Most music notes contains a double staff: standard music notation on the top, tab on the bottom. The top stuff is for music readers or people interested in standard notation. The bottom stuff shows the same info (minus the rhythm) but in tab numbers. Here’s how the tab staff works.

The top line of the tab stall represents the top string of the guitar (high E). This positioning of the strings in the lab staff may momentarily confuse you, because the top string in the tab staff — the 1st — is actually the string closest to the floor as you hold the guitar in playing position. But trust us, the setup’s more intuitive this way, and after you make the adjustment, you never think about it again. By the way, if you hold the guitar flat on your lap, with the neck facing the ceiling, the 1st string is farthest away from you. Just as the top line is when you see the tab staff on the page.

Moving on, the second tab line from the top represents the 2nd string (B) and so on down to the bottom tab line, which represents the 6th (low E) string on the guitar.

In guitar tab, lines represent strings and numbers represent frets. Tab does not, however, tell you which left-hand fingers to use. (Neither does standard notation, for that matter.)

Just as in reading text or music, you start from the left and proceed to the right in reading lab. Begin with the first note, which you play at the first fret of the 2nd string. The placement of the tab number on the second line from the top tells you to play the B string — the one next to high E — and the number I tells you to place your linger at the first fret. Go ahead and play that note and then proceed to the next note, which is also on the 2nd string, first fret. Keep moving right, playing the notes in order, until you reach the end. The vertical lines that appear on the staff after every few notes are bar lines. They divide the staff into small units of time, called bars or measures. Measures help you count beats and break up the music into smaller units.

Do not get upset if something is going wrong. If you think that everybody can play like Jimmy Hendrix you are mistaken. All icon guitarists were born to become legends. They were gifted with a talent by the nature.

So, do not be in a hurry. Do not expect fast results. Just do your job and in several months you will be able to play simple tunes and songs. Be persistent.

If you decided to learn to play guitar, please start with the reviews of the guitar playing lessons. They will guide you through possible problems and mistakes that people who want to learn to play guitar often make.

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As you listen to complicated-sounding guitar music played by virtuoso guitarists, you may imagine their left hands leaping around the fretboard with abandon. But usually, il you watch those guitarists on stage or TV, you discover that their left hands hardly move at all. Those guitarists are playing in position.

Playing in position means that your left hand remains in a fixed location on the neck with each finger more or less on a permanent assignment to a specific fret, and your fourth finger plays the eighth fret gets its name from the fret that your first finger play.

Why play in position? Why not use open position and open strings all the time? We can give you two key reasons:

* It’s easier to play high-note melodies. Playing In open position allows you to play only up to the fourth or filth fret. If you want to play higher than that, position playing enables you to play the notes smoothly and economically.

* You can instantly transpose any pattern or phrase that you know in position to another key simply by moving your hand to another position. Because position playing involves no open strings, everything you play in position is movable.

People have the idea that playing guitar in lower positions is easier than playing in higher ones. The higher notes actually aren’t harder to play: they’re just harder to read in standard notation it you don’t gel too far in a conventional method book (where reading high notes is usually saved till last). But here, you’re not focusing on music reading but on guitar playing — so go for the high notes whenever you want.

Playing exercises in position

The major scale (you know, the familiar do-re-me-fa-sol-la-si-do sound you get by playing the white keys on the piano starting from C) is a good place to start practicing the skills you need to play in position.

P laying rock ‘n’ roll guitar is arguably the most fun that you can have with an inanimate object in your hands. With the volume turned up and your adrenaline flowing, nothing’s quite like laying down a chunking rhythm or ripping through a searing lead to screaming, adoring fans — or even to your own approving smile coming back at you from the mirror. All you need to do is figure out how to play a couple of simple patterns and you can be gyrating like Elvis, duck-walking like Chuck Berry, and windmilling like Pete Townshend in no time.

Stripped of all bravado and showmanship, rock guitar is just like any other guitar style. You absorb it in simple, easy steps and then practice, practice, practice until it conies naturally. After you pick up some rhythm and lead passages and get the techniques down, the real work begins: standing in front of a mirror and perfecting your moves.

Is it realistic to learn to play guitar? Well, all the guitar playing “gurus” have started somewhere and at certain period of time they have been students as well. So, if you want to learn to play guitar, then you should better build your question like this, “Where can I learn to play guitar with the best results for me?” And this is when the links that you see can help – they will send you to the site with guitar lessons reviews.

