One of the languages of guitar music is tablature, often known simply as guitar tabs. Guitar tabs are quite easy to learn to read compared to conventional musical notation. If you decide to learn to read sheet music it will take a few weeks before you are beginning to make any sense out of it, and possibly a couple of months before you can read it fluently. Guitar tablature simply shows you where to put your fingers on the guitar fretboard.

You can download guitar tabs from the internet for your favorite songs or for material you need to begin to learn to play the guitar. There are lots of guitarists around who have never used any kind of written music. Some of them express regret that they never learned to read tab. Fortunately it is never too late to learn, anybody at any age or stage of guitar playing, can learn to read tab in half an hour. It might take a day or two to be fluent, but you get the basics almost as soon as they are explained to you.

You will hear stories from guitar players about how they spend hours and hours with their heads in the speakers of their record players or CD players learning to play riffs or songs by ear. The internet has given us a whole generation of guitar players and composers who are willing and able to share their knowledge with novice guitar players using guitar tabs. If you are a beginner guitar player you can download tabs for your favorite songs from the internet and begin playing them right away. All the hard work has been done by the guy who writes the tab. That's the way it is with guitar players. Each guitar player has his own way of playing, teaching, and learning.

Learning from guitar tabs helps guitar players with their own teaching methods to give their ideas to newbies who are still struggling. If you haven't yet learned to read guitar tabs, they are basically six horizontal lines which represent the strings of the guitar. It's as though you are looking at the guitar fretboard with the body of the guitar on your right and the head of the guitar on your left. The top line is the thin E string, and the bottom line is the thick E string. Along the lines are numbers which tell you which fret you need to place your fingers at to sound the notes.