When you're a beginning guitarist, fingerstyle guitar tablature can seem a little confusing. We're going look at just how acoustic guitar tablature works.

There are advantages and disadvantages to using acoustic guitar tab. We'll take a look at those and figure out how to best deal with them.

Guitar tab isn't a totally new invention. String instrument players as early as the 15th century used it.

The earliest tablature used letters and numbers to tell which notes to play. Modern guitar tablature just uses numbers.

There are a couple of different types of guitar tablature that are now used. They look different but do have some things in common.

For starters, the top line represents the 1st (smallest) string. The bottom line represents the 6th (largest) string. They both use numbers to tell you where to put your fretting fingers.

It's really as simple as that. Put your fingers on the strings where the numbers tell you to. Play those notes and you're playing the tab.

That's the main thing to take away in this guitar tab lesson.

Types Of Tab

One type is called ASC II. It uses numbers on a dotted line to tell you which notes to play.


The ASCII is actually a computer text file. You don't see this one used as much as you do the type below.

The guitar tab, below, is the type that is normally used in printed fingerstyle guitar tablature.

Pros & Cons

Anybody can look at a piece of fingerstyle guitar tablature and play the music that's on it. That's what makes tablature so great.

As helpful as guitar tab is, though, there's a downside to relying on it.

For starters, ocassionaly you"ll find that the tab just doesn't sound right. This usually happens because of a typo in the production of the tablature.

If you can read the musical notes on the staff above the tablature, you can figure it out.

The other downside is that the tab doesn't tell you how long to hold each note. If you already know the song, that's okay.

You're still okay if you can read the standard notation above the tab.

So, you might be able to see a theme developing here. To get the most out of guitar tab it helps to be able to read music.

A book like The Guitar Reading Workbook is a good way to teach yorself to read.

I hope that this guitar tab lesson is helpful.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me.

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