Learning Guitar Tabs

What Are Guitar Tabs?

"Tabs" is short for Tablature. Guitar Tablature is basically music transcribed into notation that allows anyone to read it even if you don't know how to read music. Instead of showing notes and musical notation, Guitar Tabs show us exactly where to play on the fret board and exactly which notes should be played in terms of what string or strings to play and on what fret. Guitar Tabs are a great tool in teaching yourself how to play guitar. 

Sheet Music

"Can you see the difference?"

The wrong way to use guitar tabs...

I learned the hard way and nobody told me the right way until after about 6 years of playing guitar. Most people while learning guitar go to the various internet tabs sites online and just lookup their favorite songs and learn how to play them. This can be helpful, however the song never sounds like original when you play it, the tabs are usually wrong and submitted by anyone and everyone (including total idiots), and you never get the timing of rhythm down, etc. Most internet tabbers play too fast and forget about rhythm and timing and play things to play them and not to play the intended song the way it was played.

The right way to use guitar tabs.... 

If it wasn't for guitar tabs, I would not be the musician I am today. I used to look at guitar tabs and found that about less than 5% are: the complete song, correct and/or done properly. When finding good/correct guitar tabs, you have to "weed" and dodge through hundreds of other works of crap to find that correct one. After a couple of years of dealing with really crappy guitar tabs I eventually started tabbing my own songs by ear but I found that this tends to take a long time. One of the guys I jam with told me about Power Tabs. Power tabs are the greatest thing since sliced bread. Power tabs are guitar tabs that you download and open in a program called "Power Tab Editor". I find that power tabs are usually 98% correct and the great thing about power tabs is that when opening up power tabs in the "Power Tab Editor", you can hear the song in Midi format before you try to play it, so you have the ability to be the judge and hear the song and determine if the power tab is correct before you learn it. Just try learning songs with power tabs and I will guarantee that you will never go back to learning tabs the old fashion way.

Note: Due to constant new laws against tablature, tab sites are being shut down daily. The sheet music industry is arguing that tabs should be illegal and is cracking down on tablature sites. The best current tablature site that offers power tabs is : http://www.ultimate-guitar.com

or

Tabcrawler.com

Click Here to download the Power Tab Editor..