How to Read Guitar Tab (and Play Your First Notes)

Tablature (tab for short) is how guitarists share music. It skips the five-line staff and the years of sight-reading and just tells you where to put your fingers. If you can count to 24, you can read tab. By the end of this lesson you'll have played three short pieces from real tab, the same notation every lesson in this series uses.

The six lines are your six strings

A tab staff has six horizontal lines, one per string. One thing trips everyone up at first: the bottom line is your thickest, lowest-sounding string (low E), and the top line is the thinnest (high E). That feels upside-down when you look down at the guitar in your lap. Tab is organized by pitch, though, like a piano: low notes at the bottom, high notes at the top. Give it a day and it clicks.

The letters at the left edge name each string's open note: E-A-D-G-B-e from the bottom line up. The lowercase e is the thin one. Before you play anything, get in tune. The free browser tuner listens through your mic and takes about a minute.

Numbers are frets, not fingers

A number on a line means press that string down at that fret, then pick it. A 0 means play the string open, with no fretting hand at all. You read left to right through time, the same way you read text. Try it with the open strings, low to high:

When you fret a number, put your fingertip just behind the metal fret wire, not on top of it and not halfway back. Right behind the wire takes the least pressure and buzzes the least. Now walk some real fret numbers on the B string:

The rhythm row

Under every tab in this series you'll see stems, beams, and note heads. That's the rhythm row. You don't need to master it today; you need three shapes. A lone stem with no beam is a quarter note: one beat. Notes joined by a beam are eighth notes: two per beat. A hollow head is a half note or longer: let it ring. Count out loud ("1, 2, 3, 4" for quarters, "1-and-2-and" for eighths) and the row starts reading itself.

Your first riff

Time to put all three together: fret numbers, open strings, and eighth-note rhythm. This little riff moves across three strings and ends on a held note:

Two more symbols you'll meet soon, so they don't surprise you. Numbers stacked vertically are played at the same time; that's a chord. An X on a string means mute it (touch it without pressing, so it clicks instead of ringing). Lesson 5 covers chords properly.

How to practice this

Play each of the three tabs five times, slowly, counting out loud. Don't worry about speed this week. You're teaching your eyes to translate lines and numbers into finger positions without thinking, and the moment that translation starts to feel boring, it's working. For the deeper reference on every tab symbol you'll ever meet (bends, slides, harmonics), keep the tab-reading reference guide bookmarked. Next lesson, we put your fretting and picking hands through their first real workout.