Reading Sheet Music - A Must For Guitarists
Feb 24th, 2008 by guitarnews
Many beginning guitarists find reading sheet music very intimidating. Learning a brand new language composed of a lot of symbols that are new and alien is often daunting. For for anyone wanting to be a serious guitarist, reading sheet music is a must, taking your guitar playing well beyond anything that Tab can teach you.
Guitar tablature is like a crutch, only teaching you how to play songs and compositions by rote. It is certainly true that Guitar Tab will teach you how to play a piece of music somewhere amongst the Tab process you miss some of the real things that music, and being a musician is all about.
Many beginner guitar lessons and learning materials focus almost entirely on guitar tab. While you can make good progress learning in this way, as a musician you miss out on so much.
According to Will Kalif, learning a piece of music with traditional sheet music means not just learning the notes but learning another language. This exercising of your mind makes you more flexible, more capable, and more creative. With time and practice you come to recognize keys, chords, progressions and whole host of things you won’t ever see with Tab.
Click here to read Will’s interesting article about reading sheet music.
True, but you at the same time there are things that you can illustrate with TAB that traditional musical notation simply can’t convey. TAB has been around in one form or another since the Renaissance period (I think it was used for Lute?), today’s TAB is much more precise than that obviously but it means that with the traditional stave you can also show various Guitar effects, bends being the obvious example. I think you do need to be able to read music to fully appreciate TAB but the benefits of TAB are massive.
Thanks for the comment Jon - it would be interesting to find an old TAB chart for the lute and display it for our readers - must look into that! You certainly make a very good point about the massive benefits of TAB once you can read traditional music notation. In other words, you get the best result if you learn both.