How to Read Guitar Charts

This guitar lesson vid shows you how to read guitar charts .

All right gang, we are going to learn how to decipher a music chart. This is a support video for the lessons that you can purchase or an E-book that you can purchase at yourguitarsage.com so check it out. Specifically the chart that we are going to be working with today is the song, “What Hurts the Most” by Rascal Flatts. I chose this song because it got a lot of good stuff in it that we can use to decipher charts. So without further ado, let us get into it here. If you notice underneath the title, we have a little section here that gives us a little description. First thing says in four that means 4/4 of four bpm. So in this case if it is one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four and that is how long a measure is, four beats and you would hold that chord out four beats. This next section here is capo one. If you do not know about capos, check out my videos. Capos are devices that you put in your guitar that helps you change keys. So in this, you put the capo right behind the first fret. And that would allow us to play in G. G of course has chords like G, C, D, Em, and the light in the key of G. So capo on the first fret allow us to play with the G field and we are actually in the key of G#. If that is confusing to you, check my video out. So let us back up for a second here. You will see a lot of charts to be written along the sign here, descriptions of what part of the song we are in, so intro, verse, chorus, turnaround, bridge, solo, etc. And you will see different things here. Some people will just put a D, C. You will notice on my charts that that is what I put a lot of times when I am handwriting. This is an I of D, C, that sort of thing. Alright, so now we know the different parts of the song here. You can see the whole song laid out there. So we got our intro here. It starts off—we got 1, 2, 3, 4 and repeat. We repeat because these symbols right here, that is the front and the back of the section of chords here. It means you would repeat that part and typically in musical notation, you see two bars here and a colon, and at the end here, a colon and two bars but in word, which is where I did this in Microsoft Word. It makes it a little bit—you really cannot quite do that, the music symbol that you will normally see, so I use brackets. So all that to say, this part is repeated, okay. We come to our verse, it is going to be the same thing, 2, 3, 4, four beats for each one of these, so you would play your chord and on the one, you would change your chord. Now you notice coming up here, we got a little section here with two chords and then underline. So we call it split measure and it is not denoted otherwise. We are going to do the split measure in half, so two beats here for the C and two beats for the D. So in this case, it would be 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4. So split measure automatically splits the four beats into two beats. If this song were in 6, then it would be split in half. The 6 would be split in half and the C would get to the D—I’m sorry, the C would get 3, the D would get 3. So we call it split measure. Once we scroll down here, we got some more split measures right here, right here and right here. So if you notice down here, I mentioned that we have a split measure cut in half as 2 and 2. Here, we have got one that is 2 and typically, it would look like this, 4, so it would be 3 beats and then one here, these are hash marks. But in this case, we have a P, which stands for push. So in this case, these here, these were something like this and then you can go 1, 2, 3, 4. So 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4. You do not see that very often but you do see that sometimes, but this song actually has the P right here which is what I call push. So instead of 1, 2, 3, 4, what you are doing is, you are pushing the beat and it means that you plan it a little bit early and to be exact, you are playing it on the end of 3. So you got D on the 4, you are at the end of 3. So 1, 2, 3, and that is where we are hitting that one right there. 1,