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When we wonder what guitar tab we need to get to begin to make up our repertoire, we usually think only about songs we like. We know that our choice in music does not suck in the slightest but if we are going to be playing our guitar and singing for audiences we need to get used to the idea that our taste in music will not match what our listeners want to hear. We may even take a look at popular choices in songs and get the uncomfortable feeling that we might have to play songs that we do not like. One thing guitar players are famous for is standing on their principles and not compromising on what they are going to play. The other thing they are famous for is giving the audience what they want. So a mixture of these two attitudes is probably going to form in your psyche as you peruse your list of guitar tabs on the internet. While we are on the subject of lists of guitar tabs remember to pay a visit to your local music store or online merchant for ready-made collections of easy guitar tabs. You can find titles like “Popular Songs for Acoustic Guitar” or “CMT’s 100 Greatest Songs of Country Music”.

One fact that has emerged from field tests conducted by buskers, night club performers and covers bands is that you should look for your repertoire in the songs of years gone by. Oldies are goodies. Another thing you should think about is whether or not you are an audience participation kind of performer. If you are still wondering about it one second after the thought enters your head, then you probably aren’t. So stay away from songs that require you to yell, “Everybody now!!” or “Just the girls this time!”. Likewise if you play solo acoustic guitar and have a voice like Johnny Cash you might want to stay away from Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love”. But do not walk away from songs you enjoy just because they might not seem immediately doable.Remember Jose Feliciano’s “Light My Fire” and Eric Clapton’s unplugged “Layla”.

Of course what songs you choose is not going to matter much if you do not pay attention to how you sing and play the guitar. People pay to see performers who are better at something than they are. Which is where playing material that you like comes in. If you are playing a song that you consider to be a crowd pleaser but you personally think is a load of stomach chunks you give attention to the part the audience likes. You already know what that is. That is why you do not bellow, “Hello darkness my old friend” or shirk on the enthusiasm when you sing the line, “Welcome to the Hotel California”.

Okay so what we get out of all this is first, there are songs that crowds of people like and second, you can sing and play these songs in a way that highlights your particular talents. Now for a basic list of songs that have been known to please a crowd or two over a period of years:
Wild World by Cat Stevens
Imagine – by John Lennon
Stairway To Heaven by Led Zeppelin
Catch the Wind by Donovan
Can’t Help Falling In Love by Elvis Presley
Waterloo Sunset by The Kinks
Angie by the Rolling Stones
Everybody Hurts by REM
50 ways to leave your lover by Paul Simon
The 59th Street Bridge Song by Simon And Garfunkel
American Pie by Don Maclean
Both Sides Now by Joni Mitchell
California Dreamin’ by The Mamas and Papas
Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door by Bob Dylan
Mrs Robinson by Simon And Garfunkel
You’re so vain by Carly Simon
Blowin’ In The Wind by Bob Dylan
Brown Eyed Girl by Van Morrison
I Walk The Line by Johnny Cash
Tears In Heaven by Eric Clapton
Gloria by Van Morrison (or Them)
Hotel California by The Eagles
Behind Blue Eyes by The Who
White Room by Cream
Sex And Candy by Marcy Playground
Californication by Red Hot Chili Peppers
What Its Like by Everlast
Alison by Elvis Costello
Life By The Drop by Stevie Ray Vaughn
Melissa by Allman Brothers
Dead Flowers by The Rolling Stones
Seagull by Bad Company
Mediterranean Sundance by Al DiMeola and Paco De Lucia
Classical Gas by Mason Williams

This list could be much, much longer, but you probably already see songs here that you would never play in a million years so all I can say now is I hope this guide to essential guitar tab has been helpful.

This article will show you how to make the best use of free guitar chord charts that you can find online. As the internet changes, sites go down and new ones come up, so I won’t risk this resource going out of date by discussing where to find your free guitar chord charts, just how to use them to kick start your guitar playing.

You can easily get together a nice collection of chord charts and lyrics to your favorite songs to help you learn to play the guitar. If you feel that you should be learning a whole bunch of musical theory and how to read musical notation, but somehow feel it’s just not you, then that’s okay – start with what you feel most enthusiastic about. Once you have started to learn using guitar chord charts you have bought or downloaded for free, you might see as you go along that you will need to know a little bit about musical theory to see how chords and scales fit together. If, however, you are comfortable learning chords to your favorite songs, then keep at it.

