Reading and Writing Guitar Tablature

What is TAB

TAB or tablature is a method of writing down music played on guitar or bass. Instead of using symbols like in standard musical notation, it uses ordinary ASCII characters and numbers, making it ideal for places like the internet where anybody with any computer can link up, copy a TAB file, and read it.

What TAB will tell you

TAB will tell you what notes to play - it will tell you which string to hit and which fret to fret it at.
TAB will tell you where hammer-ons, pull-offs, bends, slides, harmonics and vibrato are used.

TAB will tell you what tuning the piece is in. If this isn't given explicitly, assume normal tuning. TAB should also give you information on use of capos etc.

TAB will give you an indication of the ryhthm of the piece - i.e it will tell you which are the long notes and which are the short notes.

However it will not tell you exactly how long or how short they are.

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What TAB won't tell you

TAB will (usually) not tell you the note lengths of the notes - so in most cases you will have to listen to the song yourself, with the TAB in front of you to work out the ryhthm of the notes.
TAB will not tell you which fingers you use to fret which note.

TAB will (usually) not tell you anything about picking and strumming - you will have to decide for yourself where to use upstrokes/downstrokes and so on.

Reading TAB

TAB notation - the basics

TAB is simple to read, and should be simple to write if you want to submit a song you have worked out yourself. The idea is this :
You start out with 6 lines (or four for bass). These correspond to the strings of the instrument. The top line is the highest pitch string, and the bottom line is the lowest pitch string. Below is a blank bit of TAB with the string names at the left.

E - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
B - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
G - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
D - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
A - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
E - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -