Feeling Like an Airhead

Ok, I have really been seriously trying to play acoustic guitar for the past year. One thing to my advantage is I have a lead guitar playing boyfriend who helps alot. (He tho, plays by ear) I already knew how to read music, so that's a plus. I spend LOTS of time on the net searching for songs I'd like to learn, buy books like they are water, but I have one weakness....tabs. For the life of me I can not get the understanding of them in my head. Yes I realize the numbers on a tab correspond to a specific string/fret combination, but it really may as well be in a foreign language. I simply can not look at a tab and understand how it matches to a phrase of music. Such a mental block there. Any suggestions?

Auralis

Tabs are tough unless you know the melody by ear already because they only contain the information regarding which notes to play and very little else about these notes. My best suggestion is to download a program called the Power Tab Editor. It is an extremely useful program that contains not only the tablature but also the sheet music for each song. Furthermore you can actually watch and listen to the song being played, kinda like on a TV show where the bouncing ball goes over the words to a song as they're being sang.

Once you've downloaded and installed this wonderful program head on down to the Power Tab Archive to search for any songs you need.

Hope that helped.