Ok, so you've been listening on this great great theme song from a Final Fantasy game and have been dying to learn how to play it on the guitar. You searched the Internet for tablatures but unfortunately, found only monotonic tabs. Then you heard from someone that there's this cool guy on the Internet that makes kickass tablatures *winks*. But unfortunately again, that cool guy somehow made his way into the military and was trapped inside camp, thus ending the chances of your tablature request.

A sad world indeed, but hey, don't lose hope. Why ask someone when you can tab that song yourself! It's really not that complicated. Even someone who has no idea of musical theories and stuffs (like me) can do it. It can be time-consuming though, but hard?... nah...

This guide has a simple requirement though--you should know how to read a piano piece/sheet. I will not teach that to you here since this is just a simple guide and I don't have space, so just search the Internet for lessons on reading piano pieces (that's what you get for sleeping on music class).

Now let's get started. The standard tuning for a guitar is EADGBE, which means that the 6th string (the fattest and lowest-sounding one), when open-plucked, is an E-note, the 5th string an A-note, and so on. Each fret raises the note half-step, which means holding the 1st fret of the 5th string (A-string) would generate an A# note, and the 2nd fret of the 4th string (D-string) an E-note. With that in mind, take look at this table.

The table shows the note a string produces when held on a specific fret. Holding the 3rd fret of the 6th String generates a G-note, the 9th fret of the 3rd string an E-note, and the 18th fret of the 1st string a A#-note (or Bb). You'll be referring to that table a lot so unless you can memorize it, I suggest that you print it when tabbing a song off a piano sheet.

Now keep in mind how octaves work in guitars. We can see that both the 5th fret of the 6th string and the open fret (0-fret) of the 5th string both produces the same note--A. However, not because they're on different strings mean that they're on different octaves. They are actually just the same A-note (A2). The next higher octave of A (which is A3) would be on the 2nd fret of the 3rd string, which is the same as the 7th fret of the 4th string or the 12th string of the 5th string... Confused? Well, here's another table showing both the note and octave of each fret.

You probably now have an idea where this is going. Let's take a look at a simple sheet. Reading it, we have F4-E4-D4-C4. If we take a look at the Guitar Note Table, we can see that F4 is the 1st fret of the 1st string, E4 is the open fret of the 1st string, D4 is the 3rd fret of the 2nd string, and C4 is the 1st fret of the 2nd string. In tablature notation, it goes something like this.

Now, let's have a more complex piece. Here's something from FFX's "Someday the Dream Will End". The tab then, would look something like this.

And that's basically it. As long as you know how to read notes on piano sheets, all you have to do is look on the Guitar Note Table and match them. As for the timing, or knowing which string to use, or when to use pull-offs or hammer-ons, and other stuffs, well, it's all up to you. Start with simple piano pieces, then move on to something more complex, just like the usual protocol of learning. Little by little you'll realize things like when to tab a song with 2 guitars, adjust octaves, omit notes, and tuning adjustments.

Now, the big question--where do I find video game sheet music? If you have money, you can actually buy them on some online stores--just google them. Many fan-arranged pieces are also scattered thoughout the web, which you can google too. There are also programs that translates and converts MIDIs into sheet music, but you have to pay for most of them too. Simply put, just do the google search...