Reading Chord Diagrams and Guitar Tab

Chord diagrams and tablature (tab) are the two notation systems you'll run into constantly as a beginner — far more often than standard sheet music. They're both visual shorthand for "put your fingers here," and once the logic clicks, you can read a brand-new chord or lick almost instantly.

What you'll need

• Any chord chart or tab sheet (printed or on-screen) to follow along with
• Your guitar, to physically try shapes as you read them

Steps

1. Orient yourself on a chord diagram. It's a small grid representing the first few frets of the guitar, drawn as if the guitar were standing upright in front of you. The six vertical lines are strings (low E on the left, high E on the right), and the horizontal lines are frets, with the thick top line representing the nut.

2. Read the dots and numbers. A dot on the grid shows where to press a string down, and the number inside or below it tells you which finger to use (1 = index, 2 = middle, 3 = ring, 4 = pinky). An "O" above a string means play it open (unfretted); an "X" means don't play that string at all.

3. Check for a barre. A curved or straight line connecting several dots on the same fret means one finger — usually the index — presses down multiple strings at once. This shows up constantly once you start learning barre chords.

4. Switch to tab and find your bearings. Tab uses six horizontal lines just like a chord diagram's strings, but stretched out to show a sequence over time, read left to right like text. The bottom line is the low E string and the top line is the high E string — the reverse of how the strings are physically stacked, which trips up a lot of beginners at first.

5. Read the numbers on tab as frets, not fingers. A "3" sitting on the low E line means "play the 3rd fret of the low E string." A "0" means play that string open. Numbers stacked vertically at the same point in time mean play those notes together, as a chord.

6. Learn the handful of technique symbols you'll see constantly: a curved line between two numbers is a hammer-on or pull-off, "b" means bend, "/" and "\" mean slide up or down, and "~" after a note means vibrato. You don't need to memorize all of these at once — look them up the first few times you hit one, and they'll stick.