If you want to master the guitar, it’s crucial that you learn guitar tabs. The tabs are basically the language of guitar music. They’re what guitarists use to communicate songs to themselves and to each other (and by the way, the tabs read left to right, just like the alphabets of English and many other modern spoken languages). Learn guitar tabs and you learn how to make sense of the chords, notes, and frets that a sheet of music has to share with you.

There are a few things to know right off the bat about guitar tabs. First, they have six lines, not five like the sheet music for other musical instruments (this is to accord with a guitar’s six strings). Guitar tabs will start to make sense when you recognize which tabs match which strings. The tab’s lowermost line is the guitar’s low-E string. The five lines that proceed upwards are—from lowest to highest—strings A, D, G, B, and high-E on the guitar.

Once you’ve gotten the lines and strings down cold, the next step is to get a feel for the numbers that are written on the lines. Each number represents a fret (guitar-speak for “note”) that you play on the corresponding string. Case in point: If you see 5 written on the lowermost line, it means that you are supposed to place your finger on the fifth fret of the low-E string; that would happen to be the A note.

You play a fret by plucking an individual string. A chord is several notes put together, and you play it by plucking several strings at once. The guitar tab will tell you that it’s a cord, and which strings to pluck to play it, by placing numbers on several lines together at the very same point.

In the last 10 years, a myriad guitar enthusiasts’ sites have emerged that can help you to Learn Guitar Tabs. If there is a popular song that you want to learn how to cover, these sites will help you do it. Tababunga.com is one such site. Type the name of a song into its search engine, and it will give you the written tablature to the song, along with a live how-to video that shows you how to play it. You can thus read along and then watch to visualize what you’re reading, so you get your tabs sounded out for you.

“Boy band” used to mean a group that just sings and dances. But the Jonas Brothers are a boy band that rocks. The trio of brothers from the Jersey Shore rose to rapid fame by virtue of their shared prowess in guitar as well as their good looks and ambient vocals. The combination secured them the Breakthrough Artist Award at the American Music Awards in 2008, and enabled them to sell more than eight million albums worldwide as of May 2009 (though their Disney cameos also helped).

The trio’s musical prowess has won them quite a crowd of emulators, and you’ll know this because the Internet is awash with videos and pages of Jonas Brothers guitar tabs. YouTube displays hundreds of contributor videos that walk through Jonas Brothers songs like “Give Love a Try,” “Love Is On Its Way,” “When You Look Me In The Eyes,” and others.

While most of the Jonas Brothers guitar tabs videos on YouTube are submissions from amateur Jonas Brothers fans, you will find many videos from official guitar resource Web sites, too. They obviously find YouTube to be a great promotional venue, which is good for those of us looking for guitar tabs and the best sites for finding them.

Guitartutee.com is a particularly active YouTube contributor. Leave YouTube and visit the Guitartutee home page, and you’ll see that there is a smorgasbord more videos where its several Jonas Brothers Guitar Tabs videos up on YouTube came from. The site is a comprehensive one-stop shop for guitar chords, tabs, lyrics, and video tutorials to thousands of popular songs.

Guitartutee’s stated mission is teaching guitar enthusiasts how to play their favorite songs. Chances are that no matter who your favorite artist or genre happens to be, you’ll find the how-to on how to play his or her songs here: The Eagles, Carrie Underwood, Maroon 5, Radiohead, Rihanna, you name it. And of course, the Jonas Brothers are there, too; you get the tablature to 15 of their songs at the time of this writing (since the site is ever-expanding, like most guitar tabs sites, more could have been added since).

Also be sure to check Ultimate Guitar Archive. It’s got dozens of pages of tablature to Jonas Brothers songs. Individual pages hone in on specific chords or pieces of songs. So you can go through a song piece by piece until you have the whole tune cold.

Hawaiian-born ambient rocker Jack Johnson is a masterful guitarist, by most music fans’ standards. Scores of fans listening to him play, and almost as many wish they could play just like him, too. Gladly for them, the Internet affords a vast slough of guitar-tabs Web sites on which visitors can find complementary Jack Johnson Guitar Tabs.

Ultimate Guitar Archive, the perennial heavyweight in the online tablature universe, takes the grand prize, with its whopping-big total of 500 Jack Johnson Guitar Tabs. Guitar Tabs Universe is a close runner-up with 473 tabs for Jack Johnson songs.

Why do these sites have so many tabs for the same artist? you might ask. First, it’s because so many of his songs are represented here: “Adrift,” “All At Once,” “Belle,” “Drink the Water,” “Sitting, Waiting, Wishing,” and plenty of others. Second, it’s because the content comes from volunteer contributors, many of whom ended up covering the same songs.