So let’s start with the basic baby steps and work up to some really useful knowledge about guitar chords and how the dots on the charts relate to musical sounds. You know the frets on your guitar’s neck somehow show you where the notes are, so let’s get a little more technical. You will see when you use scale charts to learn to play guitar tunes that in a given position on the fret board, you will sometimes need to move up or down one fret or two frets. If you play the note at the first fret, and then move up to the second fret, you have moved up a semitone. If you have moved up two frets, it is called a tone. The distance between the notes E and F or B and C is a tone. The distance between the notes C and D is a tone. So as you learn songs in different keys you will start to see that what you are playing when you play scales is different patterns of tones or semi tones on the guitar neck.

If you have watched guitarists play you will have noticed that sometimes they place their index finger across all six strings. This is called a barre. When you begin to learn songs you will be making use of chords played in the FIRST position on the fret board. These are mostly open chords, that is chords that do not make use of the barre. You can try to play barre chords any time, but it’s a bit ambitious to expect to be able to use them until after your hands have done some practice with open chords.

When you are learning chords to accompany songs, you will probably make use of your chord charts showing you chords that use all the guitar’s strings. But if you want to get into playing solos start with the three note chords called triads. The three notes in a triad are the basic notes of your chord, so by learning triads you will begin to see how the guitar chords are structured. Also you can move your triads up and down the fret board to make new chords.
Here’s an example:
The chord of A Major is made up of the notes A C# and E shown in tab form as:

E—————————————–
B————–2————————–
G————–2————————–
D————–2————————–
A—————————————–
E—————————————–

Move that shape one semitone (one fret) up the neck and you get A# or Bb.

E—————————————–
B————–3————————–
G————–3————————–
D————–3————————–
A—————————————–
E—————————————–

One fret higher is B Major.

E—————————————–
B————–4————————–
G————–4————————–
D————–4————————–
A—————————————–
E—————————————–

This shape played anywhere on the neck will give you a major chord. The fret it is played at tells you the key it is in.

Here are the notes for the triads of the basic chords:
C Major – C E G
D Major – D F# A
E Major – B E G#
F Major – C F A
G Major – G B D
A Major – A C# E
B Major – B D# F#

Now the minor chords:
C Minor – C Eb G
D Minor – D F A
E Minor – B E G
F Minor – C F Ab
G Minor – G Bb D
A Minor – A C E
B Minor – B D F#
Naturally, there will be some points you need to make a little clearer, so you will find more descriptions and illustrations available for free on the internet.

Tablature as a means of writing music down has been with us for hundreds of years, but many people today look down on tabs as a third rate method of musical communication. In fact, tablature is not a dumbed down version of conventional musical notation, rather what we call sheet music grew from a need for more versatility in notation as music became more complex in medieval times. Electric Guitar Tabs have been a great help to the many people who have taken up the electric guitar and who wanted to get down to the business of playing as quickly as possible.

Conventional music notation has much more to communicate than tabs, but if you already know more or less how the song sounds, and are prepared to work at your own interpretation, then there is nothing wrong with using tablature.

Guitarists composing music using tabs and sharing the results of their work on the internet have brought a wide range of music within reach of amateur musicians who never learnt to read music. To some guitarists learning to read music is a waste of time that would be put to better use expressing their feelings through music. This attitude is at odds with the idea that the more theoretical knowledge you have, the greater the pool of resources at your disposal for expressing your ideas.

Tablature, on the other hand, allows the guitarist to get to know the basic piece of music in his own way, and use his musical intuition and flair for improvisation to produce a musical work which will be as much his own work as the original composer’s. For that reason electric guitar tabs are a boon to the electric guitar player who does not want to just produce a copy of someone else’s work.

You can find electric guitar tabs in music stores along with conventional written music, but the quickest and best place to look for electric guitar tabs is on the internet. Even though there’s a legal dogfight going on about tab publishers infringing the rights of the original composer, many tabs are still available for free. However you need to exercise your discernment when making use of tablature produced by amateur guitarists. You might need to change things around a little if they don’t sound right.

As for the electric guitar player who wants to broaden his musical knowledge, tablature also allows the guitarist to learn new chords, scales or modes very quickly.

Finally a reminder that using electric guitar tabs to learn new material is not a walk in the park – you need to supply some of the information which is otherwise written into sheet music. You need to have some idea of the note values and a basic understanding of time signatures and tempo. What that boils down to is that you can hear the music in your head, and you just want to know where to put your fingers on the fret board. That is what guitar tabs were originally made for.