Reading guitar TAB is easy, you just need to keep this picture in your mind:
The numbers are the frets, and the lines going across are your strings. Play the right number (fret) on the correct string, and you can’t go wrong.
Much Respect,
The Musician’s Toolbox
There are scores of easy songs to learn as long as you have some common chords memorized. Here’s a short list with easy down strum patterns:
1.) Boulevard Of Broken Dreams–Green Day
VERSE: Em, G, D, A strum each chord twice
CHORUS: C, G, D, Em strum each chord twice
–end of chorus is the B7 chord.
2.) Island In The Sun–Weezer
VERSE: Em, Am, D, G strum each one twice
CHORUS: same
BRIDGE: D to G (4x each), D to G again (4x each) C 4x, Am 4x, D 8x
then back to chorus.
3.) Brown Eyed Girl–Van Morrison (simple down strums, not the actual strum pattern)
VERSE: G, C, G, D strum each chord twice
Pre-Chorus: (the … “do you remember when” part) D strum 6x
CHORUS: (sha la la’s) G, C, G, D strum each chord twice.
Remember when you’re trying to switch chords, don’t stop strumming. Make your strumming hand tell your other hand what to do, NOT the other way around. You may make mistakes, and it may feel awkward, but ultimately, keeping a steady beat is more important than playing all the right notes all the time.
Much Respect,
The Musician’s Toolbox
Good question.
An electric guitar has pickups. They’re mounted between the end of the neck (where the frets get really really small) and the bridge, (where the strings are stretched from at the base of your guitar).
These pickups are actually electro-magnets that produce a magnetic field around your strings. (Remember, the strings are metal, right?)
So, when you pluck the string, and it vibrates up and down really fast, the metal string is creating “vibrations” in the magnetic field. It’s these vibrations that are transmitted through your pickups as a signal that goes to your amp.
This signal is very weak, but it’s there. Your amp takes that signal and force feeds it a Red Bull, Monster, And Double Shot Espresso all at the same time, and gets it full of energy, therefore making it louder.
Then that louder signal gets passed to your speaker (which is a big magnet attached to a cone), and the speaker vibrates that SAME signal from your string, only now it’s loud enough to annoy your mom, or your neighbors.
That’s it in a nutshell.
Much Respect,
The Musician’s Toolbox
The standard tuning for the guitar, starting with the top string (which is your thickest string), is E, A, D, G, B, E. When you learn guitar chords, the reason that they sound the way they do is because of this tuning. That’s why when your strings are out of tune (either too tight or too loose), your guitar can sound like a train wreck, and people run away from you as you play.
There are alternate tunings for the guitar, the most common of which is called “Dropped D” tuning. To get to Dropped D tuning, simply loosen your top string, E, down a step in the musical alphabet to D.
Sidenote: if you don’t know about the musical alphabet, it’s — A, B, C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C, D, E, F, G with the sounds getting higher as you go forwards. If you look at E in the chain of notes, notice that D comes before E, therefore D is a lower sound, and that’s why they call it “Dropped D,” because it’s literally lower in sound.
There’s also tunings where you take EVERY string and lower it by a step in the musical alphabet, so E becomes D, A becomes G, D becomes C, etc.
Here’s a list of alternate tunings you can experiment with, you’ll need a guitar tuner! Remember the first letter in the series is your TOP string, the thickest string. You’ll have to think about how to get to the letter. If you start with an E, you’ll be going LOWER to get to C, because the alphabet is A, B, C, D, E, F, G. Notice that C is two steps LOWER than E. Give it a try!
Open C: C, G, C, G, C, E
Open D: D, A, D, F#, A, D
Modal D: D, A, D, G, A, D
Open D Minor: D, A, D, F, A, D
Open G: D, G, D, G, B, D
Modal G: D, G, D, G, C, D
Open G Minor: D, G, D, G, A#, D
Open A: E, A, C# E, A, E
The word “open” in this case means that all of your strings are tuned to sound like a nice chord without having to put your fingers down on any of the frets. Modal is a word in music theory that basically means a shift in starting position in the alphabet. So, instead of starting on A, you could rewrite the alphabet like this, F, G, A, B, C, D, E
Much Respect,
The Musician’s Toolbox
It may be said that the French Revolution was the “real” revolution, and that, to be sure, the world was never the same following the events that transpired during the 18th Century. This article will explore the na-
Ha ha! Gotcha!
What are you doing reading this???!!!
Go practice!
Tongue-In-Cheek,
The Musician’s Toolbox
