

If you don’t see the string names next to each line, look elsewhere to make sure the tuning is in Standard. This is handy when a song uses an alternate tuning. Text-based and formal TAB sometimes displays the string tunings for each line as shown below: Here’s what TAB looks like for a 5-string bass: The bottom line in Bass TAB matches the lowest pitch string (eg: E for 4-string bass and B for 5-string bass in Standard Tuning) on your bass. Looking at Bass TAB is like looking down at your bass in your hands. This means if you see a part with six lines, it may be meant for guitar.Īs you can see in the diagram below, the four lines match up to the four bass strings from lowest pitch to highest pitch: The number of lines always matches the number of strings. Bass TAB written for 5-string bass will use five horizontal lines. The first thing you need to understand with Bass TAB is the basic layout.īass TAB has four horizontal lines to represent the four strings on bass.
Bass tab notes pro#
If you want to write your own music, a program such as Guitar Pro can be incredibly useful. A nice advantage of this software is the range of tools you can use such as: Guitar Pro 8 gives you everything you need to edit and create your own TAB as well as download and playback/edit TAB for other songs.
Bass tab notes full#
The easiest way is with Guitar Pro 8 (link to my full review).

There are a few different ways you can create your own TAB. Simply ignore the top staff and read the TAB as normal.
Bass tab notes how to#
It’s important to keep in mind that you don’t need to know how to read Standard Notation to use this format. This is the best of both worlds as it gives you two different ways of reading the same music. The top half is the song written in Standard Notation and the bottom half is written in Tablature. The basic idea here is that you get both the TAB version as well as the Standard Notation version at the same time.Īs you can see below, there are two staffs connected together: If you buy a TAB book, you will likely see this format. You can even write your own TAB in this format using software such as Guitar Pro (explained later). Most interactive TAB will include all instruments for a song, so you can play along to the TAB while listening to the drums, guitar, and any other instruments in the background. Websites like Songsterr use an interactive type of TAB that not only packs in far more information such as proper rhythm notation, but you can play along with the TAB.Īs you can see, the above TAB looks similar to the text-based Bass TAB from earlier, but is easier to read and uses different symbols. Simply changing the font will fix the format issues and line the notes up properly. If you see TAB like the below example, it means the wrong font was used. Notepad in Windows has quite a few other fonts that work well with TAB. The font Courier New is the most popular font for writing this type of TAB.

If you want to write Bass TAB in this format, you need to use a specific type of font.
