How to Read Bass Tabs

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Steve Bauman with Summerhays Music in Murray, Utah. We're talking about the bass guitar today and one of the things that we're talking about is how to play the bass and how to read bass tabs. So tablature is just a way to write music that's specially formulated for guitar or bass. It's kind of a shortcut way. A lot of people are purists, they don't necessarily like tab, but it does have its advantages. Anybody can learn a tricky run or a tricky piece of music fairly easily with tab, where if you don't know how to read music it can take years of study to really learn those things really well. The best possible way is to actually understand how to read music notation and tab. Even if you just learned the basics of how to read music, just some basic rhythms, the difference between quarter notes and eighth notes, whole notes, half notes, all the different types of things, triplets, what they look like on the page. Those things will help you even when you do - even when you do use tabs. This is just a beginner bass book, there's several different varieties of books out there. But this is just showing you know, sometimes when you get tabs and things off the internet and people just threw it together in their basement or whatever, they don't always include the notation above the tab. Now even if you don't know how to read music, it's very important to have the notation and the tablature, because where the tab just represents the four strings of the bass, now the way I like to remember it is the - where the B is, where it says tab, I think of that as bass, so that's the lowest string, that's the low E. And then I think of the T as treble, so it's the higher, it's the high G string. So that helps you to know which direction you're looking, which string is which. The numbers in here are just what fret, what fret you're playing, so once you put what string and what fret, put those two things together, and you know exactly what note to play. Now, if you just read the tab, you have no way of knowing whether you're playing the right rhythm or not, there's nothing to indicate rhythm. Sometimes they try to space it so that you'll kind of somewhat know, but without listening to the song there's really no way of knowing. That's why you should include the notation above where even if you don't read the notes, you can look at this and see okay, this is all eighth notes and I can at least read the rhythm, so that I can come down here and see the corresponding tab notes and make sure that I'm playing the right rhythm, very important. For any further questions visit us at summerhaysmusic.com."