Category: Guitar tabs

August 29, 2008

Christian Guitar Tabs

Filed under: Guitar tabs - 29 Aug 2008

Christian worship music is the only genre that encourages a sense of people drawing together rather than an expression of individualism. I guess competitiveness still reigns supreme in Christian music with people secretly, or otherwise, trying to out-sing, out-play or out-praise each other, but if your music is carrying a Christian message, I guess it is a good start.

The forms of Christian music follow the other musical genres fairly closely. Even gospel singing, the original popular Christian music, shares roots with blues music. There is Christian music that has its musical basis in rock and roll, in country, metal, you name it. The music sounds the same as secular music, but the content of the lyrics is vastly different.

Broadly speaking, Christian songs express a person’s hope of salvation or faith in God. They can tell a story of an individual going on a downhill slide and getting the strength to reclaim their life through faith in God. Or a Christian song can be about how great heaven is going to be compared to how basically unrewarding this life on earth is. Whatever the message, it has its roots in the life of an individual and its musical basis in the local culture.

Of course, not all Christians go for the idea of expressing religious feelings through a music that is usually used to express sentimental love and sexual lust. The main argument in the case for using popular music to carry the Christian message is that it meets potential converts on their own ground.

Country music has a very strong Christian leaning. Historically country music has always been about the trials of life and love, and often refers to the fact that we are being watched by God. Christian country music is greatly influenced by Gospel music.

So where if we are interested in learning Christian songs are there Christian guitar tabs available for us to learn? If you go to the Christian Guitar Resources, you will find thousands of Christian songs by hundreds of different artists. You can even submit your own tab for a song. The difficulty with sorting out which songs you want to learn is that Christian music has divided into several different genres with different ways of expressing their Christianity through music and varying philosophical ideas on life and religion.

If you do not already have some kind of affiliation with a Christian group or organization, you can just do a web search for “Christian guitar tabs”. This will give you a large number of general tab archives with Christian tab collections or sites that collect Christian guitar tabs exclusively.

Here is a video guitar lesson devoted to Christian music on YouTube

Technorati Tags: , , ,

Sphere: Related Content

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

June 29, 2008

Make Your Own Guitar Tabs

Filed under: Guitar tabs - 29 Jun 2008

Finding guitar tabs for songs you want to learn is one thing but writing out tab for songs you already know is a very tedious chore. Well, say goodbye to those guitar tab writing blues with TabMaker! That’s right, you can make your own guitar tabs! This is so much fun to use you will be making tabs of random notes just for the heck of it. But if you really need to make tabs of your songs it is a very handy tool!
TabMaker

Technorati Tags: ,

Sphere: Related Content

June 3, 2008

Learn How To Read Guitar Tabs

Filed under: Music Notes, Guitar tabs - 03 Jun 2008

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.

Technorati Tags: ,

Sphere: Related Content