How to Write Guitar Tabs

Guitar tablature (tab for short) is a form of musical notation that does not involve reading or writing notes on a traditional music staff. It is mostly used by guitarists who cannot read music, but is also used by music-reading guitarists because it shows the exact fretting of a particular passage. Traditional musical notation, on the other hand, leaves it up to the player to determine the best fingering and fretting to use.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderate

Things You’ll Need:

• Basic knowledge guitar fretting and fingering

1. Think of the staff used in tablature as resembling the staff in traditional notation. One major difference is that there are six lines instead of five and each line represents one string of the guitar.
2. Correspond the bottom-most line of the tab to the lowest string of the guitar (the low E string) and the top line to the highest one (the high E string).
3. Write the notes in guitar tabs as numbers which represent the number of the fret on which the particular note would be played. For instance, to write the G note on the third fret of the low E string, write the number 3 on the bottom line of the tablature staff. Here is a two octave G major scale written in tablature:E------------------------------------------2--3-----------B------------------------------------3--5-----------------G---------------------------2--4--5-----------------------D------------------2--4--5--------------------------------A---------2--3--5-----------------------------------------E--3--5---------------------------------------------------
4. Notate chords on the tabs by writing the numbers one on top of each other, just the way that notes in a chord are written on a traditional staff. For example, a G major barre chord in guitar tab would look like:E---------3---------------B---------3---------------G---------4---------------D---------5---------------A---------5---------------E---------3---------------
5. Notate performance techniques such as hammer-ons and pulloffs using the letters "h" and "p" respectively. Write the letter between the two notes where the technique will be performed.
6. Use an upward slanting line between the notes of an upward slide and a downward slanting line between the notes of a downward slide. Here you see all three techniques, between the notes G and A on the high E string.E----3h5-----5p3--------3/5-----5\3--------B-------------------------------------------G-------------------------------------------D-------------------------------------------A-------------------------------------------E-------------------------------------------

Tips & Warnings

• As you are looking at the tablature staff, it can be envisioned as looking at the guitar neck from the player's perspective. For clarification, the note names for the strings are often written at the start of each line.