So, you want to learn to play guitar. Realize that, even though it seems so difficult when you begin, it’s really not that hard to pick up. If you get some ‘beginner guitar’books and print some guitar tablature sheets off the internet, then, with a guitar, you could start doing a guitar in one day.

One advantage of using guitars to learn music is tablature. Guitar tabs are a way of representing the fret-board of your guitar, the place where you press your fingers down to strum the notes. Each separation is called a ‘fret’. The tabs are drawings of the fret- board. Because it’s such a simple thing to represent tabluture, people on-line create just about every song in the world (if it’s simple enough that it can be played on a guitar) as tablature sheets. They’re drawn using simple ASCII characters in a text file. This means that you can just store the song as a TXT, DOC or RTF file and it’ll be easily understandable.

Thus, this would be a six-string guitar and the tablature for a C Major chord would look like this:

C
e |—–0——|
B |—–1——|
G |—–0——|
D |—–2——|
A |—–3——|
E |—–x——|

The number is showing how many frets down from the top of the guitar’s neck you’d place your finger. It goes from the high-to-the-low and the left-to-the-right.

The bottom line on the tablature is the low-E string. In this case, the x indicates that it’s not played when you strum a C Major chord.

You’ll just have to get a book on tablature, or look on-line to see more about how tabs work.

http://www.guitar-players-toolbox.com/guitar-tabs.html

Since with a guitar, you’re generally playing chords rather than plucking individual notes, tablature has to represent that somehow. They put the chord above the staff

In this case, this would be a D Major and G Major chord when you look at it in tablature format:

D G
e |—2——-3—|
B |—3——-3—|
G |—2——-0—|
D |—0——-0—|
A |—x——-2—|
E |—x——-3—|

Open Google and type ‘guitar tab fundamentals’ into the gadget, then click ‘Search’.

Or, type ‘How to read guitar tablature’.

The top line is called the first string, the bottom is called the sixth string. So, the six lines are equivalent to the six strings on the guitar. So, the second line from the bottom is an A.

The number is the fret number. That means the number down from the top of your guitar’s neck that you will place your finger on. If there is a zero, then that means that the open string will be played.

So, at the very least, you’ll see this:

|——0——|
|——0——|
|——1——|
|——2——|
|——2——|
|——0——|

That is the tablature for an E Major chord, and they’re all to be played at once because the other lines have a zero on them. So, when numbers are right above each other, then that means that you play all the notes at the same time.

However, generally the chord name would be placed above the tablature statf so guitarists will understand that it’s referring to an E-Major chord.

If the notes are staggered, then that means you will play them one-at-a-time rather than all-at-once.

Here is the same E Major chord, but you would play each note one-at-a-time

|——0——|
|—–0——-|
|—-1——–|
|—2———|
|–1———-|
|-0———–|

So, see? You, too, could play the guitar.

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