Intro

You will need to know how to read music if you want to play music that other people have written or if you want to write your own music. There are two types of music you can learn, tablature or notation. GLI will have examples that have both types but you should know how to read both of them.
The downfall to tab is that guitarists don’t get to see chord shapes like they would in regular notation music (the black dots). Also, since only guitar and bass players use tabs it is hard for a guitar player that has only used tabs to communicate with someone like a piano or horn player that uses notation.

Reading TAB

The good thing about tablature is that it is really easy to read. There are six lines, one for each string and there are numbers placed on the lines to show which frets to push down to play the piece at hand. The bottom line represents the lowest string on the guitar. The top line represents the highest string. If the numbers are on the bottom string it means the note is played on the lowest string of the guitar. When the numbers are stacked on top of each other it means to play a chord. Sometimes you will see that there are X’s stacked on top of each other instead of numbers, this means to mute the strings so that the notes do not sound and then strum them.

Time Signatures

Music can be divided up into small sections called measures. The examples in GLI will have measure numbers above the examples in red lettering. Measures are a way to organize music and show time signature. Each measure contains a certain amount of beats according to the time signature. Knowing what time signature we are in will help us to play the music at hand.

Time signature tells us how many notes we can fit into a measure before we have to start another one. If we didn’t have measures and time signature musicians would have a hard time playing together without getting lost in the music. Time signature gives us a predictable route within the music. Tab doesn’t have a real way of showing the time signature that the music is in, but in GLI there will be notation examples along with the tab so you can peer at the notation to see the time signature. Time sigs are shown as a fraction, like 4/4. This is the most common type of time signature. The number on top shows how many notes are in a measure and the number on the bottom will show how long those notes are. In the case of 4/4 there are 4 quarter notes in each measure. You will not have to know a lot of time signatures for now. Just stick with 4/4 until later.

In tab there are a lot of different symbols to know. Aside from lines and numbers there may be slanted lines between two numbers, this means to slide your finger on the fret board between frets instead of just fretting the next note. You can slide down and up depending on what the arrangement of notes is. There are also curved lines between notes that mean to play two notes but only pick the first one, this is called slurring, or hammer ons and pull offs.
At first this should feel like a ton of information. There are still a lot of different symbols, these will get you started on playing though. Like any new hobby or skill you learn, everything you read at first will seem very confusing and complicated.

Good luck!

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David Coates has been playing guitar his whole life, and is presently a team member of a Guitar Lessons for Free site. The site features free tools, lessons and resources for guitarists of all ages and stages. So if you are interested in learning to play guitar there will be an enormous variety of tip, tools and tutorials for you.