All the material available on this side is gratis.
The guitar lesson and online tuition material is offered here for free. Hopefully it should help those looking to get started with their learning and understanding of guitar.
All the material available on this side is gratis.
The guitar lesson and online tuition material is offered here for free. Hopefully it should help those looking to get started with their learning and understanding of guitar.
Lessons hopefully will be written in bitesize chunks. Small amounts of theory and piano is thrown in with some lessons. Understanding of these extra bits of information is not important and not necessary if just learning guitar.
On this page I’ll deal with the understanding of how to read the lessons.
How to read TAB and understand how to read the Chord Boxes is important. Deal with those two first then move onto other issues like reading Notation.
I’ll also be explaining few techniques like ‘Alternative Picking’, ‘Palm Muting’, how to hold a plectrum, counting a beat, strumming and which fingers to use.
‘… I don’t want you to play me a riff that’s going to impress Joe Satriani; give me a riff that makes a kid want to go out and buy a guitar and learn to play …’ – Ozzy Osbourne
Reading TAB
Reading guitar tabulature
Strings/Lines
In the picture below you’ll see a pretty standard tabulature or TAB
You’ll also likely see it written as below
In both examples the arrows point at lines, these lines are the ‘strings’ on the guitar.
‘Bottom E’ is the thickest string on the guitar – the ‘Bottom’ part refers to the low sound.
‘Top E’ is the thinnest string on the guitar – ‘Top’ part refers to the high sound.
Basically TAB is upside down, at first it’s hard to get your head to remember this but with practice it does get easier.
Frets/Numbers
In the pictures below you’ll see that there are now numbers on the lines or ‘strings’
These numbers tells us which ‘fret’ to play.
The picture below shows us the frets on the guitar.
A ‘0’ on a TAB indicates an ‘Open string’ – Open means no fingers or frets.
To play a note using TAB first you have to figure out which ‘string’ then which ‘fret’
