Reading chord boxes and tab

A chord is several notes played together. On the guitar you make one by holding a shape with your fretting hand and strumming several strings at once.

Chord shapes are written down in two ways: as a chord box, a picture of the shape, or as tab, which writes out the frets as numbers. This lesson teaches you to read both. Everything after it depends on it.

A chord box is a picture of the neck standing upright, as if you had turned the guitar to face you with the headstock at the top.

• The vertical lines are the strings. Low E is on the left, high E on the right.
• The horizontal lines are the frets. The thick line at the top is the nut.
• A dot is where a finger goes. The number in it says which finger.
• An o above a string means play it open.
• An × above a string means don't play it at all.

This is E major. Finger 1 on the G string at the first fret, finger 2 on the A string at the second fret, finger 3 on the D string at the second fret, and all six strings strummed.

When a shape sits further up the neck, the box shows the fret it starts at, written as 5fr or similar beside the top fret, and there is no thick nut line.

A curved bar across several strings means one finger lies flat across all of them. That is called a barre, and you will meet it in the F and B lessons.

Tab is written on six lines, one for each string. Tab is upside down compared with the chord box: the thin high E string is the top line.

A number is the fret to press on that string, and 0 means open. Numbers written above each other are played at the same time. Numbers written one after another, left to right, are played one after another.

A string with no number, like the lines of dashes above, is not played at that moment.

Hold the E shape and pluck each string one at a time, from low E to high E, like the second tab. Every string should ring clearly. If one is dull or buzzing, find out which finger is touching it and adjust. That habit, checking string by string, is how every clean chord is built.