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Tablature

I want to explain to you a way of reading and writing guitar music. It is easier, though not as complete as reading music with the dots on the staff, and the Every Good Boy Does Fine stuff.
It is called ‘tablature’, and it goes like this:

These six lines represent your six guitar strings. The bottom one is the low sounding string. The numbers on the lines are the frets which you are to push down on that string. When numbers are written directly above one another, this means that all those notes are to be played at the same time, like a chord.

There are also ways to illustrate how long the notes are held, or how much time is between notes, but we won’t go into that right now. You can find it on the internet.

Much music written in tablature is found in stores or on the Net.

So in the first tablature diagram, you would play the 2^nd fret on the 5^th string, then the 1^st fret on the 3^rd string, then the 2^nd fret on the 4^th string, then the open 1^st string.
****Note that if you would hold the chord E in its basic position, these notes would already be fretted for you. (I wrote it that way on purpose)

Illustrated right after those notes is a group of notes all listed on top of each other. This means that it is a chord. Work it out. What chord is it?

Lastly in that 1^st diagram, I’m just pointing out that you can write just 2 notes at a time if you like. Hold down and play those two at the same time.

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