Metal Guitar Resource

To begin, it is very important to understand guitar tablature. Tablature, or tabs, have been around since the Renaissance and are an "easier" way of reading music for guitar in simple terms. Tabs have prevailed and stood the test of time because they allow almost everything to be conveyed about a particular piece of music.
What tablature cannot do is effectively show timing and note length (although by using spacing you can simulate it, but sheet music is much more effective for this). It also cannot show a few techniques and style specific markings, and time signatures are usually absent from tabs, but overall tablature has proven itself to be a very effective tool for quickly looking at how a piece is constructed and enable yourself to play it very quickly. I myself cannot read sheet music and my work on this lens will be very tab-centric because of that.
Now, to begin the tab tutorial the first thing you need to know and understand is that tabs are set up with six strings being displayed visually with the smallest highest string on the guitar at the top of the tablature (also known as string 1 or in standard tuning, the string of high e). Next comes the 2nd string, in standard tuning it's the B string. It's slightly larger than the 1st string and plays at a lower octave. After that it's pretty much common sense, as the 3rd string (G, standard tuning) follows and the 4th (high d, standard tuning) 5th (A, standard tuning) and 6th (low E, standard tuning) finish up the makeup of the tab.
Visually, like this:
1st e |----------------------------------------------
2nd B|----------------------------------------------
3rd G|----------------------------------------------
4th D|----------------------------------------------
5th A|----------------------------------------------
6th E|----------------------------------------------

If you take your guitar in front of your computer screen and hold it so that the strings are facing you and the head stock (where the pegs that the strings wrap around are) is on the left then you have a visual representation of the tab.
When you actually want to play, you just have to invert the image while you switch from looking at the tab to the strings.

We've just gone over what tablature looks like, now you need to know how notes are going to look like when they are on the tab, that way you can play anything you see written down, and even begin tabbing music that you make up on your own.
Here's a tab with some notes on it, after you look at it, scroll down and they will be explained:
e|-------------------------------------0-1-3----
B|------------------------------0-1-3----------
G|-------------------------0-2-----------------
D|------------------0-2-3---------------------
A|-----------0-2-3----------------------------
E|----0-1-3-----------------------------------

What you have here is the basic scale of the guitar.
The notes are represented by the numbers on the tab, where 0 means playing the string without depressing any frets and any other number is the fret that you want to play. For example, the first lick you play out of this is on the low E string where you pluck it without touching the fret board, or neck, of the guitar and then you play the first fret, then the third. From there you go on to repeat that process (on slightly different frets) the whole way up the strings. You then want to repeat the process going back down as displayed below:
e|---3-1-0----------------------------------------
B|----------3-1-0--------------------------------
G|----------------2-0----------------------------
D|---------------------3-2-0---------------------
A|----------------------------3-2-0--------------
E|------------------------------------3-1-0------

This will give you good practice for scales and 6-string rolls, which aren't necessarily that common, but 3 or 4 string rolls are very common.
From now on, I will just show the downwards version of the scale, and you can learn it backwards. Annoying, but good practice for you!
If you get bored of that, try this, which is a Spanish scale, very exotic:
e|-----------------------------------------7-8---
B|--------------------------------7-8-10-------
G|---------------------------8-9----------------
D|------------------7-9-10---------------------
A|-------6-7-9-10-----------------------------
E|--7-8-----------------------------------------

To be perfectly honest with you becoming good at the guitar to the point where you can play most anything you find in a tab is a difficult goal. Ideally, once you get the hang of any specific riff or lick that you learn you should be able to just spend half an hour improvising and using that established music as a base for your own. I myself am somewhat close to this and can atone for how much fun it is to have the freedom of technical ability and creative freedom. I'm not going to try to deceive you or anything, I can't truly shred, at all. I can play some types of solos, but I'm nowhere near thrash metal quality, yet. What's important about this goal is not being able to sweep or speed pick any sort of insane shred run. What's important is to understand the basic concepts of technical articulation: hammer ons, pull offs, sliding, vibrato, bending and using the whammy bar. Other critical elements to this goal of playing ability is to understand when to play in position (refrain from moving hand up and down the neck) and when to solo one string (when you like it's sound versus other strings) and even things like string skipping or left hand muting. None of these techniques took me very long, and remember, I'm self taught, I didn't have much help getting there. Fingertapping is also a really good way to sound cool because, with practice, you can use it to play fast 3 note patterns. Creativity, however, combined with the learning of these techniques, is what will develop your style and make play guitar fun for you. Take tapping, for example, you can mess around with any combination of notes on it at different speeds, and then you can even try 4 or 5 finger tapping. Or you can simplify to 2 notes, and tap with the side of the pick for extra speed and switch note pairs really fast to make some awesome licks (Iron Maiden uses this technique extensively in "The Trooper"). You could even change the entire way you tap and do it backwards (open, low fret, high fret). That sort of thing is what's going to get people to consider you a "good" player early on. Just being able to experiment with things you spend time learning and perfecting can lead you to some sweet ideas. And thus, the biggest step you can take while you try to master all these "simple" techniques is to record stuff onto your computer. Every time you have an idea for something cool, or every time you just sit down to jam, stick a microphone (doesn't have to be super expensive or high quality) in front of your amp so you have proof of how awesome you are.
THIS IS REALLY IMPORTANT!! Okay? ^^^
That's about it, however. Just never stop working on these techniques before you have them down, as they make reading music and playing it so much easier and they really are essential to sounding "cool".

Upcoming Attractions
In the future I will be submitting tutorials and informational paragraphs concerning:
Chords
Double/Triple/Quadruple Stops/Power Chords
Guitar Tuning/Alternate Tunings
Alternate Picking
Bending
Sliding
Hammer Ons/Pull Offs
Sweep Picking
Tapping
Speed Picking
String Skipping
Pinching
Harmonics
Polyrythms
Palm Muting
Vibrato
Tremolo Picking
A couple small sections of popular songs
Some of my own music
Downloads for my own music
Links to useful and entertaining websites about the guitar
Link Farms for Individual artists and bands that I've been interested in during my musical era, meaning: Yngwie Malmsteen, Metallica, Trivium, Michael Angelo Batio, Bach, Iron Maiden, and many more%u2026
A Link Farm Guide to the best external resources that I've found myself, including websites and magazines

And hopefully by the end of it, you have some idea of where you're going with the instrument, what you can do, and what you'd like to do.

As this site unfolds and so do you as a guitarist, the most important thing to remember is that this stuff is hard, this stuff is very hard to start out on as a budding guitarist (which is what I did), and some of this stuff is going to take you years to learn and perfect. Be patient, become as creative as you can as you can and use what you can do to make cool stuff, record it, write it down, and try to monitor you progress so you can see that you actually are improving with every day of practice. Get help from every resource you can, websites, magazines, people, books. Look everywhere, listen to all the music you can, find your style, find the styles you like, and try so very hard not to be intimidated by other guitarists and the challenges you face. If you're having trouble and feel like you suck, go show off in front of someone who doesn't play guitar, show them what you can do and what you are learning, get compliments, and constructive criticism%u2026 you aren't bad, you're just you, and you're learning, and you've come a hella long way from where you started. This is a life long instrument, don't drop it in frustration when you can't play what you hear the same day.