How to Play Guitar Sheet Music
Guitars are extremely versatile instruments. They are used in everything from folk music to heavy metal. For this reason, many music publishers release guitar sheet music (also known as guitar tablature) of compositions, particularly of contemporary works that are popular. If you want to play guitar and use this music, then you'll need to know the basics of how to read tablature.
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Instructions
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1
Familiarize yourself with the tab staff. The tab staff is made of 6 lines, which correspond to the six strings on the guitar. The bottom line represents the bottom string, and thus the staff line names are E, A, D, G, B and E.
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Notice the frets on your guitar (these are the marked off spaces on the top of the neck). Look at your tab and you'll see numbers written on the lines of the tab staff. These tell you to press down a particular string at a specific fret location. For example, a "6" on the third line from the bottom tells you to press the D string on the 6th fret, while "0" means nothing is pressed but you still need to strike the string.
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Position your guitar so it rests on your knee and the neck angles just slightly upward.
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Position your fingers on the strings and frets according to the first tab chord in the music.
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Strum your guitar, maintaining the fingering position. Move on to the next chord and strum again, working your way through all of the music.
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Tips & Warnings
Those who know music sometimes are confused by tab because, unlike a traditional staff, there are no "space" names and there are six lines instead of fie. It will help if you think of the tab as a mini-graph of your guitar neck rather than a staff.
Most people adopt "standard" guitar chord fingerings based on the ease of reaching the strings and frets. If you don't know these fingerings already, a guitar chord chart will show you what fingers to press on what strings.
The guitar usually is strummed with the right hand. If you are left handed and find it easier to strum with your left hand, then it may help you to string your guitar backwards and hold the neck in your right hand. This way, when you try to read your tab, you do not have to flip all of the strings and fret assignments mentally and don't need to modify anything.
Fret assignments stacked on top mean all the strings should be played at the same time. If the assignments are staggered, you should play them in the order they appear from left to right.
Since tab doesn't give you any rhythmic notation, listen to your favorite songs or check out guitar websites for some basic rhythm guitar patterns.
