all that means later - for now, it's serving solely as an example of the kind of thing you can expect to see in tablature, so don't worry about trying to follow along with it just yet. We'll get to that in the next lesson, where we'll cover some basic scale theory which will help you to understand how chords are constructed, and then I'll show you a few basic "open" chord shapes to get you strumming along.
