Tablature.

Tablature is a way of notating music so that others can read it back and play it. It's not quite as exact as traditional notation (which I can't really read myself), but it's far easier to learn, as it's simply a representation of a guitar neck, the six horizontal lines representing the six strings. The graphic below shows which lines are which. The guitar is seen from the point of view of the player, and so the six TAB lines show the strings in the same order. The chord indicated below is an A Major Seventh chord, and the numbers on the TAB lines show that the treble string is played open (0), the next string down is fretted on the second fret (2), the next string down is fretted on the first fret (1) and so on. The 'X' means DON'T play that string. It's really very straight forward.

The time element.

The time element of a piece of music reads from left to right, same as standard notation, and the numbers representing notes appear in the order they are played in. The chord in the example above would be played all at once, at the same moment, because they are all stacked up vertically. It would sound like this.

	If you were to slowly pick each note of the chord, it would look like this and sound like this.
	If the TAB of the same chord looks like this, you would play it like this. You can see where the notes that are played at the same time occur. They're the ones that stack vertically.
	Here is another example of the same chord. This is what it sounds like.

Here is a neat little finger picking thing I wrote, maybe a little too complex for a rank beginner, but if if you've started to figure out how to pick, this will really help give your fingers independence. I call it Capo Lane, the street I live in, believe it or not, and it's kind of classical in flavor, I guess. The TAB is below.

Capo Lane

Listen to this tune

Would you like to learn this tune? See this lesson