It’s a sure testament to the huge fan base that Jack Johnson has drawn, not to mention the enthusiasm he generates among those so many fans, that you’d get 473 contributions—volunteer contributions, mind you; they submit their tabs for love of the music, not for money—to the same Web site(s). That’s just the kind of artist that he is.

It’s a boon for you, in any case, because you’ll get different takes on the same songs. Certain tab contributions will be more intricate than others, and some will be simpler. Once you read a few, you can get a better idea of which ones will be more helpful to you as you’re learning the song.

Guitarmasta.net is a good site to visit if you’re a novice who is looking for Jack Johnson Guitar Tabs. Its tabs hew toward the simple side and are very reader-friendly.

Tababunga is an excellent site for guitarists of just about any skill level. Its collection of tabs for Jack Johnson songs looks small at just 14 total, but those 14 are professionally done instructional videos, not sheet music (sheet music will be good for practicing with, but there’s definitely a place for the human voice).

Every video runs 8 to 14 minutes in length and features an instructor playing the song chord by chord while talking you through what he’s doing and how you’d go about imitating it at home. Frets, strings, placement of your fingers—all of this is broken down for you.

“Hotel California,” a melancholic ode to the hedonism of 1970s Los Angeles, is one of The Eagles’ most popular songs. It’s also one of their most frequently covered. Contemporary rock bands Alabama 3, The Killers, and Vulgaras all produced their own versions in recent years.

A plethora of other artists in other music genres adapted the song to their audiences. The Latin group Gipsy Kings released a Spanish-language version in the 1990s (you’ve heard it if you saw the movie “The Big Lebowski”). Moonraisers put together a ska cover of the song. And in Europe, Macedonian singer Igor Džambazov rehashed the song into “Hotel Macedonia,” a promo for his home country.

Of course, The Eagles’ original is the one that gets the most radio play by far. Regular audiences have therefore gotten heavy exposure to the hit song over the years, and still do. That’s why it shouldn’t be surprising that for all every prominent band or singer that have taken to learning the Hotel California guitar tabs and lyrics, there are a multitude of amateur guitarists doing the same thing.

The Hotel California guitar tabs are the 20th most-downloaded guitar tabs on the Internet, according to Joe Wiles of the Rock ‘N Roll Conservatory. For all those aspiring “Hotel California” aficionados, he’s produced a short video showing how to play the basic chords. He takes you the viewer through every string and the exact placement of your fingers when you’re playing it. Look his video up on YouTube.

Live videos are good for learning. But for practicing’s sake, you might still want the written tablature. For that, be sure to visit Ultimate Guitar Archive, which has 44 different pages of Hotel California guitar tabs, each one individually submitted by a volunteer contributing guitarist.

Ultimate Guitar Archive usually has a lot more tabs for a major hit song like “Hotel California.” Type some song titles into its search engine and you’ll come up with as many as 100, 200, or 300 results. So 44 is actually a modest number. Part of this may be due to ongoing copyright issues. The Eagles are more reticent than some bands on who can post the tabs to their songs.

The site Tababunga had to take down its tabs for Hotel California after getting a letter threatening legal action. There is a “Hotel California” video on Tababunga now, but it’s just a guy playing. No lessons are presented.

Free guitar tab pages sound like a fabulous idea to many guitar enthusiasts. But they remain a contentious topic among record industry executives who insist on collecting royalties for their distribution but do not always receive them. Dozens of Web sites have been launched with the express purpose of receiving and posting free tablature to hundreds, if not thousands of popular songs. A few of them have had to fend off lawsuits along the way, and some have been taken down by court order altogether.

Many of the Web sites that offer Free guitar tab pages needlessly invite trouble by not paying royalties to the original artists and/or the artists’ music publishers whose song tablature they post, or by failing to acquire the proper print license.

But many music executives take affront to a deeper issue, and it is that guitar-tab sites’ revenues—which derive from ads, since the sites offer their content to users for free and therefore don’t collect subscription fees—stay with the sites and don’t go to the artists or the record companies. Also, some publishers and even a few artists argue that the release of their tabs leads to subpar versions of their songs being produced, since there is no guarantee that the amateur users who seek the tabs will have much personal talent.

In December 2005, music industry leaders officially declared that they held the distribution of tabs for copyrighted music to be illegal. A few months later, the Music Publishers’ Association put words into action and threatened several online providers of free guitar tab music with lawsuits. MPA Lauren Kaiser stated that her goal was for these sites to incur fines and, in some cases, prison terms.

