How to Read Guitar Tabs: Every Symbol Explained

A tab staff has six horizontal lines, one per string. The part that confuses every beginner: the top line is the thinnest string (high e), the one closest to the floor when you hold the guitar. The bottom line is the thick low E. Many tabs print the tuning letters at the left edge, so a tab in drop D shows a D on the bottom line instead of an E.

A number on a line tells you which fret to press on that string. 0 means play the string open. 3 means press the third fret. Read left to right, exactly like text.

Bass tab works the same way with four lines (G D A E from top to bottom), and seven or eight line tabs are for extended range guitars. The rule never changes: one line per string, highest string on top.

When several numbers sit in the same vertical column, you play those strings at the same time. A tall stack across five or six lines is a strummed chord. Two or three numbers stacked is a partial chord or a double stop.

An open C major chord in tab reads, from low string to high: 3 2 0 1 0, with the low E string left out. Once you have seen a few of these, you recognise chord shapes at a glance instead of reading each number. A string with no number in the column is not played; an x in the column means mute it.

Most symbols in a tab describe what your fretting hand does between two notes. The letters in plain text tabs are shorthand that varies from one writer to the next; tabs made in notation software draw the same ideas with arcs, lines and arrows, as in the chart below.

Two details trip people up. The number after a bend is the pitch to reach, not a fret you touch: 7b9 means press fret 7 and push the string until it sounds like fret 9. Notation software writes the same bend as an arrow labelled full (two frets, one whole step) or ½ (one fret). And a slide drawn with an arc as well as a line (a legato slide) gets one pick stroke, while a plain slide is picked again on the second note.

The next group tells your picking hand what to do. P.M. with a dashed line means palm muting: rest the edge of your picking hand on the strings by the bridge for every note under the line. The note keeps its pitch but sounds short and dark. A number in round brackets is a ghost note, played much quieter than the notes around it.

Strum arrows are the symbol most often read backwards. In tab a downstrum is drawn as an arrow pointing up, because the pick travels from the low E on the bottom line toward the high e on the top line. The small ⊓ and V marks above single notes are pick directions: ⊓ is a downstroke, V an upstroke.

Plain text tab shows which notes to play but not how long each one lasts. Tabs made in notation software carry the rhythm, either as stems under the tab numbers or, as on a Tabtify tab, in a standard notation staff printed above the tab. You read the fret from the tab line and the timing from the note directly above it.

Rhythm is counted in beats. Bars split the music into equal groups of beats, and the time signature at the start says how many: the top number is beats per bar, the bottom number is which note gets one beat. In 4/4, the most common, there are four quarter-note beats per bar.

Vertical bar lines split the tab into bars. A thick bar line with two dots facing inward marks the start of a repeat, and the same sign facing back marks the end: play everything between them again, then carry on. With no opening sign, go back to the start of the song.

First and second endings are brackets over the last bars of a repeated part. The first time through, play the bars under bracket 1. On the repeat, skip them and jump to bracket 2. A short first bar with fewer beats than the time signature is a pickup bar: the notes lead into the first full beat, the way a sung line can start before the first strong beat. The tempo mark over the first bar gives the speed in beats per minute.

Dynamics are written under the staff as Italian abbreviations, from pp (very soft) through p, mp, mf and f to ff (very loud). A long opening wedge (crescendo) means get gradually louder; a closing wedge (diminuendo) means get softer. A fermata, an arc with a dot over a note, means hold it longer than written.

Accents (>) and heavy accents (^) mean hit that note harder; a dot over the note head (staccato) means cut it short. On a Tabtify tab these three appear on the notation staff, so they are easy to miss if you only look at the tab line. Wah marks sit above the tab: o for an open pedal, + for a closed one.

Bass tab uses the same rules on four lines, G on top and the low E at the bottom; a five-string bass adds a B line under the E. Two letters appear in bass tab and almost nowhere else. S means slap: strike the string with the side of your thumb. P means pop: hook a finger under the string and snap it against the frets. An x with S is a muted slap, a percussive thump with no pitch. The full guide to reading bass tab covers 5-string tabs, slap notation and the patterns bass lines are built from.

If a bass line has no tab anywhere, an audio to bass tab converter gives you a starting draft to correct by ear.

Text tabs on forums and lyric sites are typed in a fixed-width font, so they can only carry fret numbers and letters. They leave the rhythm to your ear, which is why most players learn from them with the recording playing alongside. Guitar Pro and MusicXML files store the timing of every note, so the tab can play back in time and you can hear a bar before you try it.

Some songs have no tab at all. Tabtify can make one from a recording: the result opens as an editable tab with rhythm and plays back against the original audio. Treat it as a draft. A clean solo instrument comes out closest; a full band mix usually needs a few notes moved by ear.

Reading tab is a skill you build in days, not months. Pick one riff you already know by sound, because knowing how it should sound lets your ear correct your reading. Play it from the tab at half speed, saying the string and fret out loud on the hard beats. Then add one symbol at a time from the charts above: the hammer-ons first, then the slides, then the bends.

Once, do the reverse: take four bars you can already play and write them down as tab, on paper or in a free online tab maker. Writing tab forces you to choose a symbol for every sound, and it fixes the string-to-line mapping faster than reading alone.