Category: Music Notes

If you are learning guitar you have probably heard about tablature, or tabs. As a new guitar player you are anxious to start playing songs, and you have been told that tabs are the easiest way to learn. That is good news. You do not need to spend weeks or months learning music theory.
Guitar tablature is a system of musical notation which is very popular with guitarists. With guitar tabs a composer can express most musical ideas on the acoustic or electric guitar in a clear, straightforward way.
If you want to start playing guitar right away, grab the tabs for your favorite song and take a look at what the tab consists of:

E—3——————

B———————-

G———————-

D———————-

A———————-

E———————-

You will probably believe me when I tell you that the tab is a representation of the neck of the guitar. You find out which frets to put your fingers at by following the numbers printed along the strings. If there is a number 3 on the top string, that means you put your finger at the third fret on the top E string - the thinnest string on the guitar. You have just played the note G. No problem. The guitar is your oyster.

Now let us move onto tabs for guitar chords. Here is an E Major chord:

E—0——————-

B—0——————-

G—1——————-

D—2——————-

A—2——————-

E—0——————-

Just for comparison, if you take a look at the sheet music for the same song you will be presented with a bunch of black dots that do not do a thing to help you play the song. The language of sheet music is not as simple as tab language. There is a whole background of musical theory behind the little black dots on the page. Learning theory takes time and effort, and unless you see some way you will benefit from learning music it is just going to clutter up your brain with useless furniture.

Guitar tabs fast track your learning of songs, but there is one condition: you must already know what these songs sound like. You see, there are some elements missing from tabs that are present in conventional sheet music. Tabs do not give you a time signature or note values. Basically that means you can play the notes but, without hearing the song played by somebody else, you will not know how long each note lasts. But the chances are when you are starting out learning to play guitar you will probably be wanting to play songs you have heard before.

Tabs are available on the internet for acoustic, bass or electric guitars. If you plan on playing guitar with a group of other musicians, you might encounter some problems sharing your guitar tabs with them unless they are also guitar players. If you work with a keyboard player he or she probably learnt to read music as part of their keyboard playing course, and they may not be able to make head or tail out of your guitar tab.

So there are some faults with relying exclusively on tabs to learn songs but if you work at learning your guitar tabs you will find that you will be able to play guitar just as well as a guitarist with a knowledge of musical notation.

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We all have that idea lurking at the back of our heads that we don’t really need to learn how to play a guitar. What we really need is some free guitar tabs. Yeah, tabs of our favorite songs is what we need, our innate talent will do the rest. Just in case your talent does not include an instinctive understanding of how to read tablature, here is Reading Guitar Tab at How To Tune A Guitar. For a mountain of guitar tabs for any song you would care to name, go to Rock Magic

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Many guitarists develop a comfort zone of positions on the fretboard that they experience difficulty getting out of. The most basic is when you start off on the guitar by learning the notes and chords in the first position and somehow never get round to finding out where the notes and chords are further up the guitar’s neck.
So today I have listed a bunch of places on the web where you can get some encouragement to explore the possibilities of the guitar more fully.
1. “Most guitar players are victims of their own quick-fix mentality. “Why learn every scale in every key if I can use a ‘cookie-cutter shape’ scale pattern that I can move around the guitar neck and play the same notes?” What happens is that a large number of players know their scales if somebody holds their hand and takes them to the root note or starting point of the scale, but what they don’t learn is what notes they are playing and how they all relate together. And, more importantly, how to use the scales to make music that doesn’t sound like they’re “trapped in a box”.”Break Out Of The Box - Learn all of the notes on the fretboard
2. A tutorial on learning the notes on the guitar neck. Guitar Fretboard notes
3. “Memorizing the name of the notes on the entire fretboard may seem like a daunting task, because a standard guitar has 21 or more frets. That’s 126 or more frets with notes to memorize… or is it? In reality it’s not as bad as that. We’ve made it as simple as possible.
Below is a 5 step tutorial that will help you become familiar with the fretboard and it’s notes. You don’t have to learn them all right away but it’s a long term goal that you should strive for, so working on learning them on a regular basis is a good idea.” Discover The Fretboard
4. “Some things you can do with the scale and chord tone diagram printer:
Generate guitar scales or bass scales on the fretboard.
View and print scales for drop-D tuning on a guitar or bass fretboard.
Display the notes to guitar chords on the fret board.
Find your own guitar chord voicings by assembling the arpeggio notes of chords in various ways.
Print out all the guitar notes on the guitar fretboard or bass notes on the bass fretboard.
Create printable blank fretboard diagrams for any number of strings in any shape or size.
Create and print scales for violin, cello, double bass and other fretless string instruments.
Show the notes of natural harmonics on the guitar, bass guitar or any other stringed instrument.
Generate diagrams for almost all scales and chords from the vast scale and chord dictionary.
Make left-handed guitar fretboard diagrams.” Scale and Chord Tone Fretboard Printer
And finally a dude giving us a video lesson on the guitar notes:

Technorati Tags: learning the notes on the guitar