Learning To Read Flamenco Guitar TABs

If you have never trained as a formal musician and therefore learned how to read traditional musical notation then you could find yourself at a little bit of a disadvantage when it comes to flamenco guitar music and tabs. This is because flamenco guitar is a real and very genuine musical art form. It's a formal style of playing with a long tradition dating back hundreds of years. As such many of its greatest books and teaching materials were all written in old fashioned musical notation, the original source of flamenco guitar lessons were in fact books. If you cannot read music then in many ways you will be limiting the resources you have to learn from.

Those of you who are really serious about learning to play flamenco on guitar in the purest and most authentic way possible should seriously consider learning how to read music properly if you cannot already do so.

How To Read Flamenco Guitar Tabs

Now, not all of us are interested in putting in the time it's going to take to learn how to read music right? Well in that case the answer is to learn the much easier form of music notation - guitar TAB or tablature as it's known. This is where you get 6 horizontal lines - one for each guitar string. Then numbers (representing the frets) are places along those lines to indicate on which fret(s) to place your fingers. It's actually a very simple grid system of horizontal lines to tell you which string and a number on that string to tell you which fret.

It does not take very long to become completely fluent at reading tabs for flamenco guitar. In fact, most people will master it in under a week. Once your eyes get used to reading tab you'll find that it becomes as fast and as simple as reading English words in a book. You'll be able to read the tab straight off the page and play on your guitar at the same time. Furthermore, if you go into any guitar store you'll find that the majority of books there are all notated with tablature so it's a very useful skill.