Preview Lesson #1 - Reading Tab

Welcome to the Rock Star Academy Core Skills lessons. In these lessons you have the opportunity to learn many interesting chords, scales, arpeggios, rhythms, and picking patterns.

The Core Skills lessons also explain useful music theory that allows you to understand how chords, scales, and arpeggios are constructed. You will also get to learn how standard music notation and guitar tab work as they are both very valuable tools when learning how to play guitar.

The core skills will help to improve your ability to compose and give you a deeper understanding of how to jam along with other musicians.

1) First, Let's Find Out What Tab Actually Is...

Tablature, or tab for short, is a form of musical notation indicating instrument fingering rather than musical pitches. Rock Star Academy diagrams show both standard musical notation and tab. An example is shown below.

2) So, What Else Is There To Know?

Tablature notation was created to make music easier to read for fretted instruments.

It can be learned quickly, and you do not really need to know any musical theory.

What it shows are the strings that are played, which is important since any given note can be played on different strings.

Each guitar string is represented by a line. The numbers indicate on which frets the fingers must press to play the notes. “0” means that the string is played open — that is, without pressing on any fret.

The lowest line represents the lowest-pitched string (low E), and the top line represents the highest-pitched string of the guitar (high E).

This actually corresponds to what you see when you lean over your guitar, as opposed to what you see when you are facing it.

3) Right, Time To Try Some Exercises!