Okay, so you wanna play bass guitar and you want to play your favorite songs right away. Your first thought? Look it up on the internet or buy a book. That works fine if you can read music; however if it all looks like a bunch of squiggly figures and sticks; don’t fret (pun intended). There is another way to do things that might look equally chaotic at first but will have you on your way to rock stardom overnight (all good things happen overnight don’t they?).

Another method of learning songs for those of who are too lazy to read notes and not blessed with a golden ear is tablature. You can find this stuff all over the net but buyer beware, most of it is user submitted and won’t sound 100% like the original. These days a lot of guitar magazines will publish tablature along with the actual musical staves.

For example a piece of bass tablature might look something like this:

Each line represents a string on the bass: The bottom being E string or biggest string on your average 4 string bass and the top being the G or smallest string on most basses. The numbers indicate the fret on the neck where the note is located. Therefore to play the above piece of music you would hit the 4^th fret on the G string then the 5^th note on the G string, followed by the second and third frets on the D string and so on.

There are a few things to look out for, not all people take the timing into account so you might have to figure that out yourself, some may use bigger spacing to represent longer pauses between notes and others may identify tempo with a time signature such as ¾ or 4/4 or they may simply say slow, moderate, fast etc. You will also have to check for odd tunings also either at the beginning or in the notes at the end.

Overall this is a very hit and miss way to learn and it doesn’t always explain everything as thoroughly as musical notes but it’s a great way to get started and can quickly give even the most experienced musician a jump start on any song.

On some sites, mostly user-submitted material, you will find tab written backwards with the heaviest (E) string on the top line. Don’t let this confuse you. If you start playing it and it doesn’t sound anywhere close to being right, check for this common error.