Playing Basic Melodies (Tab)
Preface (skip if this isn’t your first time here):
THERE ARE TOO MANY PEOPLE WHO DON’T KNOW ANYTHING USEFUL ABOUT THE GUITAR!
It’s because no one either showed them anything useful or they never found out the basics of playing guitar.
DON’T BE LIKE THEM!
Here we are going to talk about those guitar basics in bite-sized chunks.
Hopefully, this will give you everything necessary to understand how to play the instrument, fix any flaws in your playing, and form ideas on how to change things up in your technique.
Let’s come back to tabs. To play basic melodies on tab you’ll need to review both our post on reading tabs and reading rhythms. Now it’s time to put all those two things together.
WARNING! A lot of tabs don’t have any rhythm indications and you are left to your own devices in figuring out how the song is supposed to sound. While this is valuable and something to definitely try, we’re only going to go over playing tabbed melodies with rhythm.
Here’s a little melody all on one string below:
Notice how the rhythm changes from quarter notes to a half note, then you get eight 8th notes? Did you see how much the first measure gets repeated in this little example? If you didn’t notice it, this time go back and use your eyes.
To really gauge if you’re playing in time, you might want to use a metronome. Set the beat to 60 and play. I’ll help you out though by writing down how to count this. Remember the numbers are consistent. Once the “+” signs come in, it acts as double time. Again, the numbers are consistent NO MATTER WHAT!
If you have that (and only if you really have it down), then play this melody on multiple strings:
Alright, now it’s time to graduate to a more a complex melody:
Now to the finale (which you’re totally up for):
If you can do all these, look up your favorite song on Songsterr and see if you can play the melody.