Why Learn Notation?

Wednesday, September 5, 2007

While guitar tablature is a convenient shorthand way of writing music it is in no way a substitute for standard musical notation. Here’s why:

  • Practically everything you are going to want to learn will be in music notation. If you can only read tablature you will be con- fined to a very small repertoire.

  • If you learn standard notation you can read music for any instru-ment. You might want to make a guitar arrangement from a piano score, or simply learn the notes of a song for which you wi be working out chords.

  • Chord construction and harmony theory is much easier to see in notation.

  • You want to be a guitarist, but you almost certainly also want to be considered a musician. It is hard to achieve this if you don’t understand the basic language of music. Other musicians don’t read guitar tablature.

  • One of the problems newcomers to music have is the difficulty of reading the time as well as the notes. Fortunately you already have experience with the basics of counting, so all we have to do now is understand how the notes fit on the music staff.


    1 comments:

    Unknown said...

    Nice and encouraging post! I always want to learn notation, it's just that I'm always intimidated by notes, lol. I'm helping myself to learn the guitar. I'm an avid fan of online guitar lessons and video tutorials. The one I love is the Learn and Master Guitar by Steve Krenz (Guitar Lessons Blog). The author is a professional guitarist and a teacher, so creating a tutorial on how to play the guitar is as smooth as silk for him.It's pretty effective BTW.

    Thanks, I'm having a good time here, except the posts with notations since I can't understand them for the mean time, lol.