Guide
Writing guitar and bass tablature: staves, technique marks, transposing and PDF
Tablature is the shorthand most guitarists and bassists learn first. Instead of notes on a staff, it draws the strings as lines and puts the fret number on the line where a finger goes. It is easy to read once you know the idea, and easy to type in a monospaced font. This page gives you a place to write it, with the staves and symbols a tab needs, tools to change it and a PDF that prints properly.
How tab works
Each line is a string. The top line is the highest string and the bottom the lowest. A 0 is an open string, 3 is the third fret. Numbers in the same column are played together; moving right means moving forward in time. For a guitar in standard tuning the lines are e, B, G, D, A, E, and for a four-string bass G, D, A, E. Vertical bar lines mark the bars.
A worked example
Press Sample to load a four-bar riff titled “Simple riff”. The longest line is 66 characters, and at 10 point the PDF fits 85 characters per line, so no staff needs splitting. Choose Move every fret by 1 and press Up 1 fret: the top string changes from e|—––0—––… to e|—––1—––…, and every other fret number rises by one, with the bar lines and columns unmoved. Press Down 1 fret and it returns to the original. The count of staves found is 1.
Inserting staves and marks
Add a guitar staff or Add a bass staff puts a blank staff of 32 columns at the cursor, separated by a blank line. The technique buttons insert a mark at the cursor: h for hammer-on, p for pull-off, b for bend, / and \ for slides up and down, ~ for vibrato, x for a muted note and (5) as a ghost note you adjust to the fret you need. They are only text, so any other symbol you like also works.
Transposing
Choose a step of 1, 2, 5 or 12 and press Up or Down to move every fret number. Columns stay lined up even when a number goes from one digit to two, because the tool pads the other strings. If notes would go above fret 24, the page says how many. In the other direction, notes that would fall below the open string are set to 0, and a warning tells you how many were changed. Transposing by 12 moves a part an octave.
The PDF
Fill in the title, artist, tuning and capo, which appear as a header. The PDF uses a monospaced font, with a size of 8 to 12 point, and the page reports how many characters fit on a line at that size. A staff that is too wide is split at a bar line so notes are not cut off. The title and artist use a basic Latin font, so other characters become a question mark. The text download is the same tab as plain text.
Edge cases
Proportional fonts break the alignment, so the editor is monospaced and does not wrap. Fill gaps with dashes rather than the tab key. Lines of different lengths in a staff are not aligned automatically, and a technique mark is only text, so transposing changes the fret numbers but leaves marks such as h or p where they are.
Limits
It does not play the tab, convert to standard notation or read other tab file formats. It works with text and has no rhythm notation. Your work is saved in your browser as you type.
Related tools
- Chord Diagram Maker makes chord boxes for the same song.
- Chord Transposer moves a song’s chords into a key that suits the singer.
- Fretboard Trainer helps you learn which note sits at each fret.
- Online Tuner tunes the guitar before you play the tab.
Checked against the current version of the Guitar Tab Maker on .