Whenever you see a number on a line in Guitar TAB, it is an instruction to play a specific note on that string. What Do Numbers Mean on Guitar TABĮach line on Guitar TAB matches a string on your guitar. The key point to remember is that the top line on Guitar TAB matches the highest pitch string on your guitar and the lowest line matches the lowest pitch string on your guitar. Text-based and formal Guitar TAB sometimes displays the string tunings for each line as shown below: The bottom line in Guitar TAB matches the lowest pitch string (low E) on your guitar. Looking at Guitar TAB is like looking down at your guitar in your hands. TAB for bass or ukulele will have four or five lines and Guitar TAB for a 7-string guitar would have 7 horizontal lines.Īs you can see in the diagram below, the six lines match up to the six strings on your guitar: There may be more or fewer lines to match different instruments. Guitar TAB has six horizontal lines to represent the six strings on the guitar. The first thing you need to understand with Guitar TAB is the basic layout. Being able to play the TAB back also helps you understand what to play on guitar. Guitar Pro 7 gives you everything you need to edit and create your own Guitar TABs. The easiest way is with Guitar Pro 7 (link to my full review). There are a few different ways you can create your own formal Guitar TAB.

If you don’t know how to read standard notation, you can simply ignore the top staff and read the bottom Guitar TAB staff. Many guitarists prefer this format because it gives you the most information on how to play a song on guitar. This is the best of both worlds as it gives you two different ways of reading the same music. The top half is the song written in Standard Notation and the bottom half is written in Tablature. As you can see below, there are two staffs connected together: If you buy a Guitar TAB book, you will likely see this format. Formal Guitar TAB like this or the below type is far more useful. This is why I recommend avoiding text-based Guitar TAB if possible. You may notice that there is a lot more information on this TAB compared to the text-based Guitar TAB from earlier. Websites like Songsterr use an interactive type of Guitar TAB that looks slightly different than text-based Guitar TAB.Īs you can see, the above Guitar TAB looks similar to the text-based Guitar TAB earlier, but is easier to read and uses different symbols. Simply changing the font will fix the format issues.

If you see Guitar TAB like the below, it means the wrong font was used. Notepad in Windows has quite a few different fonts that work well with Guitar TAB. The font Courier New is the most popular font for writing this type of Guitar TAB. If you want to write Guitar TAB in this format, you need to use a specific type of font.

All right now tabs