Various Types Of Guitar Tabs

Various Types Of Guitar Tabs

Three main types of guitar tab are the ASCII Tab, plain tab with rhythm information and Tab with notation.

Ascii Guitar Tabs

First let's take a look at ASCII Tab, this is quite a common type of guitar tab found on guitar forums. The thing that makes this kind of Tab unique is the whole thing uses simple text to reperesent ordinary Tab. Here is an example of the same chromatic run shown above but text generated.

As handy as this kind of Tab is, it has some drawbacks.

• If a monospaced font isn't used then the whole thing can become an unreadable mess.
• It relies on a standard which is fine for fret numbers but can get messy when we need to show techniques like bends, vibrato etc.
• Rarely used with timing / rhythm information.

Basic Guitar Tabs

Next we have basic guitar tab with timing information. This TAB lets us know the time signature and the note duration so that we know whether we should play quarter notes, eighth notes, triplets etc. This kind of Tab needs to be in image format for the web. It's also used a lot in books and magazines.

Guitar Tab With Legend

This is the ultimate kind of guitar tab, we get two staffs. One with full notation and the other with basic tab like the one above.

As we can see, guitar tabs with note timing value makes a lot more sense. Even though most text style of tabs you find on the internet has no indication of note duration, it is still possible to include it to an extent. Ascii tab exported from Guitar-Pro for instance does show note duration by placing text above the TAB. Here is an example of guitar Tab exported from Guitar-Pro using the same chromatic run as above played with eighth notes. The 'E' indicates an eighth note.

Guitar-Pro Guitar Tab legend