Greetings and welcome to the first installment of this column. Reading guitar tab will be our first topic.
Tab is short for tablature, which is a notational system widely used by today's’ guitarists. The origin of this system can be traced back hundreds of years to music written for the lute, an early predecessor of the guitar.
In tab there are six lines. Each line represents one of your six strings.
While the line represents the string you're playing, the number on that line represents what fret is fingered or left open. The open notes are represented by an “O”. A typical single note riff is written left to right like this;
Notice the dots at the beginning and end of the phrase. These are used to indicate repeats of the phrase they surround. How many times to play the phrase is shown by a number above it such as 2X or 4X. When two or more notes are played together, they are stacked on top of each other. Chords are written in this way.
Again, single note melodic phrases are written left to right. The only technique we'll use in this piece is vibrato or shaking the string. This is indicated by a squiggly line after the note ~~~~~. This technique is used to highlight the turn around.
We'll cover more techniques in the next column. So much for the task here's the application.
