Guitar Tablature

Before I tell you where to find guitar tablature, I would like to tell a quick story about how I found out about guitar tablature...

Way back in 1989, I was at the book store with my mom and looking through the magazine racks. I saw a "Guitar for the Practicing Musician" with Reb Beach of Winger on the cover. And they had guitar tablature for the Winger song "17." At the time I was a budding young player with very little skill, but I was completely in awe of the solo by Reb on "17"...

I talked my mom into buying it for me when I saw they had guitar tablature for the whole song. I got home and was looking at it and I see all these numbers below the actual music. I was like "what the heck is all that?!?" I turned to the back of the magazine and they had a Guitar Tablature Explanation. I was like "oh wow...now I don't have to read music anymore...woo hoo!!" It was also my introduction to two-handed tapping (which at the time I had no clue what it was)...but that's a different story.

Guitar tablature (for those who don't know) is a notation that looks somewhat like sheet music, but it is actually a six-line staff that represents the guitar fretboard. A note is represented on the staff by a number. Combined with actual music notation, guitar tablature makes sight reading a breeze, and you can learn songs much more quickly then by trying to site read music on its own.

Ok, I said I would show you some of my favorite places to find guitar tablature so here we go.

Basically, you have 2 different options.

1) Downloading indivdual guitar tablature songs or albums.

I prefer this method because you can download individual songs with guitar tablature one at a time as opposed to buying the whole songbook.

Musicnotes has a pretty decent selection. To view their selection of guitar tablature, you'll need to download the music notes viewer which allows you to preview and browse the store. Then, when you find the sheet music you're looking for, you can download the Musicnotes player which gives you MIDI playback that allows you to adjust the tempo.

2) Getting guitar tablature songbooks from an online store

The above sites have songbooks too, but for guitartablature songbooks, SheetMusic Superstore has the best selection...the reason is that they use Amazon's search results...go figure :-). I've found books here that I bought 10 years ago that I've never found anywhere else.

Sheet Music Plus