Why Guitar Tabs Suck (Article)

A guitarists struggle to learn guitar tab…

My first adventure in to a song was Pink Floyd – Wish You Were Here. I went to the search engine and had no idea what a tab was or even how to begin searching for one.

Finally I began to put two and two together and found a version of Pink Floyd Wish You Were here from MXTabs.net way back before they got shut down =(

To make a long story short, I broke a sweat out of frustration in less than 5 minutes, put my guitar back in it’s case and went back to playing my video games. That was back then…

This is now…

Guitar tabs look like perfect english to me now, but at the time when I was starting out I could not make sense of anything. It looked like another foreign language to me! My friends laughed when they watched my fingers try to play a song in the most ridiculous way imaginable. I was just trying to do what the tab told me to do, but the tab did not tell me what finger position to play in, or if there were any helpful tricks to make it easier on my hands! I was getting tired of this dead end approach to improve my skills.

Here is my point: Guitar tab sucked then and it sucks now. I’m still waiting for the pioneer that fixes this problem for the masses…

What do you struggle with? Chances are it may be the motivation to keep playing. Because that is how it used to be for me!