How to Read Guitar Tab and Chord Charts - Tutorial

Please share this video and subscribe to our channel:    / @learn.love.guitar   Learn more about this topic on our website: http://www.learnloveguitar.com/guitar... The great thing about standard music notation is that it communicates everything a musician needs to know to play a song exactly as the composer intended. But any guitarist will tell you that standard music notation is not exactly the easiest thing to interpret for guitar players. Let us take a look and listen to the superb guitar opening melody of the Led Zeppelin classic Over the Hills and Far Away. Unless you are an incredibly experienced musician and guitar player, what you are looking at would take you a very long time to figure out how to play. Because guitar players are a creative bunch, they figured out an entirely different way to communicate which notes to play on a guitar. It is called guitar tabulature notation, or just tab for short. This video is going to explain how guitar tab works and the differences between these two musical notation formats. Learning guitar tab is critical in making your guitar journey a little easier and lot more fun. Much of the difficulty with standard music notation has to do with a guitar not being quite as intuitive to play compared to other instruments such as a piano. A prime example is to compare the layout of keys on a piano to the frets on a guitar. From basic music theory, you may already know that there are twelve notes in a musical octave. And those notes repeat themselves as you move up or down the chromatic scale. The twelve notes on a piano are relatively easy to “see” without any difficult memorization or visualization. For example, the note that is to the left of the group of two black keys is a C note. Always. No matter where you are on a piano, this note is always a C. And all you have to do to play that note is push on it with one finger. On a guitar, even something as simple as a C note takes a little more work. First of all, to play any C note on a guitar, you have to use both of your hands. One to pluck the right string, and the other to press on the same string at the right position on the fretboard. And all but two of the six strings have different notes for each fret. In other words, pressing your finger on the same fret of each different string will produce different notes. Now don’t be frightened, but here is what the guitar fretboard looks like through the first 12 frets: The notes grouped together in the tall orange box on the far left indicate the open strings, which is sometimes referred to as fret zero. The fret numbers along the bottom that are circled in gray indicate where the dots or other markings are inlayed into the fretboard to help you keep track of which fret you’re on. While you don’t have to memorize the entire fretboard layout, there are a few critically important items to understand about the guitar fretboard. If you start on any particular string and follow the pattern of notes as you move right or left, you will see the exact same pattern of notes that are shown on the piano keys. Once you get to the twelfth fret, the pattern begins to repeat itself because you’ve reached the next octave. So the 12th fret is the same as the open string, the 13th fret is the same as the 1st fret, and so on and so on. The fifth fret is another natural point of overlap, but in a different way. With the exception of the B string, the fifth fret of a given string is equal in pitch to the next higher open string. For example, the fifth fret of the low E string is an A note, which is the exact same pitch as the second open A string. If you’re still a bit confused, pause the video for a couple seconds to better understand what I’m talking about. guitar relative tuning fifth fret This phenomenon can be very useful when minimizing finger movement when playing more quickly, as your fretting hand doesn’t have to slide to far up or down the fretboard to rapidly play notes of a similar pitch. Also, as you may have already figured out, this type of overlap is repeated between the 5th and 10th frets. If you are now feeling a little bit intimidated, don’t fret (ha ha, my favorite guitar pun!) because help is on the way! And help for guitar players comes in the form of a second type of musical notation, called guitar tablature notation, or guitar tab for short. Instead of worrying about memorizing the musical staff to understand which note to play, and then having to remember where that note falls on the guitar fretboard, guitar tab simply tells you which string and fret to play. In other words, tabs tell you where to put your left and right hands to play the notes of the song. It’s genius really, and makes the life of a budding guitar hero much simpler and enables a much more rapid learning curve. #HowToPlayGuitar #GuitarChordsLesson #GuitarTutorial