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.