Tab

How're you doing? Have you tackled Amazing Grace yet? I know, I know, it's far from Beethoven, but I hope to give you some references for you that will help you practice.

Here's our first exercise. Think about a song that you heard on the radio today. It doesn't matter what genre of music it was, just think about it. Maybe the lyrics come to mind, or maybe you can hear the chorus repeat in your head. Wouldn't it be nice to sit down at a keyboard and be able to play that song?

Want to learn how it's done?


Most of everything you need to know about a song is written in a chord progression. This is true for most popular songs, however if you think back to our earlier lesson, you should recall that every melody is built around a series of chords!!!

If we know the chord progresson to a song, it is usually very easy to pick out the melody, as that is generally what tends to stay in our minds when the song ends. Fortunately for us, most chord progressions are already written out for us!

How can that be? All the work is already done?

Heck yeah! Believe it or not, you can usually find the chords to a song by entering the song title followed by "tab" into your search engine. TAB stands for "tablature", which is a form of notation for music commonly used for guitars.

Why are we looking up guitar music?

Actually, the majority of TAB is just a sequence of letters A through G. You may come across a few diagrams of the guitar strings, but all you need to pay attention to is the sequence of the chords.

Let's look at an example: Piano Man, by Billy Joel.

Step 1: Open your search engine, whether it be Google, Yahoo, Lycos, etc.
Step 2: Type "Piano Man tab" into the search engine field.
Step 3: Look for a link that has the title of the song, the artist, and either "tab" or "chords"
Step 4: Analyzing the tab!

If you used Google, you should have come up with this link here. If you came up with something else through a different search engine or by change in links, I will transfer the TAB to our little working area here.

At the top of our TAB will be some diagrams of the guitar strings, but below, you'll see something like this:

Intro
G   C\G   D*   C Cmaj D(X2)



G   D          Em          C
It's 4 o'clock on a Saturday
                      D
The regular crowd shuffles in
      G      D        Em
There's an old man sitting next to me
  C           D         G   C\G   D*
Making love to his tonic and gin





C Cmaj7 D G            D         Em
He says, "Son, can you play me a memory?
C                          D
I'm not really sure how it goes,
    G            D           Em
But it's sad and it's sweet and I knew it complete
C             D             G
When I wore a younger man's clothes"
Em             A7
Oh, la da da ditty da,
Em7         D      D D7 G\D D
La da ditty da da dum

At first sight, this may seem a little confusing, so let's break it down into bite-size pieces.

Intro
G   C\G   D*   C Cmaj D(X2)

This is obviously the introduction to the song. If you're familiar with this song, you may be able to hear it in your mind. These are the chords that the introduction melody revolves around. Always take the first letter you see, and for the most part, you can ignore everything that's attached to that letter. (there's one exception that we'll get to in just a moment)

The first chord is G. So we would find G on the piano... (can you still remember?) Reference your key chart if you've forgotten!

Play your G, and then add two evenly spaced keys on top. It should look something like this.

Pat yourself on the back if you got that right! Great job!

Now let's look at the next chord, which is C/G. Hm. Let's just take the first letter we see attached here, C, and ignore the rest of it for now. We can come back to that later.

Play your C note, then add two evenly spaced keys above. Here is what it should look like.

What's next? D. Before we attempt this one, I have to make a small note.

There are two types of chords that you should be aware of; major and minor. When you play a major chord, the chord itself should sound "happy" and "light". It's difficult to tell the difference until you actually hear a minor chord, which often sounds "sad" and "dark".


I bring this up because if you played a D chord smilar to the way we played a C or G, you will get a "sad", "dark", or minor sounding chord. This will be explained when we get into some music theory, but for now you're going to have to memorize that D is an exception.

So let's learn how to play a D major first. Play a D, then we're going to add two evenly spaced notes above it, HOWEVER, the note in the middle needs to be raised a half step. This means we'll be playing one of the black keys.


Your D chord should look like this:


((insert image))


Just remember that we have a black key in the middle for D!

Intro
G   C\G   D*   C Cmaj D(X2)

The rest of the Introduction is cake! We progress back to C, stay on C ("maj" means "major"), then back to D.


Give that a couple of tries. See if you can flow from one chord to the next without pausing. Go as slow as you need, just remember to be consistant when playing. It doesn't matter how fast or slow your rhythm is, just keep it the same!


Feel free to give the rest of this song a try. I have created some notes about specific chords at the bottom of this post so that you may use it as a quick, separate reference when practicing.


See you next time!




*Notes