OK, question for you all.
I never learned to read music. I just didn’t really see the point. When I was learning guitar in the 90s I used to buy Hal Leonard transcriptions. I nearly wore this one out:
I used to just work from tab though. Endless hours trying to nail solos, nuanced rhythm parts, and getting those audio players where you could slow the music but not adjust the pitch.
It all begs the question - how important is reading music? Do you folks read music, and if so, why?
First off, I want to say I have that book… great book but so much stuff wrong and the positions they chose for how to play some of the stuff is crazy lol.
I use tab and can read music notation but not practiced enough to just put a piece in front of me and have me play it. Most pieces in standard notation are not properly done for guitar now days… they leave out the roman numerals for position. You will sometimes see position markings if written by jazz or classical guitarists.
In my opinion, standard notation is a dying art where guitar is concerned it has certainly been mostly replaced by tab, but tab without notation above it to show the timing of the notes it’s somewhat useless too. So both are still needed until a better way comes along.
Well I have a classical music background and spent a lot of time studying Solfege and western music composition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solfège).
A lot of tab books also have the notes like this Steve Vai’s Passion and Welfare transcription.
I find myself reading the notes in classical notation for the solos, much faster and easier for me and I can read ahead a few bars.
For the chords/rhythm sections, I prefer the tabs as there are too many ways to play the same chords on guitar.
For any other instrument in complex music like Dream Theater or Vai, I hate the fake tabs and only look at the music score.
But is it important? I don’t think so, unless you start writing your own music and need to include non guitar voices and instruments.
I also use tabs. But i agree we need musical notation for the timming
I’m at the beginning of my guitar journey and I’m trying to learn to read music since now. I love it!
I learned the basics of music notations when I was 9 years old but only started applying this knowledge to guitar around 18 or 19. For a long while, the zone between the 6th and 11th fret remained a “Terra incognita” for me (with the exception of the 1st and 6th string notes and the E on the 7th in the A string).
Playing with the classical guitar and learning to read from sight has helped me.
And in the past year, making a lot of transcriptions from standard notation to tabs has helped a lot!
I’m currently transcribing Flight of the Bumblebee from standard notation to tabs (using the Guitar Tabs X app for Android). There’s already a tab notation on the sheet but it’s full of unnecessarily complicated series of notes so I prefer to do the tab myself.
And I agree with you… Having the standard notation makes it essential to have the right timing.
Great subject!
Since tabs are historically the way to write down stuff for fretted string instruments (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tablature) and have been used for hundrets of years I think it really makes sense to play guitar using them.
On the other hand harmonies and theory are understood better using notation.
I think whatever works for you is best. You will find both in the internet. Even tabulature with rhythms or even notation added.
Hi everyone. I would just like to bring to your attention an article I read in guitar player 01/12/2020 featuring Steve Lukather, Toto guitarist and session player extraordinaire!. Some quotes ’ The biggest lie out there is that knowing how to read music or knowing anything about music theory takes your soul away…Bullshit’.
‘I could give you a thousand reasons why knowing harmony and theory has helped the writing process, the options, the improvisation.’
He does recognize, of course, that people learn in different ways but he remains adamant…‘saying that music theory takes the soul out of a song is just a lazy man’s way of saying they don’t have the time to put in’.
It would have been better if he said lazy person’s way as obviously a lot of women are guitar players! Nevertheless, the point Steve Lukather is making is clear.’ If anything it has really helped my playing’ he says. He is sharing with us some profound musical insights. Let’s be receptive!
This reminds me of a 4 or 5 years ago when I discovered a video Tutorial from John McLaughlin. I thought to myself “How fortunate to find videos from such legendary master guitar players here for everyone!”
And after a few minutes he started explaining that in order to follow the rest of the tutorial, you needed to be able to read sheet music and know pretty much all of the fretboard otherwise it wasn’t worth watching…
My enthusiasm instantly vanished 
.
Same thing with a guitar textbook by a French guitar pedagog named Jean-Jacques Rébillard… I bought the book 6 years ago but I’ve only just started to understand it and make relevant use of it last year🙄. The book is about improvisation and most of the theory needed to improvise in scales, with exemples of solos “in the style of…” famous guitar players (in blues, jazz, rock, metal, funk…). On the 7th page, he says that you need to know your fretboard before you can be able to improvise successfully…
So it seems the more advanced you are in your knowledge of scales and improvisation, the more this knowledge of the fretboard will be helpful (or perhaps it’s the other way round🤔…).
I’ve had to work on sight-seeing in order to play classical pieces. So I can work my way through a sheet of music but I’m really NOT good at INSTANT recognition of notes and playing on the fretboard… It’s a whole other skill that takes as much practice as Kiko’s Guitar Workout Strategy (that’s as long as it takes… At the least 
)… But I’m talking about the capacity to do both : reading the sheet AND finding the right place to put your finger on the fretboard almost simultaneously. But separately, these two things can be learned fairly “quickly” (if you consider a year of every day practice as something “quick” … The fretboard can actually be learned quicker than that if you’re well organized).
I’d say I can identify roughly 70% of the notes on the fretboard fairly quickly (if you consider 50 bpm quarter notes to be fast 
)
