Guitar tabs are the quickest way for you to get started playing music on your guitar. Tabs are a simple written form of music that many guitar players of a wide range of genres use. So your first step in learning to play guitar music is to learn to read tabs. It's not difficult, the lines you see on the paper represent the six strings of the guitar and the numbers are the frets where you place your fingers to play the notes. If you get the guitar tabs for a song that you are familiar with and try to play the melody line you will get the hang of it in no time. Get the tabs for a really simple song like Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.

You should also have some chord charts to learn the accompaniment for songs. The charts are diagrams of chords as they appear on the six strings of the guitar. You can find guitar tabs for chords but often they are pictures of the guitar strings with dots at the frets where your are supposed to put your fingers. Essential chords for learning easy to play guitar tabs are C, G, A, E, E minor and D. Just as a guide, E, C, G and A minor are very easy open chords to learn. A and D need a little more dedication and B and F are in introduction to barre chords.

For a beginner guitar tabs that are easy to play can be found amongst the songs of Oasis, Nirvana, Black Sabbath and Green Day. Also you would do well to search the songs of Bob Dylan or The Beatles. You can just type the title of the song or the name of the artist along with "guitar tabs". A lot of the tabs have lyrics as well which will help you to understand the tabs if you are just starting out. Here are some suggestions for guitar oriented songs that are easy to play: Wild Thing, Iron Man, Smoke On The Water, War On War, California Stars, Big Dipper and Magic Trick.

When we think of tabs we usually mean tabs written using a simple text editor like Notepad but there are also guitar tabs written for tab editing programs like GuitarPro, Powertab or TablEdit. These three programs can be downloaded for free as trials. There is no limit on how long the software works for but some functions are disabled. The advantage of using tab editing software is that the program plays the tabs for you as a MIDI file so you can follow the tabs much more easily.