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Introduction to Guitar Tablature - Part 1

Although we call it guitar tabs nowadays, tablature has been around since the a5th century. It was used to write for lutes, vihuela, ukelele. It was used in Renaissance and Baroque eras; there were many types of tablature for even for organs. Today it is commonly used for guitar and stringed instruments and the like.

For us, we will solely focus on guitar tablature. Unlike music notation, tablature indicates the note to be played in numbers rather than musical pitches or notes on music sheets. Guitar tablature allows you to read and write the technical aspect of playing the guitar. Techniques such as hammer-on, vibrato, pull-offs, etc. are all easily demonstratable.

Here's an example

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Guitar tablature is easily adapted into bass player's tablature as well. The diagram of a tablature as shown above is the view of the guitar if you kept it on your lap frets upward. The top most line is high 6th string and the bottom the lowest E. The numbers are the note you need to fret.

Do not confuse yourself with a chord diagram and guitar tabs. Chord diagram shows its numbers, which is the finger number, even in fretting and picking exercises it works that way. Its' the same concept. But on tablature the numbers are the frets you need to play, no matter what finger you use.

I will be covering this topic of guitar tablature more in depth soon. In Guitar Therapy courses I will be using guitar tablature to teach rather than music notation. Guitar tablature is easy and you don't have to be able to read music, you can play any tune you want just with guitar tabs.

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