So, when you're reading the tab you'll notice a few strange symbols and directions above the music. You can think of these as signposts telling you where to go next in the music.
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Whether using our interactive tab player, normal tabs or reading full-blown sheet music, you will have come across various cool symbols and musical directions to follow. These are important to understand, and in this blog post, we'll dive into the most common of these musical navigations. Let's dive in!
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Dan Holton
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It's very common in music to repeat sections, for example, you would have the same backing for verse 1, verse 2 etc. And, while we can write these all out one after another, we prefer to use these directions to keep the sheet music to as few pages as possible. That way you get all the information you need to play the piece in front of you without having to turn the page (or scroll!). So, let's start with the "repeat bars"…
Repeat Bars
These special bar lines always come in pairs and book-end a passage that needs to be repeated. So, as soon as you get to the 'closing' repeat go right back to the 'opening' repeat and play through the passage again. If you only need to play the passage twice you won't see any other notation, but if it's 3 or more times around you'll see a little x3 or x4 above the 'closing' repeat. Here are two examples of a repeat direction, one asking you to repeat twice, and one four times:
Alternate Endings
Very often you'll need to change just the last bar of a repeated passage - this is very useful for leading into a new section for example going from a verse to a chorus. To save writing out the entire verse twice you can use alternate endings. The Line 'brackets' the bar (or bars) that will be different on each repeat and the number tells you when you should play it. So, if you see a 1. you play that bar on the first time through, then the section with the 2. on the second time through. Here is an example diagram of that:
Dal Segno
Segno is Italian for 'Sign' and it's a marker on a piece of music. It's paired up with the direction Dal Segno and is literally telling you to go back to the sign and play from there. So, the first time you see the symbol you can ignore it - it comes into play after you see Dal Segno (or D.S). Here's an example of that in tab:
Coda
Coda is Italian for 'tail' and it's a passage that brings a piece of music to an end. It's paired up with the direction Da Coda means skip straight to the Coda symbol and play from there. The Da Coda is the last instruction you would take on a piece of music, as it moves you right to the very end passage. So if there are any Dal Segno symbols then work through them first, before acknowledging the Da Coda. As a basic example, it would look something like this:
Want to put these into practice?
I would highly recommend starting the Acoustic Fingerstyle Level 1 course if you want to put these into practice! In that course, as we work through the units, we bring in more and more of these signposts.
Conclusion
More symbols may appear, but with these 4 covered, you will be fine 90% of the time. Plus if you do see other symbols, you'll be able to put together a pretty good educated guess what they might be for based on what you have learnt here! All the best, Dan.