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An In-depth look at Guitar Tabs

As we have seen in our previous session, which focused on the introduction of tablature, the diagrams differ from those of chord diagram illustrations. The numbers on the horizontal lines indicate the fret number rather than the finger number. You can see this when you keep going above the 5th or 6th fret on the guitar diagrams.

To learn something, I believe the best teacher is a practical application itself. Therefore I have devised a fretting exercise, an improvisation from a Steve Vai exercise I came across a long time ago. It is advisable to use a metronome or if you can, maintain a count yourself while doing the exercise.

First, we do it in a simple chromatic run starting from 1st fret on the 6th string. Examine the diagram below.

It’s a simple chromatic exercise you start with lowest string and chromatically decend. Once you do
then you ascend in the oppsite starting with your pink from the highest string.

It’s important to have a metronome on or try and count yourself as you do the exercise, Remember,
the purpose of this exercise is actually make you familiar with what is guitar tablature and how to read it. 

Lets look at the part two of this exercise which is a bit more advanced than a simple chromatic run.


As you can see the fingers are interchanging as you progress in the exercise. Now you can see
how useful guitar tablature is for guitarists as its allows him not only to learn fretting exercises but also to cover complex guitar solos.

Now let us look at other symbols you might come across on guitar tablature. The following symbols are commonly seen to indicate 'slide', 'vibrato,' 'bends', 'hammer-on' etc.

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