and what we're going to go over in this guitar basics video is how to go about
reading guitar tablature there are a number of different ways to read music
and you can either use standard notation which are the little balls and sticks
that if you took piano when you were younger that might look reminiscent to
you well we will be using that notation to to read rhythm but to start off we're
going to use something that's called guitar tablature which is
basically a paint-by-number it's a coordinate system for playing the guitar
and the reason I like using this with beginner guitar players is because it's
just much easier much quicker of a way for them to pick up the guitar and get
them into playing most of the students that come to our school and most of the
students that I've dealt with of all my students one of them went on to go to
Berkley the majority of students are not taking lessons to become professional
musicians if someone wants to go down that route absolutely I would take them
down that route and teach them how to do that because it is an important skill
but for most guitar players they're just doing it for a hobby and they just want
to have fun with it so I tend to use guitar tablature to help students with
reading individual notes we'll also go over something called a chord chart down
the road when we get into doing songs and a chord chart is another way to read
music so what we're going to do is we're going to go over to the white board and
I'm going to talk about what guitar tablature is and how you go about using
it to breed music alright welcome to the white board so you will see here that I
have this random thing written on the board excellent
so this is technically when I technically this is what guitar 2m looks
like so guitar tablature is the strings of your guitar so each
one of these lines represents a string and the strings they represent actually
let me grab a blue marker here so this represents this bottom line
represents the fat string on your guitar this is e the next string above that is
a the next string above that is D followed by G followed by B followed by
the e on the little string this is the skinniest string of a guitar so when you
look at guitar time it's like looking at your guitar upside down so guitar table
will look like this so the bottom fast string is on the bottom followed by a D
G B and E so in this particular example you see on the board and this particular
example this song mostly is played on the bottom east ring now this is the
first eight notes just on called ode to joy' it's a pretty popular sign that
most people know the melody too and you'll see here that there's a bunch of
numbers written down remember I told you guitar tablature as a coordinate system
it tells you what string to play and on what fret number so the numbers you see
here are your fret numbers on your guitar so this example tells me that the
first note I'm going to play in this song is located on the bottom east
string at the zero fret now the zero fret what's that so can we call that an
open string that just means you don't fret any of the notes on the guitar you
just play the string open so this first note is going to be the open bottom east
ring followed by the open bottom East ring followed by the first fret on the
bottom string followed by the 3rd fret on the bottom string so the first four
notes to this song are all on that bottom skinny e string
the open e open e first fret third fret now if we move on to the next four notes
in this on we have another 3 which means play the third fret again a 1 so 1st
fret a 0 open string and then you'll notice that our last note here jumps
down to a different string so now we've got to change strings so we're not on
the E string anymore we're on the B string so we have to move and play the B
string on the 3rd fret so this entire song if I go back to the beginning is
open fret on the bottom east ring open fret 1st fret third fret third fret
again first fret open fret and then we're gonna switch strings we're gonna
go to the B string and we're gonna play the third fret so if I got my guitar and
I just happened to play this song I'll hold it up here so that you can kind of
see a little bit hopefully you can see everything I am going to play open
string open string first string third string third string first string open
string and then third string on the B string so all of those first seven notes
happen on the bottom string 0 0 1 three one zero and then the last note
happens on the B string third fret now you're probably going to learn I see
you're using different fingers how do I know what your fingers to use that's the
downside of tablature it doesn't tell you what finger to use you kind of got
to figure that out on your own or your muscle memory will tell you as you get
further and further in general guitarists are lazy and we want to move
as little as possible but in the beginning just to get used to the fret
numbers and where things are don't be afraid to just use one finger and then
eventually you can use multiple fingers as you get further but the basics of the
guitar tablature is that it's a coordinate system so first it tells you
what string and then it tells you what fret on that string it doesn't tell you
the rhythm there's no rhythm here and it doesn't tell you what finger number to
use those are the downsides of tablature but in general I can get someone playing
Oh juju i or some other similar yet fun song I can get them playing something
very quickly within their first lesson and having fun with music which for most
people is amazing so this is guitar tablature you will most likely come
across it in your studies it is most commonly used on line if you're gonna
look up on line song so getting familiar with guitar tablature is key so just to
repeat one more time guitar tablature is a coordinate system there are six
strings the fact string is the bottom the skinny string is the top the number
is the fret so this would be skinny string E string open open string open
string first fret third fret third fret 1st fret open string then move to the B
string and play the third fret and this is how you read tab
lost somewhere in this space