If you want to play a song on a piano, you must know which key to hit and when. Because you can’t remember this for all the songs, people have devised ways to write the instructions on paper. Piano tabs are one way to notate a piece of music. In this article we’ll show you the basics of how to understand them.

Compared to standard sheet music, tabs are easier to learn and understand. This is the reason why they’re so popular, especially on the internet. Because they are simple, they are great for beginners, but you should be aware that their simplicity also brings limitations.

Fine, let’s begin. We’ll start with something easy, something that everybody knows. How about Mary Had a Little Lamb? Okay, here is a piano tab for Mary Had a Little Lamb: 4|e–dc-d-|e-e-e—|d-d-d—|e-g-g—|. As you can see there are no notes. Piano tabs are made only of letters, numbers, and some symbols. No notes here. Let’s go decipher this, it’s really not that difficult.

You should probably know that tabs usually consist of several lines, not just one as in our simple example. But no matter how many lines there are they always start with a number. In our case – 4. The number tells you in which octave the notes are. In our example they are in fourth octave.

What about the letters? Yes, the letters are the meat of all this. They correspond to the notes that you have to play. Lowercase letters are natural notes (white keys on a piano), uppercase letters are sharps or flats (black keys on a piano).

Okay, we went through numbers and letters, what about those symbols – dashes and vertical lines. What do they stand for? Vertical lines are used to separate measures, while dashes indicate timing.

There you have it. This covers the basic of basics. Now go and practice, because only practice makes perfect. And remember, tabs are not a substitute for traditional notation.

If you want to learn more, please visit reading piano tabs. Probably the best way to learn is to play your favorite songs. Take a look at how to play River Flows In You piano.

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