Outlining Chord Shapes & Reading Guitar Tab

Video Transcript

MICHAEL PLUNKETT: Hello, this is Michael Plunkett on behalf of Expert Village. We're now going to talk about a concept that can be useful in looking at guitar tablature. It's the way that guitar tablature can oftentimes outline chord shapes that we might already be familiar with, but might not realize when looking at the tab initially. So, written here is a great example of something that we might commonly see when looking at a guitar tablature. We see a lot of different notes, written mostly in melody or apart from each other, not at the same time. And not understanding how this is put together, it could be rather difficult to play, trying to read all this at once. It's a lot of jumping. And the same goes for this other side here, this next measure. But if we condense all of the notes together, which I've done over here, we see that on the 5th string, we've got O. We've got a two here on the 4th, another two on the 3rd as we see here, and one on the 2nd string. When we put those together, it probably looks a lot more familiar, that's an A minor chord that we would often see. I even wrote it above this. And so, instead of trying to play each one of this note by note, we can think that we're just making an A minor chord and then we're just picking out different notes from it. The same goes with this one too; when we stack all these together, we find that it outlines an E minor chord shape. When I play them together, you'll notice my hands are just making the different shapes of each of those chords. Here's the first measure, the A minor, and the E minor. So, playing them together, it would sound something. A lot easier when we think of it in the chord shapes as opposed to just looking at the individual notes on each page. So, see if you can do that as much as possible. A lot of the times, it will actually make playing guitar tablature a lot easier.

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