Introduction to tablature

nospam@example.com (Mark Round) — Mon, 26 Jun 2006 10:01:53 +0100

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.

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First guitar lesson back online!

nospam@example.com (Mark Round) — Sun, 25 Jun 2006 13:59:25 +0100

Now here's a blast from the past! I was talking recently to an old friend, who reminded me of the guitar lessons I used to post, way back during the paelolithic era of this website. I went trawling through my files and found the whole archive as a zip file - instead of just uploading this though, I decided to go through each lesson and expand on it with the stuff I've learnt in the past few years. The original idea was a complete course, where you could start from scratch and by the end be able to play in a rock/blues style.

So, Dave, here you go - here's the first part, I'll be adding more over the coming weeks!

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Mark's blog - Guitar

Introduction to tablature

First guitar lesson back online!