Many of my music educator students are new not only to the ukulele, but also to reading TAB notation. In this video, I show and explain how to read TAB by writing out a simple and familiar melody, played on the ukulele. Reading and writing TAB is a simple system, once you are familiar with it. It takes about ten minutes to learn it and you can use it for melodies, chords, and even notate rhythms. Generally, Ukulele TAB is used for simple melodies where the rhythm is familiar.

There are many symbols that can be added to basic TAB to communicate a wide range of musical treatments, effects and actions. There are also a few online resources you can use to write TAB and save PDFs to use with your students.

Here’s a PDF of the sheet I used in the video.