On Reading Guitar Tabs: How Tablature Can Harm Your Progress And Make You Give Up Playing Guitar
It’s frustrating to become ‘stuck in a rut’ with your guitar playing or realize that after all this time you still don’t know how to make your guitar playing sound like what you hear when you listen to your favorite guitar players. But have you ever considered that way that in which you learn might be affected by the insufficiency of the learning and notation systems you use in your practice?
A lot of people nowadays search the internet for guitar tabs, which is great. But you have to understand that these tabs are only a means to an end; some are even completely incorrect. The blues masters didn’t rely on tablature when they learned how to play. They listened to the music and applied what they learned, instead of jumping from one tab to the next. In this article we will use tablature as a way for you to grasp the concepts and try them out yourself, but remember that tablature isn’t written in stone, it’s just a way to communicate what is being played, in the end you should listen to the music. So let’s start exploring how guitar tabs can disrupt the learning process.
Missing Elements In Tablature
If you look at a blues song in tablature, then there are so many elements missing in the notation of the tabs. Take for instance a tab like the one below.
In the video below I’ll go over how to play this blues bass loop on guitar and give you some important tips and tricks to really get it down.
If you would be playing this straight from the tablature, then it would sound like what you hear in the sound example that you find through the above link. But it could well be that in the original recording of such a rhythm part there are many other things going on. We might have to use a whole different rhythm, different feeling, position, etc.
Take for instance the tablature from the example above. It could well be that the best way to play this is to make use of left hand muting, such as in the tab below:
Listen to this riff
Here I tabbed out the first three bars of our above example. As you can see in the tab, for every stroke we need to mute all the other strings. Now listen to the audio example from this tab. As you can hear, we are playing with a different feel and tone that wouldn’t be possible without the muting technique. Fact is that many guitar tabs will only show you the correct notes to play like in the first tablature, but will leave out important information like for instance the muting from the last example.
Use Your Ears
Listening is the most important thing. If you would only rely on the tab (such as the one from the first example above), then you wouldn’t even come close to the feeling and technique that is necessary to play the riff properly and would only sound amateurish.
This muting technique is only one of the hundreds of possible elements that can be missing from the tablature. If you want to play mature sounding blues guitar parts you need to develop great muting technique. But this ineffeciency of guitar tabs also applies to expression techniques such as vibrato and bending, as well as countless other techniques. These are techniques where you can’t only rely on tabs, because there are so many little alterations that are possible.
Learn How To Master Blues Guitar Playing