Learning Guitar: How to Read Guitar Tablature

By Dan Cross, About.com Guide

The following tutorial will help to explain to you the basic concept of reading guitar tab. Although it may seem complex, learning to read tab is quite simple, and you should find yourself reading tab easily in no time.

Guitarists are a unique breed. Chances are, if you play guitar, you are either self-taught, or have taken a small number of lessons via a friend or guitar teacher. If you were a pianist, however, you would have learned the instrument through years of private study, which would include both music theory lessons, and heavy focus on sight reading.

Nothing wrong with taking the more informal approach to learning music, but it does create some inherent problems when it comes to laborious duties like learning to read music. Learning to sight read takes a reasonable amount of work, without immediate benefit, and it is these sort of skills that self-taught musicians tend to avoid.

It's never too late to learn to read music... if you want to get serious about a career in the music industry, it really is essential. However, guitarists have created their own method of music notation, guitar tablature which, while admittedly flawed, provides a simple and easy to read way of sharing music with other guitarists.
 

A tab staff for guitar has 6 horizontal lines, each one representing a string of the instrument. The bottom line of the staff represents your lowest "E" string, the second line from the bottom represents your "A" string, etc. Easy enough to read, right?

Notice that there are numbers located smack dab in the middle of the lines (aka strings). The numbers simply represent the fret the tab is telling you to play. For example, in the illustration above, the tab is telling you to play the third string (third line) seventh fret.

Note: When the number "0" is used in tablature, this indicates that the open string should be played.

INSTRUCTION : Deconstructing Sus Chords Lesson

by acousticguitar.com

Learn the easy music theory behind chord suspension and resolution. With tab. By Matt Warnock

Suspended chords, or “sus chords” as they are better known, are somewhat of an enigma in the realm of modern harmony. They float between the worlds of major and minor chords, somehow sounding like they can function in any harmonic situation, regardless of key or tonality. They are at once full and heavy sounding (mostly a result of the perfect-fifth interval they contain), while at the same time open-ended and harmonically ambiguous, due to the lack of a major or minor third.

In this article, we’ll take a look at how sus chords are constructed and show how you can begin playing sus2 and sus4 chord voicings beyond open position.
Open-Position Sus Chords

In classical harmony, the word suspended originally referred to situations where a note from one chord was sustained while the rest of the voices changed to a new chord, as shown in Example 1. These days, musicians use the term a bit more loosely, referring to chords in which the third (major or minor) is replaced by the second or fourth note of the scale and often (though not always) resolves back to
the major or minor third.

Example 2 shows a couple of simple Dsus chord voicings in open-position. Notice that the F# (the third of the D-major scale) is replaced by the open E string (the second) in the sus2 chord and the third-fret G note (the fourth) in the sus4 chord. The resolution back to the third is common, as heard in the standard D-major chords in this example, although sus chords can stand on their own and don’t always require a resolution.

Many common open-position sus chords can be built in this manner—simply replace the third of the chord with either the second for a sus2 (Example 3a) or the fourth for a sus4 (Example 3b). Take a minute to play each of the chords in Example 3, and alternate between each sus2 and sus4 voicing and its major-chord cousin to get these sounds flowing through your ears and under your fingers.   Example 4 shows a common I–IV–V–I chord progression in the key of D that features sus2 and sus4 chords resolving to major chords on the third beat of each measure. This example is written as an arpeggiated line, but the progression could just as easily be strummed—the important thing to notice is the open sound that each sus chord makes before it resolves to the more stable sound of the major triad.