Reading tab and chord charts (I don't read notation well and you don't have to either)
Let's clear something up before we start, because I've been sitting on it since the first lesson and it's time I said it plainly.
I don't read standard notation well. Those five lines with the little flags and stems — I can pick through it slowly, like reading a language I took two years of in high school and then never used. If you handed me sheet music right now and asked me to sight-read it at tempo, I'd let you down. That is not false modesty. That is just where I'm at.
What I read, and read fine, is tab and chord charts. And here's the thing I want you to take from this lesson: that's not a lesser way to read music. It's a different tool for a different job. Nobody looks at a guy building a deck and says "real carpenters use hand saws only." You use the tool that gets the joint cut clean.
What a chord chart actually is
A chord chart is just a little grid. Six vertical lines for your six strings, low E on the left, high E on the right. Horizontal lines are frets. Dots tell you where to put your fingers. An X over a string means don't play it. An O means play it open.
That's the whole system. I feel like people see the grid and assume there's more to decode, and there isn't. Once you've looked at ten of them, you've basically seen them all.
What tab is doing
Tab, or tablature, is a strip of six lines representing the same six strings, but this time it's showing you when to play something, reading left to right like a sentence. A number sitting on a line tells you which fret to press on that string. A "0" means open string.
The thing tab does NOT tell you is rhythm. It won't tell you if a note is quick or held out or fits with the beat. That's the honest limitation, and I want you to know it going in rather than get frustrated three weeks from now wondering why the tab "sounds right" but not really right. You usually need to hear the song once, even just a phone recording, and then let the tab guide your fingers while your ear supplies the timing.
A small, practical way to practice this
Print out or pull up a chart for a song you already know by ear. Something simple. Don't pick the hardest thing you can find just to prove something.
- Look at the chart for ten seconds before you touch the guitar. Just look. Find the shape with your eyes first.
- Place your fingers slowly, one at a time, checking each one against the dots.
- Strum once. Listen for buzzing or dead strings — that usually means a finger's not quite pressing where the dot says it should.
- Move to the next chord in the progression. Don't rush the change. Ten clean seconds beats ten sloppy ones.
Small thing, and it doesn't matter enormously at this stage, but a lot of charts you'll find online are a little wrong — a wrong fingering, a mislabeled chord, a capo note buried at the bottom nobody reads. Read the whole chart before you commit your fingers to it. I read the footnotes. This is basically the guitar version of that habit.
The nerves part nobody puts in the chart
Here's something charts and tab will never tell you: how your hands are going to behave the first time you play in front of somebody.
First time I ever played at sacrament meeting, my hands were shaking so bad the pick was actually chattering against the strings, this little rattly buzz that had nothing to do with the chord chart in front of me and everything to do with nerves. I'd practiced that thing clean all week. Chart memorized, fingers ready. Didn't matter. Heather told me afterward it sounded "intentional." Forty-one years married to that woman and that is a very Heather sentence — kind, and also not remotely true.
I tell you that because the chart is not the hard part. The chart is the easy part. The chart just sits there and waits for you. The hard part is your own hands doing something you didn't chart for.
One opinion, stated as a preference
I'd rather you learn to read four chord charts well than memorize forty songs sloppily. Four songs you can call up clean, at a campfire or a family thing or church, will serve you better than a stack of half-remembered tab you have to squint at your phone to recover. Depth over volume. That's just how I've always leaned on this.
A caution, plainly
If you're pulling tab and charts off the internet, some sites bury the version number or the capo instructions at the very bottom under a wall of ads. Scroll all the way down before you start. Nothing dangerous about it, just annoying to build a whole chord shape around a note that turns out to be wrong because you missed a line.
Before next time
Find a chart online for one song you like — doesn't need to be one I've taught you — and spend ten minutes just reading it, no guitar in hand, until the grid makes sense to your eye. We'll play through it together next time. 👍