Accompanying yourself as you sing your favorite songs — or as someone else sings them if your voice is less than melodious — is one of the best ways to pick up basic guitar chords. II you know how to play basic chords, you can play lots of popular songs right away — from “Skip to My Lou” to “Louie Louie.”

In this article, we organize the major and minor chords into families. A family of chords is simply a group of related chords. We say they’re related because you often use these chords together to play songs. The concept is sort of like color-coordinating your clothing or assembling a group of foods to create a balanced meal. Chords in a family go together like peanut butter and chocolate (except that chords in a family are less messy). Along the way, we help you expand your guitar notation vocabulary as yon start to develop your chord-playing and strumming skills.

Think of a family of chords as a plant. If one of the chords — the one that feels like home base in a song (usually the chord you start and end a song with) — Is the plants root, the other chords in the family are the different shoots rising up from that same root. Together, the root and shoots make up the family. Put ‘em all together and you have a lush garden … er, make that a song by the way. The technical term for a family is key so you can say some-thing like “This song uses A-family chords of “This song is in the key of A”

Playing chords can be a little painful at first. (We mean for you, not for people within earshot; c’mon, we’re not that cruel.) No matter how tough you are, if you’ve never played the guitar before, your left-hand fingertips are soft. Fretting a guitar string, therefore, is going to feel to your fingertips almost as if you’re hammering a railroad spike with your bare hand. Ouch!

In short, pressing down the string hurts. This situation isn’t weird at all — in fact, it’s quite normal for beginning guitarists. (Well, it’s weird if you enjoy the pain). You must develop nice, thick calluses on your fingertips before playing the guitar can ever feel completely comfortable. You may take weeks or even months to build up those protective layers of dead skin, depending on how much and how often you play. But after you finally earn your calluses, you never lose them.

Do not expect to become Jimmy Hendrix in a month. For some people it takes several years to play guitar. Remember, that all skillful guitar players are naturally gifted. They were born to become guitar gurus. So, do not get upset if you cannot play like Joe Satriani.

Is it possible to learn to play guitar? Well, all the guitar playing icons have started somewhere and at certain period of time they have been students as well. So, if you want to learn to play guitar, then you should better put your question like this, “Where can I learn to play guitar with maximum effect for me?” And this is when the links that you see can help – they will send you directly to the site with guitar lessons reviews.

It may sound obvious to say that the more you practice the better you’ll get, but it it true. However, perhaps even more important is this concept: The more you practice, the faster you’ll get good. Although there’s no set amount of practice time for “getting good,” a good rule of thumb is to practice at least 30 minutes every day. Also, it’s generally agreed that practicing at regular intervals is better than jamming a week’s worth of time, say, 3 hours) all into one practice session.

If at first you find a new technique difficult to master, stick with it, and you’ll eventually get the hang of it. To get even better on the guitar, we suggest the following:

* Set aside a certain time every day for practicing.

* Get together with your guitar-playing friends, and get them to listen to what you’re doing.

* Create a practice environment where you have privacy, away from distractions (TV, conversations, your mother bugging you to come to dinner, and so on).

• Watch videos of guitar players who play the kind of music you like and that you’d like to learn.
• Use guitar books

Most guitar books present melodies as a way to teach you to read music. In fact, the primary goal of most guitar books isn’t to teach you to play guitar in the real world but to teach music reading through the guitar. The difference is significant.

If you pick up guitar playing through a book, you can eventually play nursery-rhyme ditties in perfect quarter and hall notes. But if you learn to play as most guitar players do — through friends showing you licks or by using your ear — you can come away playing “Smoke on the Water,” “Sunshine of Your love,” “Blackbird”.

If you cannot read notes you can use tablatures.

Numbers on the tablature (or tab) staff tell you which frets on which strings to finger with your left hand. A 0 indicates an open string. By listening to the CD, you can hear when to play these notes. And just to be safe, thorough, and completely redundant, we also include the standard notation for the following reasons:

* For people who read music already.
* For people who want to gradually pick up the skill of music reading (at least by osmosis if not rigorous study) by listening to the CD and following along with the rhythm notation

Finally, you can use YouTube. Do not only watch your favorite guitar players and bands. YouTube is also full of tutorials. It is very easy to learn when someone shows you how to play your favorite songs and this person does it slowly for you to understand.

If you made up your mind to learn to play guitar, please start with the reviews of the guitar playing lessons. They will help you to get through possible problems and mistakes that people who want to learn to play guitar often make.

So, start your journey to learn to play guitar here.