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Reading Music for Guitarists

Learn to read tabs, chord charts, fretboard diagrams, strumming patterns, and more! This course explains how to understand all of these must-know notation styles.

6 Lessons • 41 mins

Lessons in This Course

How to Read Guitar Tabs

Perhaps the single most helpful way to visualize music on the guitar! Six lines, one for each string — here's how to read tabs.

Video6:58 PDF6 pages

How to Read Chord Charts

An incredibly efficient way to visualize any chord shape, showing us which strings to play and where to put our fretting-hand fingers.

Video7:35 PDF3 pages

How to Read Strumming Patterns

Down-strums, up-strums, accents, bass notes, and more... I'll walk you through the must-know notation for reading strumming patterns.

Video7:13 PDF3 pages

How to Read Fretboard Diagrams

Sometimes we need a map of all the notes we're using... which fretboard diagrams are great for! Here's how they can make your guitar life easier.

Video7:58 PDF3 pages

How to Read Chord Progressions

Memorizing songs is tricky, but chord progressions can help out big time! Learn how to quickly read & make sense of the order of chords in any song.

Video4:41 PDF2 pages

How to Read My Song Sheets

Tabs, chord charts, strumming, progressions, and more: learn how my print-friendly song sheets combine all of these notation styles into a single package!

Video7:17 PDF3 pages

Print-Friendly Guides Included!

In addition to my video walkthroughs of each topic, I also made hand-crafted PDFs to accompany each lesson in this course. You can download these, print them as many times as you want, and keep them forever. Each PDF can be found on its corresponding lesson page linked above.

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