Alternate Picking and Reading TAB

Alternate picking means when you play a string, you first play a downward motion, as you’ve done in the previous exercises, starting with your plectrum above the string you want to play and playing it downwards.

Then the next note is played with an up stroke:

From this:

To this:

An so on: so your pattern would go like this:

Note: 1   2   3   4   5   6 

         ▼ ▲ ▼ ▲ ▼ ▲ etc 

     (down) (up) (down) (up) (down) (up)

Exercise 8:

Play Exercise 4 with your finger in the first fret of the thinnest E string, but now play it over and over again using the above technique.

Exercise 9:

Just as you did before, now do it on the B string, then the G, D, A and thickest E strings.

Don’t progress until you’ve got a good understanding and can play the above exercise with clarity.

Part 2 : Reading Tab

You may have heard of guitarists talking about guitar tablature, or tab. It’s basically an easy way of reading guitar notes and songs without knowledge of reading music (or those dreaded dots as some people call it). Guitarists are lucky as they have developed a nice little simple system where it doesn’t take long to start reading tab.

Example of Tab:


Once you know how to read tab, a world of music will open unto you. There are advantages and disadvantages to using tab so most guitar magazines and books have combined traditional music notation and tab together as seen on the next page:

At this stage we are only concerned about reading the notes correctly. In future (as you will notice in guitar mags) there is more signs and things that help the guitarist know which techniques to use and how to play the notes. But let’s just take it one day at a time and get you to understand what we mean.

Look at figure 1 below, for now just ignore the top line (the musical notation) and just concentrate on the TAB.

Exercise 10:



These horizontal lines represent your guitar strings. Yes, there are six lines just as you’ve got six strings. Now: TAKE NOTE: The top string on the page, ie: string/line 1 is your thinnest E string on your guitar, the one closest to the floor. You may think that’s the wrong way round, however, if you pear over your guitar, you’re basically seeing your guitar upside down and that string then becomes the top string or another way to remember that the thinnest E string is on top, is to lie your guitar flat on the floor and the music as below. You’ll see now they are on the same side.

The letters represent the frets on your guitar, your fret nearest the head of the guitar is fret 1, eg

                                                  Fret:         5      4        3         2         1

So therefore, on our example above, you play the highest E string in the second fret:

Each time it’s written represents one time of playing therefore. Exercise 10 is played once.

Next time we'll expand on this subject and get you to play a few more notes.

Notes, Strings and Tuning

Ok, before we can start learning how to play the guitar, we need to make sure our guitars are in tune. That means that each string is individually set to a defined tone or pitch. Now, before we get into that let’s just make sure you are up to speed with basic music theory.

As you know, music has different notes, those different notes each have a different pitch, that’s what gives the music it’s melody or tune so it doesn’t sound like one sound. Music uses the alphabetic letters A, B, C, D E, F and G. There are also a few notes in between them but for now, each note on a guitar, piano, trumpet, violin etc is either an A, B, C, D, E, F or G. For fun, find a piano or keyboard a press any white note. That note will be one of the above notes.

Therefore, it would make sense that the 6 strings on our guitar are each individually set to one of these notes. There is a standard way of setting the strings, ie tuning the strings. There are other ways which you can investigate yourself once you have been playing for a while.

The standard tuning on a guitar working from the top, thickest string is E, the next one is A, then D, then G, then B then E again. Yes, the thinnest string on your guitar is also an E string.

I’d definitely recommend buying a good quality guitar tuner. The reason for this that there is nothing worse than trying to learn the guitar on a guitar that is out of tune. Everything you try will sound wrong or awful and thus putting you off. So it’s imperative that you invest in this little gadget. As all tuners work a bit differently we won’t go into tuning the guitar with a tuner here. The best is to ask the sales person how to tune the guitar using that tuner and choose one that you’re comfortable with and is easy to use. On your AUDIO is the “tuning notes” where each string is played separately from each other (starting with the thickest string and each string is played twice for you). Experienced guitarists can use notes to tune their guitar, however a guitar tuner is still needed to get an exact pitch.

The names of each string is therefore easy to remember, the thickest string is called your E string as it sounds an E when played in open position (no left hand fingers on fretboard); next is the A string, next D string etc. So now if somebody says to you play the B string you know which string to play.

Right - back to the notes of music. Just as each note on a piano represents a different note, each string and fret represents a note on the guitar. Let’s start with your thickest string. Pick up your guitar and pluck on the thickest string without putting any fingers of your left hand on the fretboard. If the guitar is tuned correctly, the sound coming out of your guitar will be the E note. Then if you plucked at the second thickest string, it would sound the note A. Continue through the rest of the strings D, G, B and the high E.

You might notice that the E on the thinnest string sounds much higher than the E on the thickest string. Don’t worry too much about that now, that’s because the thinnest string’s E is a couple of octaves higher, but we will get to that.