Easy Guitar Tabs You Can Learn

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By: Mike Hammil

One way to learn to play guitar is to use simple guitar tabs. These can be found almost anywhere online, mostly for free. Some instructors compare guitar tabs to easy guitar music.

Beginner guitar tabs can be used to teach positioning and show you where to play a specific note or chord. The tab denotes precisely which fret on which string is to be played. With tabs, it is possible to actually learn a song on the guitar very quickly.

While useful in their own right, there are a couple of things you should know about simple guitar tabs. Here, we will show the differences between sheet music and guitar tabs.

Guitar tabs are a bit different from sheet music. Sheet music has five lines and four spaces. The spaces are the notes F, A, C, and E. They spell the word FACE, so they are easy to remember that way.
The lines are E, G, B, D and F. These can be remembered with the phrase Every Good Boy Does Fine.

Guitar tabs have six lines and five spaces. The lines represent the strings while the spaces are NOT used at all. The bottom line is the thickest string and the topmost line is the thinnest string.
Instead of notes, there are numbers placed on the lines. These are the frets where the note is to be played.
For instance, say you want to play an F on the lowest string. The F is played on the thickest string at the first fret. A tab of this note will have a numeral “1” on the bottom line. If you wanted to play the string open (the note E), a “0” is placed on the bottom line.

Some tabs even have a notation below the six lines that tell you which fingers to use. This is helpful for learning chords with tablature.

You can see exactly how simple guitar tabs can make it to learn a note or a chord. The only thing about tabs is that you have no timing or duration for the notes being played. You will only know where it is played on the guitar with no inkling as to melody.

For this reason, you can find sheet music that has tab, or tablature, directly beneath the actual music. This way you have all the information you need to learn a song using beginner guitar tabs. Most easy guitar sheet music will have simple guitar tabs like this.

If you already know how a song sounds, using easy guitar tabs can get you going in the right direction in a hurry.

Using simple guitar tabs is not a real good idea for complete beginners. Learning to read sheet music should come first and then beginner guitar tabs can follow. Learning in this manner will give you a nicely rounded guitar education when coupled with the basics of guitar.

Once you have mastered the basics, using easy guitar tabs can be a very useful tool. You can learn scales, songs and even learn some theory in this way. By knowing where to play a specific note or chord, you can start to see the technique behind it. Simple guitar tabs can also teach you the simplest way to move around the fret board.