Guitar Tabs

A guitar is a musical instrument. Playing the guitar depends in large part on structure. For playing the guitar, one has to understand the notes that make up a scale as well as the notes of the six individual strings. The notes are A, A# or Bb, B, C, C# or Db, D, Eb, E, F, F# or Gb, G and G# or Ab. Eight of these notes make a scale.

However, a guitar tab is a system of notations, letters, symbols and other visual representations, instead of the traditional musical notation. The sole purpose of a guitar tab is to give the direction to the player as to how to play a musical piece through a diagram of strings of the guitar.

Guitar tabs or a tablature consists of a diagram of strings of the guitar with finger positions indicated by numbers corresponding to the appropriate frets and sometimes with the numerical representations of the fingers.

If we track back the history of tablatures, it has been in practice in the Western world for the last six centuries. They were mostly a horizontal grid read from left to right with letters and numbers written over them signifying the construction of pitches, and rhythmic signs above. However, beginning in the 17th century various systems of tablatures existed in Germany, Italy, Spain and France. Nowadays tablatures, guitar tabs in particular, have vertical lines which represent the strings of the guitar, no matter what the guitar is. Horizontal lines are for the frets and dots signify the position of the figures.