Rhythm & Reading Guitar Tab

Video Transcript

MICHAEL PLUNKETT: Hello. This is Michael Plunkett on behalf of Expert Village. We're now going to take a look at, again, our tab, and we're going to see how rhythm can apply to reading our tablature. Now most of the time, especially if you're getting tabs online or if you find them that somebody had made or if you make your own, rhythm itself won't really be written on there exactly when something is supposed to play. They'll most often space the notes as best as they can trying to explain when something might be played. So in this example, this is what something might look like, you see--remember that C-major chord that we've been playing? I have four of them in a row here. And for the most part, they're all pretty evenly spaced. If there were rhythm written above it, it might look something like this. These are just what we call quarter notes and they're just telling us we play them all at the same--for the same amount of time being the same note. So, it might sound something like this, one, two, three, four; one, two, three, four. All evenly spaced in time, and that's how they happen two, three, four, just like that. Now, in the second one, you see that they're not exactly evenly spaced. The first two in this chord are a little bit closer together and then there's a gap here and these two are closer together. If you saw it with the rhythm written, it might look something like this, what we call an eighth note with the dotted quarter. This is basically a short note followed by a long note. So, you've got dot-dot, dot-dot. If I were playing the chord, it might sound something like this, one, two, three, four. One and two, and three, and four, and. I had two short ones next to each other with the space and two long ones--oh, I'm sorry, two more short ones. So, say, we didn't have the rhythm. By looking at this, we can still tell pretty basically what it's going to sound like. We've got some evenly spaced ones and then we've got close with the more of a gap here and close. So, it might be something like this, three, four, one, two, three, four, one and two, and three and four, and... That's looking at some of the basic concepts of rhythm in tablature.

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