How to read tab in 10 minutes (and why the notation sits next to it)

I read my first piece of tab upside down for two days. I played every single number correctly, it sounded like nothing on earth, and I could not even name what was wrong, because the numbers were right. They were right. It is just that my thickest string is up near my chin, and on the page it lies along the bottom.

Six lines are six strings, and the thinnest one is on top

Lay the guitar flat on your lap with the strings facing up and look down at it. What you see is tab: six lines and six strings. The top line is the first string, the thinnest one (high e), and the bottom line is the sixth, the thickest (low E).

This one layout catches people out more than anything else here. When you hold the guitar normally, the thickest string is the one nearest the ceiling. Laughton warns about it outright, and with reason: almost everybody trips on it at the start. The encyclopaedia adds something the teaching books leave out: there is no standard here, and some tab on the internet is printed the other way round. So before you play a single number, glance at the letters down the left hand side. They tell you which way you are reading.

A number is a fret, a zero is an open string

A number on a line tells you which fret to press on that string. Zero does not mean “play nothing”, it means “play that string open, with no finger on it”. Numbers stacked one above the other, in a column, are a chord played at once. Am reads from the bottom as the open A string, second fret on D, second on G, first on B and an open e. An “x” instead of a number means: do not hit that string at all.

Besides numbers, a handful of letters float about in text tab, and every one of them is a technique rather than a fret number. An h is a hammer on: you sound the second note with the fretting finger alone, without picking it. A p is a pull off, the same thing in reverse, where you pull the finger off the string. A b is a bend, pushing the string sideways. A slash is a slide along the string, up or down, and it is sometimes written as an s. A tilde means vibrato. For your first week the first two letters are plenty.

What tab does not tell you

The most important sentence here is not about what tab contains, but about what it leaves out. Tab does not tell you how long to hold a note. One of the books asks the question straight out: one beat, two, three, and how are you meant to tell? You cannot, and it is not your fault: the encyclopaedia calls this an operational notation, because it says where and when to put a finger down, not how long the note lasts.

Hence the symptom you will recognise the moment you play tab for a song you do not know by heart: every note is right and none of it sounds like the song. The rhythm was not on the page, so it had to be in your head, and it was not there either.

Books patch that hole in three ways. The notation is printed above the tab, note stems and circles are glued onto the numbers, or a counting line reading “1 2 3 4” runs over the top. We do the first. In a song, the notation and the Tab sit side by side and both highlight in time, so you can see the rhythm instead of guessing it. That is the whole answer to the question in the title.

The strings are called E A D G B e, and a Polish songbook says H

From thickest to thinnest: E, A, D, G, B, e. The capital and the small letter are the same note name two octaves apart. That is exactly why they are written in different sizes: it is the cheapest possible hint about which string is which.

The second string is the one place where a Polish songbook and this app disagree. We write B, because that is the English notation and it is what the app calls these notes. Polish and German songbooks write H there instead, and they keep the letter B for the note a semitone lower. If you do not know that two systems exist, the first chord sheet you print will have you playing a semitone off.

Your first melody: Frère Jacques on the two thinnest strings

The teaching books agree on this one: first melodies are played on the two thinnest strings, because then the whole hand stays put. Frère Jacques (Panie Janie in our catalogue) fits there almost entirely and needs six notes. C is the first fret of the B string and D the third fret of the same string. E is the open e, F the first fret of e, G the third fret of e, and A the fifth.

phrase	notes	string and fret
Are you sleeping	C D E C	B1 B3 e0 B1
Brother John	E F G	e0 e1 e3
Morning bells are ringing	G A G F E C	e3 e5 e3 e1 e0 B1
Ding dang dong	C G C	B1 G0 B1

Every phrase is sung twice, so those four rows are the whole song. The last phrase steps off the two thin strings for one note: the G underneath is the open G string. That is the moment the tune drops lower than anything before it, and you can hear that the song has finished.

How to practise it so it takes ten minutes, not a week

There is one rule and it is called one finger per fret: the index takes the first fret, the middle the second, the ring the third, the little finger the fourth. The books state it harshly, because everybody is tempted the same way: to grab everything with one finger and slide the whole hand back and forth.

One note sticks out of that rule: the A on the fifth fret. It is not a mistake in the tab, it is two different things wearing a similar name. A position is four fingers over four frets, while “the first five frets” is a stretch of the neck including the open strings. Reach for that A with your little finger, or shift the hand up a fret and back. Both are honest, as long as you do not pick a different one every time.

Practise phrase by phrase, not top to bottom. Four phrases, a few notes each, pick alternating down and up. Only when each of them comes out without a stumble do you glue them together. The measure the books use here is good and merciless: not “I played it”, but “I played it without a single hesitation”.

Then open Panie Janie in the app, switch the Tab on and pull the tempo down to about sixty per cent. The notation and the tab highlight in time, so you see what the bare page cannot tell you. It shows where a note is meant to last longer, and where you are running late.

What confused me

Besides reading it upside down, there was a second thing, sillier and longer lasting. I downloaded tab for songs I did not know by heart and wondered why none of it worked. Tab carries no rhythm, so if the tune is not in your head it is nowhere. These days I only take from tab what I can already hum, and I read the rest with the notation next to it.

And the other one: you do not need to read notation to start. I was afraid that notation was the gate you had to pass, and it is an option instead. Tab answers “where do I put my finger”, the stave answers “how long do I hold it”, and you are allowed to learn them in that order.