The Guitar Players Club

I was recently reading some posts in a forum topic regarding guitar tablature and learning to read standard music notation. There were some 'interesting' opinions on the topics.

Firstly, I'd like to say that I learned to read standard music notation many years age. When I was 12 or 13 years old I played in the school band. At the time I was playing the clarinet, not my ideal choice of instruments, but the guitar wasn't an available option at school. Although the clarinet wasn't the instrument I

ultimately chose to pursue throughout my music career, it did get me active in learning music, and most importantly I learned to read music early on.

More than a few of the posts that I read in the forum I previously mentioned were by guys that stated there was really no reason to learn to read music when you can get the same information via guitar tab. I'm here to say, don't believe that!! I will be the first to say that I do believe that knowing how to 'read' tablature is a great convenience, but it shouldn't be assumed that it can be used 'in place of' learning to read music.

If you don't plan on making music a professional endeavor, then by all means learn tablature, copy the songs that you're interested in from CDs and go from there. However, if you truly want to be a professional musician, learning to read standard music notation is a must.

If you're going to put yourself 'out there' as a profesional guitarist, there will be times when you'll have to collaberate on musical projects and exchanging the music to such projects will be part of it. If you ever try to hand another instrumentatlists a TAB sheet, you'll actually depict yourself as a rank amateur. No professional musician or producer would ever work with you...they couldn't. Guitar TABS are just that 'GUITAR' tabs. They are just for the guitarist. A keyboardist isn't going to learn to decipher tablature to make up for the fact that some guitarist didn't put forth the effort necessary to learn what he/she needed to in order to make it in the field.

Also, what are you going to do if/WHEN you've got a potentially great offer to work on a project and a producer hands you the music to the project, but you can't read music ? I'll tell you, you're going to learn to read music immediately, not likely, or you're going to miss that great chance and become known as an amateur and never contacted again.

So, if you really love the guitar and plan on making it a career, do what you need to now...learn to read music. It is somewhat involved, but is very 'doable', it's not a matter of 'can I do it', it's just a matter of 'do I care enough about learing everything I can to become the best guitarist that I can possibly be'.

Just look around on the web, do some searches, there's many, many free sites where you can get everything that you need to become a proficient site reader. It's a little slow going at first, but it's something that you'll be extrememly glad that you achieved throughout your life, I promise you that. Get started today, you'll never regret it...you will regret not doing it however.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 14th, 2008 at 6:43 pm and is filed under Theory.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.