How to Read Tremelo on Guitar Tab

Guitar tablature or "tabs" is a great way to read for many beginners. Although rhythm and some other elements are hard to read in tabs, readers can see just what a guitar player is doing in a song because the musical "staff" is the six strings of your guitar and each note is marked by its fret. You can also read a lot of techniques in tablature. One of them is tremolo, where you repeat one note a lot of times quickly.

Difficulty: Challenging

Instructions

1. Look for the marking "trem." that indicates you'll be playing tremolo. Don't confuse it with the "tr" used for another technique called "trill."

2. In some rare cases, you won't have a "trem." marking to identify tremolo. What you'll be looking for is the repetition of one note over and over again in a line. Since the tab lines are guitar strings, you'll be looking for one fret number repeated over and over on the same string, like this: 5-5-5-5-5-5-5-5-5.

3. When you've found your tremolo marking or set, start playing the note many times quickly. You do this by using multiple fingers to pluck the string, keeping your finger of your left hand on the same fret. You get a great wavering sound that guitar players use a lot in flamenco and similar styles.

4. Play tremolo as fast as possible. For a lot of techniques, it's hard to get the rhythm right, since tabs don't have a lot of rhythmic markings, but with tremolo, to get that liquid sound of the note repeating, you don't have to worry about quarter, eighth or sixteenth notes, just play it as many times quickly as you can, so that your picking blends into that abstract sound called tremolo.

5. Keep up the tremolo until your set of notes ends. When you see another note picked on that string, the tremolo section is over. Likewise, if the series of numbers ends and the string is blank, you're done.

Tips & Warnings

• Recognize tremolo variants. Some tabs abound with esoteric stuff like tremolo bars, tremolo dips, etc. For these complex techniques, you'll see another number interjected with a line going out from your progressive tremolo pattern. This usually means you insert that note into your tremolo pattern, keeping your fast picking going, so that the tremolo sound changes notes for a short moment.