Guitar music has its own musical notation. The standard musician’s notation of staffs, notes, note values, ledger lines, key signatures and time signatures is replaced with a simpler, operational type of notation, called a tab. Even if you do not know how to read music, you can learn how to play guitar with the acoustic guitar tabs. Many stringed instruments use tabs or tablatures.

The form of musical notation specific to the guitar is acoustic guitar tabs, or tablature. Each chord is notated with one tab, a small chart of the guitar strings themselves. The string at the top of the diagram is the one furthest from your body as you hold the guitar. Each string will show a number, which is the fret you should hold to create that chord. If you see a zero, that means an open string. An X means that string should be muffled.

If you’re not sure what a fret is, it’s the area between the metal bars on the neck, or the fingerboard of your guitar. Usually there will be somewhere between 21 to 24 frets on the acoustic guitar. The dots you see on the frets are simply a visual guide to let you see where you are.

Check out acoustic guitar tabs and youll notice that the numbers run all in one line, indicating which fret to use on the one string youre plucking. Those numbers tell you that youre supposed to be playing each of them individually. If theres a number on each line and the numbers are on top of each other, then youre supposed to play the notes simultaneously, strumming away on all six of your strings.

When you’re reading on up acoustic guitar tabs, a few other things are going to come up, like hammer-ons, pull-offs, bends and slides. The letter h indicates a hammer-on. For instance, you might see something like 7h9 on one of the lines. Pull-offs are indicated by a p, bends by the letter b, and slides by the notation “/ (thats a slash mark).

After youve gotten accustomed to the notion of reading music by string position, search online for basic acoustic guitar tabs and find a tune youre really familiar with to practice on. While the approach may be new to you, youll see that you can pick up its melody quickly this way now that you can read tabs.

Listening to a song while you are trying to learn it makes it simpler to learn. Details and rhythms that you think you remember will pop out and help you. Learning the guitar using acoustic guitar tabs makes it quite a bit more fun. It won’t take long to learn several songs, and you will be able to play them for your friends at parties, or while you’re alone so you can enjoy them in private.