Free Guitar Tablature (or tabulature, or tab/tabs for short) is a form of musical notation indicating instrument fingering rather than musical pitches.
Free Guitar Tablature is common for fretted stringed instruments such as the lute, vihuela, or guitar, as well as many free reed aerophones such as the harmonica. Free Guitar Tablature was common during the Renaissance and Baroque eras, and is commonly used in notating rock, pop, folk, ragtime, and blues music.
Three types of organ tablature were used in Europe: German, Spanish and Italian. There are several types of ocarina tabulature.[1] Harp tablature was used in Spain and Wales.
To distinguish standard musical notation from tablature, the former is usually called "staff notation" or just "notation".
An alternate usage of the word "tab" is common on the internet, where it can also refer to conventional chord symbols (for harmony), or note names (for melody).
Understanding the Tab Staff
A tab staff for guitar has 6 horizontal lines, each one representing a string of the instrument. The bottom line of the staff represents your lowest "E" string, the second line from the bottom represents your "A" string, etc.
Notice that there are numbers located smack dab in the middle of the lines (aka strings). The numbers simply represent the fret the tab is telling you to play. For example, in the illustration above, the tab is telling you to play the third string (third line) seventh fret.
Note: When the number "0" is used in tablature, this indicates that the open string should be played.
This is the concept of reading tab, at it's most basic. Now let's examine some of the more advanced aspects of reading tablature notation, including how to read chords in tab.
