I’m a beginniner, having started with Justin Giutar last fall. I’m making good progress with the songs in the JustinGuitar App. Now I want to start using other sources of music including tabs and sheets with lyrics and chords. However, I’m struggling with this transition. For example when I look at a sheet with lyrics and chords on it, there is no indication of the bar structure. Tabs are almost too much info for my current skill level… I guess I’m a little spoiled by using the app. Does anyone have advice/suggestions to make this change?
I’ve never used a app so don’t even know about them.
But I do use music + tabs.
The real music really spells out what you need to do. So if you can follow the music, (ie at least kinda read music), to me, this is where the facts of a song are.
As for tabs. I use them often. Agreed, there’s no q’s as to where to play or rhythms to use.
So, your left to your own demise.
Listen to the real song your wanting to play. The version of the song you want to play. Then your left to do your best to mimic what you hear. You’ll be making many attempts at playing what your hearing in the original song. At least I do.
I’ve also found that I never play a song exactly like what I’m trying to copy. Either I miss parts of a song, or I just can’t play parts of a song. So, I’m left with what I can do.
Every song I’ve done is nothing but my rendition of any song I’m trying to cover. In other words. I’m never perfect or exact in my rendition. The song becomes what I think the song sounds like, to me.
I figure if I can play a song such that someone may recognize the song I’m trying to do, I’ve succeeded in covering that song.
Many times I’ll get the basic idea of what I want to do fairly quickly. But to get the song like I want to play it will take me months if not years to get it to sound like I really want to play it.
Take your time, listen to what ya wanna copy, hear the music in your mind, feel the music in you body. If I’m feeling this way, I have the best chance of success in my renditions.
Good luck.
It’s a long process imho.
edit, oh, you’ll likely encounter chords you don’t know too. These you’ll have to learn to memory + be able to be fast enough to use them throughout your song. This just adds more time to the process, but it also will add to your chord vocabulary. So imho, these new chords are all good.
Music is about listening with your ears not looking with your eyes.
That being said I understand we all need to learn new things by reading Chord sheets or Tabs, but you also have to know the song your learning by listening to the original or a version you’d like to learn.
In Justin’s transcribing lessons he recommends listening to a song at least 10 times in a row the get the song structure down. I’d suggest learning the lyrics well enough so you can sing along with the original and listen for the chord changes.
It sounds time consuming but it gets easier the more you do it. Learning song structure is something everyone should learn but very few Teachers teach it so you need to learn it by listening tapping your foot to the rhythm and singing or humming along to the music.
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This question comes up from time to time. You have to figure out where the bars fall.
My advice is the following: get the chord + lyric sheet and read though it while you listen to the original recording of the song. Tap your foot while you do this (no guitar needed for this part). Do it several times and you should be able to hear exactly where the chord changes are occurring and how many beats there are between each change. Mark up your chord sheet accordingly. Now grab your guitar and play the song. Simples!
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To add a bit to what @jjw John suggested: when I “grab [my] guitar and play the song”, I start with very simple strumming. I might strum only when the chord changes (but at least once per measure). I’m sure to keep my hand moving though! Once those changes are embedded in my brain (and arm), I move to more sophisticated strumming. This is usually a pretty quick process.
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As the others said, you need to have the tab in front of you and read it while listening to the song. Knowing the song well already helps a lot.
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Hi Michael, learning a little bit of music theory and how to understand sheet music goes a long way. I know a lot of people hate it, but it is well worth it in the long run
I understand this struggle. It was an enormous hangup for me earlier on and it still frustrates me from time to time.
The more you dig into songsheets, the more you’ll see that the consistency is terrible. Some songsheet authors/editors/whatever you want to call them do a good job of including the rhythm structure in the song. I’ve come across a few where the chord is provides with dots afterward indicating the number of beats it gets played. These are great for beginners in your position and where I was a year ago.
If you’re playing on your own, you have the luxury of doing what other folks say and listening to the song several times while looking at the songsheet to work all those things out. That really is the best way. It might help, especially at the beginning, to write notes on the songsheet to help you with the rhythm as you work them out.
What nobody is really inclined to tell you at the start (and this is a failing of guitar instruction) is that songsheets are MEANT to be a shorthand notation to follow along after you’ve learned the song. But that’s not how they’re actually used by a LOT of people. I spoke about this with my instructor probably about a year ago and he grumbled about it. He hates that notation.
Sometimes it doesn’t go the ideal way - sometimes you’re with a group who hands you a songsheet and you’re expected to follow along. Sometimes without having the slightest clue how the song goes. In those cases, you follow the group and if something varies from the standard 4 beats/measure or 3 beats/measure, then you’re going to mess it up until you get it down.
You’ll encounter songs that kinda fall into a couple broad groups. Songsheets work well enough for the ones that are your basic campfire strumming type songs. Songsheets start to fail when things get more complex than that.
ASCII tabs work better for picking, but they also fail when it comes to conveying rhythm information. High-quality TABS like you can get (or create) using Guitar Pro allow you to get all the information you need to play a song. Makes sense, because Guitar Pro can also handle standard musical notation. If I’m working out how to play something more complex, then I go to Guitar Pro where I can write it out with all the important information. Once I learn it there, I can use the shorthand from songsheets or ASCII tabs until I have the whole thing memorized (which make take a lot for something especially complex).
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I could listen to a song 600 times and still not identify what the chords are. 
Me, too! But @stitch is suggesting to listen to the song to understand where the chord changes occur, not to identify what the chords are. This is quite doable if you read the chord chart while listening.
Another way of doing this is to lay out the chords of a song on a regular grid and then fill in lyrics. Something like this:
The regular grid for the chords can be very helpful to identify patterns and repetition in the chord progression (for example line 1 and 3 the same for this song).
Note that I have spaced out the lyrics so they fall in the right place.
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