So far, no sites have actually been taken to court. But several have volunteered to take their guitar tabs offline until they and the music industry arrive at a lasting compromise. Mxtabs.net closed down temporarily in 2005 but re-launched in late February 2006. In February 2008, the site agreed to pay music publishers and song writers for their song content. And the only songs that it would run would be those that had the express permission of the artists.

Other sites do their part to steer clear of trouble. The site MetalTabs.com takes the preventive approach of always contacting the bands for their consent to having the tablature of their songs posted. Most bands grant its requests.

Like many other deceased rock ‘n roll legends, the late Ozzy Osbourne guitarist Randy Rhoads still has a fair share of emulators today. “Crazy Train,” a metal hit that he performed back in 1981 for the Ozzy Osbourne album Blizzard of Ozz, is a classic hit that lots of beginner guitarists place near the top of their lists of songs to learn. The Crazy Train guitar tabs are fairly easy to get the swing of, even if one is a novice.

The Crazy Train guitar tabs intro is just a few simple power chords. Moving further into the song, you come across some comparably more complicated lead guitar riffs, especially once you hit the guitar solo later toward the end of the song. Though you might find some of these chords trickier, stick with them and you’ll master them soon enough.

You’ll find sheet printouts for the Crazy Train guitar tabs on some guitar Web sites. Look around more, and you’ll also find videos posted by individual guitarists. Certain social-networking sites are loaded with these. Who’s to say that once you get the hang of the song, you might even post one of your own?

When you play this song, you’re playing a song that had an important role to play in rock ‘n roll history: It was Ozzy’s first single as a solo artist after his departure from Black Sabbath, and helped cement him as an independent and talented musician in his own right. It reached number nine on the Billboard Tracks chart. Years later, VH1 gave it two distinctive plaudits: number 9 in the 40 Greatest Metal Songs (2006) and the 23rd greatest hard rock song of all time (2009).

At the time, Crazy Train also solidified Randy Rhoads’ prominent role in Ozzy’s fledgling band. The guitarist got recognized by band members and fans alike for his impressive grasp of technique and composition, and he went front and center in the band’s new music, going so far as to co-write every song. But for his early death in 1982, there is no telling where he might have taken the band.

You’re also in some good company music-wise when you cover this song. The Flys performed a cover of it for the Soundtrack of the 1999 action movie Universal Soldier: The Return. The Welsh band Bullet for My Valentine performed their own respective cover, as did the Texan group Forever the Sickest Kids.

Now the Internet’s fastest-growing guitar community, Ultimate Guitar Tabs Archive is a buzzing abode of music and music fans. Visitors will find reviews of new albums, music news flashes, guest columns opining on the last developments in the music world, and a huge discussion forum. They will also find a massive database of the guitar tabs for hundreds of songs, and even a collection of free guitar lessons.

Ultimate Guitar Tabs Archive arose from humble beginnings. In October 1998, Eugeny Naidenov was an economics student at Kaliningrad State University in Russia when he took the initiative of launching a simple home page listing guitar tabs by just 10 artists.

Guitarists caught on to the site and started trickling in as visitors and as contributors. Within four years, the site’s library had grown to 20,000 tabs. Having attained a steady viewership, Ultimate Guitar Tabs Archive expanded its page to include user profiles, a search engine to find tabs in the tabs database, and tabs favourites. Next up was the launch of an on-site Ultimate Guitar Forum, a discussion arena that has since accumulated more than 2 million message postings and more than 200,000 registered members.

The site is a must-see for rock fans who want to get a flavor for rock music scenes across the globe. One can read about American artist Jack White’s musings over whether to play more shows with the White Stripes, and then skip over to view a feature story about Swedish goth group Katatonia.

The site’s prominence in the guitar community enables it to snag many high-profile interviews, as well: Members of Staind, Creed, and Megadeth, among other internationally known greats, have all lent their time for question-and-answer sessions with the site’s staff. All of these are up on the site for viewing under the heading “Interviews.”

The guitar lessons can give the guitar novice a pretty good start. Richly illustrated articles in this section lead the reader step-by-step in how to play basic guitar chords, how to read tabs, and how to play basic ska and metalcore. It’s also got warm-up exercises for improving one’s speed and picking.

Do you have an artist in mind that really impressed you with a chord that he or she plays in a particular hit song? The lessons page even breaks down for you some specific chords, tones, and lead techniques that Matt Bellamy, John Mayer, James Hetfield, and other artists incorporate into their music.