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Old 11-30-2017, 12:37 PM
Denny B Denny B is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by JonPR View Post
That's fair enough. I'm the same age to you, and picked up guitar for similar reasons. But that was way back in the mid-1960s...

[cue swirly harp music; scene dissolves... picture goes black and white...]

I taught myself guitar - because there were no teachers for folk/blues/rock guitar back then (and if there had been, I'd have avoided them - this wasn't school!!!). There was no tab either. There were one or two tutor books - literally no more than that - which used notation (and taught you how to read it, up to a point).
I'd also learned to read notation at school (before I was ever interested in music).

What that meant was that I could teach myself a whole load of stuff by reading songbooks. Not only songbooks (ie containing mostly songs I'd heard before), but books of classical guitar, with lots of pieces I'd never heard before, but were fun to play, and taught me a lot of other stuff I'd never have learned any other way.

I learned from records too - slowing them down with a tape deck - and notated them to help me remember them. As I say, there was no tab, but notation is better for that task anyway - it shows rhythm and timing as well as the shape of the tune.

I'm probably different from you, in that I wanted to write my own music too, right from the start. (In the first week I owned the guitar, I wrote four tunes. And I mean I wrote them down, which is how I know... They were obviously crap, but that's not the point ) So notation was invaluable for that, as were the tips about composition I was picking up from the songbooks.

Much later, when I played in bands with horn sections, I could write arrangements and give them the parts to play. And of course I continued to learn new music from books. (I'm not saying that's ideal. Much better to learn by ear. If there's a downside to notation, it's that it can distract you from the need to learn by ear...)

Of course, things are very different today. If you can't write notation and want to record a composition - and you can't easily show timings on tab - you can record it in audio on your phone. If you can't find tab for a song you want to learn, you can learn it easily by ear, using slowdown software (which you can also use to check any tab you do find).

In short, notation is a handy tool, in many ways. But many amateur or hobbyist musicians can easily do fine without it. I'd never say a beginner has to learn it. I use notation and tab together with my students, but I don't push them to learn notation.

It's also worth saying that most other musical cultures around the world learn by ear, not by writing things down (even in something like tab form). Indian classical music, eg, is learned wholly by ear.

IOW, the fight between staff notation and tab is a kind of side issue. They are both types of information that can be useful, but actually learning music is done by ear, not by reading.


Lots of good points there, Jon...thanks for the reply...

And I'd have to say, I have a pretty good ear...I've always been able to tell when a note, a chord, or a rhythm was even slightly off...

When I'm starting to learn something new, I'd say tab gets me in the neighborhood, and my ear takes me home...
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