The Lines in Reading Guitar Tab

Video Transcript

"MICHAEL PLUNKETT: Hello. This is Michael Plunkett on behalf of Expert Village. To start out looking at tab, we need to first examine what we have here. We basically have six different lines that are laid out, and right now I just have a short example but they can go on and on as you'll see when you look at tab. Each of these lines represents a different string that we use on guitar. For example, we give them numbers just like we number our guitar strings. They go one, this at the top, two, three, four, five and six, and these relate to the different strings on guitar. The easiest way to think of it is if you take your guitar and hold it up with the body to the right and the head of your guitar to the left, it mimics the strings. So, one would be our highest or smallest string on the guitar, and six would be our lowest or what we call bass string on the guitar. It can be confusing sometimes because we often hold our guitars like this when we're looking at it and so, you might want to think that this is your bass string, so try not to get that mixed up. So, you can think of it in terms of numbers or also if you're familiar with the guitar strings themselves, they would be "e," that's our high E, small "e," B, G, D, A and E. And, again, that's our low bass E on the guitar and that's our highest string that we have. So, two different ways of thinking about those six lines on the guitar."