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Guitar Tab
Staff
2004-11-01

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Guitar Tab

Guitar tab is an easy to read form of sheet music for the guitar that can help a beginning student quickly and easily learn to play a song, chord, or passage that is notated. It's important to note also, that may intermediate and advanced guitarists also use guitar tablature to help learn new songs, or to transcribe songs they've learned. It's not just a tool for beginners!

Guitar Chords in Tablature

A simple guitar chord, notated in guitar tab or tablature would look like this:

Tab C Chord
e-------0-----------
B-------1-----------
G-------0-----------
D-------2-----------
A-------3-----------
E-------0-----------


As you can see, the strings are indicated by the dashed lines representing the six strings of the guitar as they appear on the guitar fretboard. Although the diagram above illustrates tab used for displaying a chord, guitar tab can also be used to display. Please see the passage below:

e--------------------------
B--------------------------
G--------------------------
D---------------------3----
A------------3---5---------
E---3---5------------------


The guitarist would execute the following passage by fingering the third and fifth frets on the low E string successively, and then moving the finger to the A string for the third and fifth frets, etc.

As you can see this can be a really easy way to learn chord progressions, riffs, or even entire songs!

Some additional notation used in tablature includes, but is not limited to:

h - Hammer-on
p - Pull-off
b - Bend
r - Release bend
/ - Slide up
\ - Slide down
~ - Vibrato
v - Vibrato
x - Muted Note
(5) - Harmonic


Guitar tab can be found on many different sites across the internet. Much of the tablature out there is created by guitarists, for guitarists. This free guitar tab can sometimes be a little inaccurate, but for the most part you will find tablature from submitters to be relatively accurate. Probably the largest repository of songs and other guitar tablature is the Online Guitar Archive, or O.L.G.A. OLGA has been around for over 10 years and has the largest collection we've seen to date. To visit OLGA to locate free guitar tab for your favorite songs, simply click on the link below:

The Online Guitar Archive