Acoustic Guitar Tabs

When you are looking at acoustic guitar tabs, you are really looking at a diagram of the strings of your acoustic guitar. The lines represent the strings, with the very first string right at the top and the sixth string right down below at the bottom. You will see numbers on those lines,they are there to tell you which fret to play.If you see a 0 then that means you have to play the string open,which means don't touch it! and an X means to muffle the string so it does not ring out.

Just in case you aren't sure what a fret is,don't worry i will explain, the fret is the area between two metal bars on the neck of the acoustic guitar. There are usually between 21 and 24 frets on a guitar. The dots on the frets are just a visual reference to help you know where you are on the fret board.

If you look at an acoustic guitar tab then all of the numbers are one after the other, all on one line, the numbers indicate which fret to use on that string, and you play only that string.The numbers are noted one after another, which indicates that you play one note at a time.

If there is a number on each of the lines and the numbers are piled one on top of the other, then the acoustic guitar tab is telling you to play all of those notes at the same time, strumming all six strings.

This is where you will come across some letters and signs instead of just numbers notifying what to do on your acoustic guitar,such as hammer-ons, pull-offs, bends and slides!
Hammer-ons are noted by the letter "h", You will probably see this noted as something like 7h9 on a line.
Pull-offs are noted by a "p" in the same way,and Bends are notated by a "b" and slides are notated by a "/" (slash).

Once you get into the swing of reading tabs, do a web search for some easy acoustic guitar tabs and then pick out a very simple song that you like and know very well and play around with it.
Reading and playing acoustic guitar tabs does take a bit of time to get used to, but you will be very surprised at how quickly you can start to pick it up now that you know how to read guitar tabs.

Being able to hear the song that you're working on learning always makes it easier to learn. Even if you think you remember how it goes, listening to it while you're learning it will help you with rhythm and detail.

Using acoustic guitar tabs to learn to play the guitar is a lot of fun. Before long, you'll have several songs you can play at parties to impress your friends, or just for your own pleasure.