Neutron2K's Guide to Guitar Diagrams

This tutorial will offer some insight into how to read the numerous guitar diagrams that are used in today's standard notations. I am assuming that you are already familiar with most if not all of the diagrams but i will explain them anyway.

Chord Boxes

Chord charts are used to convey to the reader how a chord should be played. They consist of many parts. Below is an example of a full CHORD diagram for the standard TRIAD of C Major:

A C Major Chord box The CHORD chart to the left shows the fingering of the standard C MAJOR TRIAD.

At the top is the name of the chord. Under this is sometimes the notes notes of the strings, esp if the chord uses a different tuning.

We then have a grid which represents the guitar fretboard as if u were looking at it vertically and face on. The bass E string is represented by the thicker vertical line on the left, and the treble E String is the vertical line to the right.

On the strings you will find some blobs which represent where each string should be FRETTED (Frets are represented by the horizontal lines).

The symbols along the top represent the state of a string. If no symbol appears, it means that string is fretted somewhere. I an 'O' appears, it means the string is to be played open. If an 'X' appears, the string is not meant to be played.

The numbers on the blobs represent which finger on your fretting hand should be used to fret that particular note. Sometimes these numbers will appear along the bottom of the grid, next to the blobs or not at all.

At the bottom of the grid is sometimes placed the corresponding notes to those that are fretted.

If the horizontal line at the top of the grid is thicker than the others, or is doubled up, it represents the nut on the fretboard, i.e. the fret after this is fret 1. If this does not appear and all the lines are identical it means the chord is to be played elsewhere on the fretboard and a number will appear on either side informing you of which fret the chard starts at.

There are literally dozens of variations if these CHORD charts today but they all convey the same information and are roughly similar.

Guitar Tablature

Guitar TABLATURE (TAB for short), is the preferred method for learning songs or techniques for guitarists. TAB can communicate a lot of information to a guitarist when learning new material.

The kind of information conveyed by TAB is as follows:

Tempo
Which Frets to play on any given string
Special techniques applied to a specified not such as a LEGETTO (Slide, Hammer-On or Pull Off's)
Tuning of the Guitar
Harmonics Used

The list could go on. The one thing that TAB cannot convey is any sense of TIMING.

As with all standard notations, there are a great many various types. In this section I will focus on the most standard.

The following Diagram is an example TAB bar from a piece of Sheet Music:

A bar of Guitar tab

The diagram above shows the bare basics of a TAB diagram. The six horizontal lines represent the 6 strings of the guitar. The first line represents the Treble 'E' String (Bottom string of guitar), and the top line represents the Bass 'E' String (top string of the guitar).

The numbers on the 5th String ('A' String) Represent which frets need to be pressed in turn. TAB is read left to right so in this example you would play the 3rd fret of the 5th string, then the 5th fret of the 5th string, then the 3rd again of the 5th string. It couldn't be much simpler.

There are a lot of other markings and things you will find on TAB, all of which is usually detailed in the first few pages of a TAB song book.

Because a Full in depth tutorial on tab would take me too long, I have located a good ASCII text based tutorial and it is available by clicking the link below. Please note I take no credit for this as it is the work of another individual.

Apart from taking the text from the file and putting it into this site, no modifications have been made.

Yes I know this is technically Cheating but as your here to learn about theory you should already be Familiar with TAB.

Guitar Tablature Guide

Scale Diagrams/Fretboard Diagrams

Scale and Fretboard Diagrams are used to display the positioning of a scale or sometimes chords. They look the regardless of what they are conveying. There are ways to decipher what they are showing - Normally the support text will tell you but the main way to determine if a scale is being shown or a chord is that with a chord there will not be more than one fret highlighted per string.

These fretboard Diagrams represent a large portion, or in some instances the whole of the guitar neck. The following Scale Diagram represents the C MAJOR Scale:

A Scale Diagram

The animation on this Fretboard Diagram represents how Scales are intended to be played for ear training purposes, i.e. so that the play can get used to a particular scales unique sound both ascending and descending.

Chords are only rarely shown on these fretboard style diagrams so I will not provide examples here.

Chord Charts

Rhythm Diagrams are only really used in Beginners Guitar Books in my experience, although sometimes I have seen them accompany Guitar TAB and standard written musical notation in order to attempt to convey the strumming style to the reader.

Chord Charts are a long standing tradition in music and do not convey any information concerning melody. They are very easy to read and you may not come across them. They certainly will not be used in this site.

|| Gmaj /// | Emin /// | Cmaj /// | D7 /// ||

Ok, these are easy. The start and end of a chord chart is traditionally indicated by a double pipe (||)/ Each bar is separated by a single pipe (|). Within each bar will appear a number of chord names and rhythm slash's.

In the above example, you would play a GMajor chord for the first bar, an Emin chord for the second bar, a CMajor chord for the 3rd bar, and would round things off with a D7 chord for the last bar.

The rhythm slash's indicate how many times a chord should be played in that bar. In all of the above examples bar, each chord is played 4 times (1 time indicated by chord name, other 3 indicated by rhythm slash's)

If there are 2 chords to one bar, you would see something like this:

|| CMaj / C7 / ||

This indicates that you play a CMajor chord for the first half of the bar (2 times) and a C7 chord for the second half of the bar (2 times).

Easy isn't it?