Using easy tablature is a great way to start exploring the acoustic guitar and all of its wonderful sonic capabilities. With the acoustic guitar, you have no tricks or gimmicks and no sound effects and amplification to rely on. Instead, you just have your fingers and what's in your heart and mind. With the relative ease of these simple tabs, you're on your way.
Blues Progressions
You ain't no guitar player if you can't play the blues, or so the saying goes. America's original art form, the blues, is one of the most vital parts of the musical language. With the blues, you can converse with other musicians. You can jazz it up, rock and roll it, and even take it to the country. The following examples are relatively easy as they are all in the key of A or A minor and use melodies in first position along with simple chord forms to illustrate the tunes. Play them slow, medium and fast and vary your rhythms and feels. To download, click on the thumbnail. For help with printables use this easy guide.
Taking the Boulevard
Green Day's Billie Joe Armstrong has written quite a number of top hits, and his Boulevard Of Broken Dreams is a deep and poignant look at loneliness. Musically, it offers a wonderful chord progression and a strong, haunting, and memorable melody. Use this version to interpret the song your way acoustically.
Holiday Acoustics
We Three Kings is a holiday favorite that is basically a minor blues with a bridge. This version focuses on the A section of the song and offers a great vehicle for improvisation. Put on your jazz and blues hat, get together with some friends, and jam on this one.
Online Resources
The five sources listed here are a great start to expand your acoustic guitar repertoire and offer a variety of easy to read and play songs in many styles.
- Guitar Noise is an educational and lesson website that offers a great introduction to the guitar. Written in a blog style and compiled by David Hodge, the site does offer a section of easy guitar songs. It's a good first stop along the way.
- Guitar Nick is a terrific resource for music of all styles with an enormous list of pieces with varying degrees of difficulty. The pages offer videos of how to play and the tablature on the same page, which is extremely helpful. They do just about everything except play the guitar for you.
- Ultimate Guitar has a seemingly endless list of songs to choose from and offers different versions. At the touch of a button, you can change key and even listen to examples. This is a great resource for easy to advanced acoustic tabs.
- National Guitar Academy is similar to Guitar Nick in that it shows everything you need on one page with chord diagrams, tabs, and how-to videos. It's another terrific resource.
- Guitar Alliance offers all styles and music from simple and easy to quite advanced. The site is easy to navigate. and the first page lists over a hundred links to songs. In one click you're learning and playing.
Print Resources
To go further in depth, many of the top sheet music and educational publishers in the music industry including Hal Leonard, Alfred, Mel Bay, and many others offer standalone and entire series of educational books and song books that are either entirely in or include tablature. Sometimes there's no substitute for that old-fashioned fancy book learnin', and these well-established companies offer outstanding and tried-and-true methods and materials for improving beginner guitarists.
