How to Read Guitar Music in 5 minutes!
Updated: Apr 8, 2022
Have you ever attempted to play a song you like on guitar and struggled to make it sound good? Or maybe you bought a guitar with plans to learn how to play it, then let it sit in the corner. This article will help you learn how to read music so that you can learn to play your favorite songs!
There are two types of guitar music that you will generally find when looking up guitar music: Chord Charts and Tablature (Tabs).
Chord Charts
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFN47dlUh7M (Links to an external site.)
Chord charts are essentially a drawing of the guitar with dots where you can put your fingers. The vertical lines represent the guitar strings and the horizontal lines represent the guitar frets. Most songs will have guitar chords available for free on sites like https://www.ultimate-guitar.com/ (Links to an external site.)
or https://www.songsterr.com/ (Links to an external site.)
But you have to know how to read the
se guitar chords first. One disadvantage chord charts is that it doesn't tell you the exact strumming pattern or specific notes to pluck. This is where guitar tabs comes in.
Tablature or TABS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1rlrXpH3ro (Links to an external site.)
The other kind of guitar music that is very common is tablature. With this guitar music, the horizontal lines represent the guitar strings where the numbers represent which fret to push your finger down.
This kind of guitar music helps you learn how to play a song more exact because it will tell you each individual note that the song plays on the guitar. The disadvantage of this type of guitar music is that it can be more complicated to understand than chord charts.
If you are wanting to learn how to play guitar, both types of guitar music would be beneficial to learn, however, both types will help you to play the songs you love to listen to!
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