Why these two sheets matter more than they look
Among the nine printables in the library, the blank tablature paper and the open-chord chart are consistently the two most-downloaded. The reason is that they’re the only two that get reached for in every lesson — the others are situational (you don’t need the circle of fifths every week, you don’t fill out a progress tracker after every session). These two are the daily-driver sheets, the ones that get used until they’re creased and tea-stained.
Blank tab paper has been a staple in guitar teaching for fifty years for one reason: the act of writing music down by hand in front of a student is one of the highest-bandwidth teaching moves you have. You’re showing them not just the notes but the process of figuring out the notes. They watch you erase, re-sketch, draw an arrow, change your mind. By the time you hand them the finished sheet, they’ve seen the line built from the ground up.
The open-chord chart serves a different purpose. It’s less about teaching and more about not teaching — about giving a beginner a self-service reference so they don’t have to email you in the middle of the week to ask “how do I play D again?”. A chord chart that lives inside the guitar case lid removes that friction. The student picks up the guitar, sees the diagram, plays the chord. No phone, no app, no waiting for a response.
The blank tab in detail
Six 6-line staves per page, A4 portrait, 100% scale. Generous vertical spacing so a handwritten fret number doesn’t crowd the next one. The whole sheet is plain enough that it gets out of the way — you’re writing music on it, not admiring the design.
Six staves per page works out to roughly 16–24 bars of medium-density riff. For longer pieces, multiple sheets stapled together. For shorter sketches (a 4-bar lick to give a student as homework), you’re using half a sheet — most tutors fold them in half and stack the resulting half-sheets in their student folder.
There are alternatives worth knowing about. Guitar Pro → PDF handles fully-notated pieces with proper rhythm — much better than handwriting if the source already exists in GP format. The chord encyclopedia covers the entire indexable chord vocabulary if you need a voicing the cheat sheet doesn’t show.
The chord chart in detail
18 open chords laid out in a single A4 landscape page: 6 majors (C, A, G, E, D, F), 3 minors (Am, Em, Dm), 5 dominant 7ths (E7, A7, B7, D7, G7), and 4 sus chords (Dsus2, Dsus4, Asus2, Asus4). Each diagram shows finger numbers and string-by-string fingering. F is shown in two versions: the full barre and a simplified three-finger Fmaj7-ish voicing for beginners whose grip strength hasn’t caught up yet.
The chart is designed to live somewhere visible — inside the case lid, on the wall next to the music stand, in the front of a practice folder. It’s not designed to be a comprehensive chord reference; that’s what the chord encyclopedia is for. The 18 chords here are the high-frequency vocabulary a beginner uses in their first six months. Once they outgrow it, the next teaching block is barre chords — which unlocks all twelve keys and warrants its own reference sheet (in the roadmap).
A few honest cases where digital beats paper for tab and chord work:
- Fully-notated pieces with complex rhythms. Hand-writing 16th-note triplets with grace notes is a mug’s game. Use Guitar Pro and the GP→PDF tool to produce a clean printable PDF.
- Chord voicings beyond the open-chord vocabulary. Drop-2 chords, jazz voicings, chord-melody arrangements. The chord encyclopedia covers ~800 chord pages; the chord chart generator lets you spec a custom voicing and download a single PNG.
- Searching for a chord by sound. “I have the notes E, G, B and D — what chord is that?” — the reverse chord lookup tool answers that in a click.
The pattern: paper for the high-frequency reference and the messy sketching; digital tools for the long tail and the polished output. Both are free here.
