Learn How to Read Piano Tabs

Learning to play the piano involves learning how to read sheet music and learning how to read chord music . Also it is very important to learn how to read piano tabs. Tablature or tabs as they are known as is a way of writing down the various chords and notes required to play a certain piece of music.

Tabs don’t use regular musical notations to represent the notes. Of course, traditional sheet music is very detailed and tabs are not, however, they are much easier to read. Tabs aid beginners as well as experienced pianists. If you surf the Internet you will find lots of piano easy tabs and piano song tabs for you to practice with.

Learn how to read piano tabs with Rocket Piano

Let’s see some more examples of easy piano tabs. Given below is a representation of a single note piano tab for the scale of ‘F’

4|———c-d-e-f-|
3|-f-g-a-A———|

Remember piano tabs are read from left to right and the two sets of notes are played at the same time. The numbers, as mentioned earlier, tell you what octave is to be played. Keep in mind that all octaves start with key ‘C’ and octave 4 is always in the middle of the keyboard.

All small alphabet, that are, a, b, c, d, e, f, and g, indicate the natural notes or white keys and the capital letters, that are, A,C,D,F,G are shown as sharp or A# C# D# F# G# which are also the black keys. Very often ‘b’ notes get mixed up with flats because flats are denoted by a ‘b’ so the B flat note is shown by its equivalent A# or A. the vertical bar you see on the diagram “I” is used to identify different segments of the notes and the timing or space between notes is indicated by a “-“ sign and the more the dashes the longer the note.

You can find several piano easy piano tabs and piano song tabs online. But remember that lots of practice is the key to playing any instrument or song.

It is not difficult to learn how to read piano tabs. .. Once you master your seven notes piano tabs and piano song tabs you too can give them each a note like Maria does in the movie “the Sound of Music” you too can create your own music with “Do Re Me Fa So La Ti”. Once you know the notes to play…you can play any music. 

Learn how to read piano tabs with Rocket Piano