One of the languages of guitar music is tablature, often known simply as guitar tabs. Guitar tabs are quite simple to learn to read compared to conventional musical notation. If you choose to learn to read sheet music it will take a few weeks before you are beginning to make any sense out of it, and possibly a couple of months before you can read it fluently. Guitar tablature simply shows you where to place your fingers on the guitar fretboard.

You can download guitar tabs from the internet for your favorite songs or for material you need to start to learn to play the guitar. There are lots of guitarists around who have never used any kind of written music. Some of them express regret that they never learned to read tab. Fortunately it is never too late to learn, anyone at any age or stage of guitar playing, can learn to read tab in half an hour. It might take a day or two to be fluent, but you get the basics nearly as soon as they are clarified to you.

You will hear tales from guitar players about how they spend hours and hours with their heads in the speakers of their record players or CD players learning to play riffs or songs by ear. The internet has given us a whole generation of guitar players and composers who are willing and able to share their knowledge with novice guitar players using guitar tabs. If you are a beginner guitar player you can download tabs for your favorite songs from the internet and start playing them straight away. All the hard work has been done by the guy who writes the tab. That’s the way it is with guitar players. Each guitar player has his own way of playing, teaching, and learning.

Learning from guitar tabs helps guitar players with their own teaching methods to give their thoughts to newbies who are still struggling. If you haven’t yet learned to read guitar tabs, they are basically six horizontal lines which represent the strings of the guitar. It’s as though you are looking at the guitar fretboard with the body of the guitar on your right and the head of the guitar on your left. The top line is the thin E string, and the bottom line is the thick E string. Along the lines are numbers which tell you which fret you need to place your fingers at to sound the notes.

Guitarists are insatiable learners and the world is full of fantastic guitar learning material. First of all, there are countless tablature books which show you in the simple-to-learn guitar tablature format how to play all your favorite songs even if you can’t read sheet music. If you can read sheet music, then there is sheet music available for every well loved artist and thousands of classical and lesser-known composers. There are also “method books” that teach how to play a particular style, and there are instructional guitar DVDs that show you and tell you everything a single guitarist knows how to do. There are books with CDs full of audio examples, there are DVDs that come with tablature books; the list of available guitar learning resources is endless.
Guitar lessons are still the number one way that guitarists pick up new information. In-person guitar lessons with a local guitar teacher are probably the most effective way to learn new things about the guitar. The world is full of part-time and full-time guitar teachers, who place their heart and soul into teaching their students how to be an ever-improving guitar learning machine. Guitar teachers are expensive, but, and not everyone has the money or the time to commit to in-person lessons. So while this is a truly effective method, it is not for everyone.
Over the last 5 years, online guitar lessons have become an outstanding resource for guitarists wanting to learn guitar at a convenient pace and at very low cost. In my opinion, online guitar lessons have come of age, and are now the best tool for learning guitar available to anyone anywhere. I don’t propose that online guitar lessons should supplant books, sheet music, DVDs, and in-person guitar lessons. What I want to suggest is that online guitar lessons are more convenient, cheaper, more useable, and provide more breadth of information than any other method available.
Convenience: Tablature books are OK, as long as they come with some audio examples. DVDs are OK, as long as they come with a book. The problem is that keeping your place in the book and your place on the CD/DVD in synch is hard. Every time you take a break (every day basically) you lose your place and have to synch up all over again. Online guitar lessons, on the other hand, solve the problem of synching the tab, explanation, and audio/video samples. A web page is the ultimate guitar lesson format: audio, video, and text all together in one document.
Price: Books and DVDs have to be manufacturer, shipped, and inventoried. If you have ever burned a CD or made some copies at a copy shop, you know that manufacturing a product costs real money. Imagine if you had to turn around and sell your product at a profit? Shipping a book or DVD to the retailer is another expense in traditional publishing that occurs before the product is even ready to be sold. Inventory, the hidden expense, can be the largest: every month the book sits in the store, it costs the owner a percent of the price to pay for it to be kept out of the rain, and if the inventory is bought on credit, there is interest on the loan as well. All told, it is no wonder there are few places that sell guitar lesson products even in a large city.
Breadth: Guitar books generally can only have a few hundred pages; DVDs can only hold a couple of hours of video. A web site can expand to the size of a whole library full of books and DVDs. This is one aspect of the size advantage of online guitar lessons, but the more vital aspect is this: getting a book published is so hard, that many fantastic guitarists simply never try it. Publishing a web site is so simple that many fantastic guitarists who would never previously have published their knowledge can now publish their guitar lessons online where you can find them.
As you can see, online guitar lessons have significant advantages that should make them an vital part of any guitarist’s learning strategy. As the internet continues to grow, and the use of video on the internet spreads, look for online guitar lessons to one day be the recognized leader in helping guitarists improve their skills in a convenient, inexpensive way.