Guitar Tablature: Helping People Rock for Over Five Hundred Years

What’s your instrument of choice? Electric guitar? Mandolin? Ukelele? Banjo? What all of these various instruments have in common is that they are played by fingering taut strings. They also share a common type of musical writing that is far easier to pick up than classical music notation for piano and symphonic instruments: guitar tablature.

Some musicians might like to believe tablature to be a modern invention to aid in learning acoustic or rock guitar, but it is actually quite old. It was given its start by those rock stars of five hundred years ago: the English lute players.

Guitar tablature is clever in its simplicity. It consists of six lines, each indicating a string on the instrument. The top line is for the thinnest string (the 1st string); the bottom line is for the deepest sounding string (the 6th string). Looking at it, it is easy to visualize the strings of a guitar. Instead of having to memorize all the things involved in classical music notation, you can simply look at tablature, take up your guitar, and know at once what to do. Small numbers between the lines on the tablature indicate what fret to play. It really is as easy as it sounds.

Knowing how to decode guitar tablature opens up a whole world of possibilities. You can easily pick up your favorite songs if you can find the tabs. Writing down any music that you compose could not be simpler, either. Finding and sharing tabs online is a plus for any musician, especially on sites that include videos and lessons and show in detail how difficult slides and fingerings are accomplished. Almost any musician you can imagine has guitar tabs on the internet for the taking.

Those English lute players couldn’t have predicted the future applications their musical shorthand would have. They were just looking for an easy way to share tunes. Whether you’re a big lute fan or not, you owe them a world of gratitude for simplifying music!