When I first started playing the guitar, I had no idea how to read guitar tabs. They looked like just a bunch of lines and numbers. My Dad, who taught me how to play, never had a need for guitar tabs – all he needed to do was listen to a song once or twice and he could instantly replicate the song. Unfortunately, I was not blessed with his musical genius, and so learning how to read guitar tabs became a necessity if I wanted to play all the same songs my friends were playing.

Finding guitar tabs to play on the web are very easy to do – there are countless free guitar tab sites, or if you’re looking for a song you can’t seem to find anywhere else, you can try sites such as Sheet Music Plus Guitar Tab.

The basics of reading guitar tabs is to understand the lines each represent the strings on the guitar, and the numbers represent the fret.

Example of an A chord:

————- High E String
-2————
-2————
-2————
————-
————- Low E String

You can see how the number two shows that you would place your fingers in the second fret space on your guitar neck.

When you see the numbers all lined up at the same interval, it shows to play them all at the same time, which is usual for playing chords.

When playing individual notes, you’ll notice guitar tabs to look more like this:

——2——
–1——3—
x————-
0————-
x————
x————

Letters in Guitar Tabs
Occasionally you will see letters in guitar tabs. Below are the common letters found when reading guitar tabs and what they mean:

h: Hammer On: You will sometimes see this looking like 3h5 – which would mean you would hammer on from the third to the second.

p: Pull Off: A Pull off is often written just like a hammer on, for example 5p3.

b, r: These letters symbolize bends – with b where the begining of the bend starts and r where it ends.

/, \ : These symbols usually represent slides from one fret to another – with the / being an ascending slide and the \ a descending slide.

v, ~: Vibratos: These symbols often show when to use a vibrato.

x: This symbol is for showing to mute a string, though it is not always used – many times a muted string will simply be left blank.

<>: These symbols show when to play harmonics

As you can see, learning how to read guitar tabs can make it easy to learn the correct notes for a song. The most difficult part about reading guitar tabs however is that often they do not give the guitar player any direction on the rhythm to use, which can make it difficult for some beginner guitar players to understand reading guitar tabs, even if they’ve mastered being able to pick out the notes. Eventually though with practice you’ll learn how to listen out for different rhythms and begin being able to pick them up quickly.

Have any other suggestions on how to read guitar tabs? Share them in the comments below!