For Beginners*

So, since I've already posted about some of the anatomy of the guitar, I thought I'd start to get to the interesting stuff. I'm not going to get into any of the actual guitar playing today (next time will be about playing chords), but this is a nice starting point for someone who's never picked up a guitar before.

The first thing to know about guitars is the strings: on a typical guitar, there are six strings, with the lowest pitched one at the top, and the highest pitched one at the bottom (a little counter-intuitive, but it makes sense once you start playing). The order of the strings by note is EADGBe, in ascending order (the last one is always listed as lower case to distinguish it from the first string. It's generally referred to as "high e"). I'll talk about tuning in a later post, but for now, let's get into how to read music. I've said before that guitarists don't have to learn to read sheet music. If you can, that's great, and it probably gives you access to more songs, but it's not necessary. I started off as a violinist myself, but I was never good at sight-reading.

Guitar music is laid out in "tabs", which are great because they tell you exactly where your fingers need to go, and on which strings. There are two types of tabs: finger-picking tabs, and chord tabs. Finger-picking is for playing individual notes, and chords are synonymous to strumming. A typical finger-picking tab will look something like this:

(Intro tab for The Freshmen by The Verve Pipe)
e|------------0-----------|--------------3-|------------------------|----------------|
B|------3-------------3--|------0---------|-----------3-----------|-----------0---|
G|----2---2-------2-----|---0-----0-----|------4-------4---4---|------0--------|
D|--0--------------------|-----------------|----4---4-------4-----|----0---0-----|
A|------------------------|-----------------|--2--------------------|----------------|
E|------------------------|-3--------------|------------------------|--3------------|
The first "measure" is plucked like this: open D string, second fret on G, third fret on B, second fret on G, etc. Sometimes the spacing is nice enough to tell you something about the tempo, but more often than not its a lot of listening to the song, and trial and error.

The second way songs are played is as chords. These can be laid out in a similar manner to tabs:

(Chords for Swing Life Away by Rise Against)
G:  e|3     Cadd9: e|3     Em7: e|3     D5: e|3     A5: e|3
     B|3                 B|3              B|3           B|3           B|3
     G|0                G|0              G|0          G|2           G|0
     D|0                D|2              D|2          D|0            D|2
     A|2                A|3               A|2          A|x            A|0
     E|3                 E|x               E|0           E|x           E|x

These appear at the beginnings of tabs, and will tell you every chord used in the song. When notes are listed one under another in a tab, that means those strings are strummed at the same time. If an "x" appears, like in the Cadd9 chord, that string isn't played (not a crucial distinction for most chords). As you can see though, alignment is crucial for this method-- if the font changes, everything has to be readjusted. Hence, I tend to prefer this method:

(Chords for Breathe 2am by Anna Nalick, as shown in the last post)
Aadd9 - (xx7650)
G - (355433) or (320033)
D - (xx0232)
A - (x02220)
Bm - (x24432)

These tell you the placement of your fingers, same as above, with the strings in order from lowest pitch to highest pitch (example: the first chord, Aadd9, is played with the high e string open).

Regardless of how chords are presented, the rest of the song will appear as such:

Aadd9 (xx7650)                                                      G
Yeah, we walk through the door so accusing their eyes
                                                     D
Like they have any right at all to criticize
                                                                    Aadd9
Hypocrites you're all here for the very same reason

...with the chord name appearing where it is strummed during the lyrics. Whenever I post a video of myself playing (like my last post), I will always include a (mostly) correct tab, so you can try to follow along where the chords change. Again, alignment can be an issue here, and sometimes I myself am too lazy to adjust the tabs if I can remember where to change chords. This is why videos are so great-- you can very easily see where chords change.

When I started playing, I tended to prefer tabs to chord charts, in a manner like this:

(Intro tab for Tomorrow by Avril Lavigne)
      G          Em7                         Cadd9
e|--3-3---3-3-3-3--3-3-3---3-3--3-3--x-x--3-3--3-3--
B|--3-3---3-3-3-3--3-3-3---3-3--3-3--x-x--3-3--3-3--
G|--0-0---0-0-0-0--0-0-0---0-0--0-0--x-x--0-0--0-0--
D|--0-0---2-2-2-2--2-2-2---2-2--2-2--x-x--2-2--2-2--
A|--2-2---2-2-2-2--2-2-2---3-3--3-3--x-x--3-3--3-3--
E|--3-3---0-0-0-0--0-0-0---x-x--x-x--x-x--x-x--x-x--

This tells you exactly where to place your fingers, and how many times to strum. Sometimes notation like this (^) and (v) will also be used to tell you which ones are upstrokes and which ones are downstrokes. I found this easier to read at first, because I wasn't familiar with any of the chords. When you become more familiar with the common chords (the ones I tend to use most are G, D, C, A, and E), you may begin to prefer the lyrics with chords.

I think that's about all I have to say on reading music for now. Hopefully this will make my future tips easier to understand. Next, I'll get to physically playing the guitar, so you can start to build up strength in your hands, and work on some of your favourite songs.

-Kal