In this lesson we just add a couple of notes on String 3. Here they are:

We are adding the notes “G” (3rd string – open) and “A” (3rd string – 2nd fret). Be sure to use your middle finger to play the “A” note. As you can see, you will now have a total of 8 notes to work with:

• String #1 = 3 notes (E,F,G)
• String #2 = 3 notes (B,C,D)
• String #3 = 2 notes (G, A)

The first question many of my students ask is: Why are there two “G” notes and why do they sound different? Our musical system (there are different kinds of musical systems) provides us with seven natural notes A,B,C,D,E,F, and G. If one were to play these notes on the piano (white keys), the note to the right of G (next natural note pitch higher and also the next white key) would be called “A” again. Except it would be one “octave” higher. We perceive this with our ears. It is also perceived with an oscilloscope. The waves double, and every other wave matches when it peaks and dips.

For an example, let’s listen to the two “G” notes. Place your ring finger on the 3rd fret of the 1st string (the “G” note on the 1st string). Pluck the 3rd string open (the “G” on string 3) and then pluck the 1st string 3rd fret (the “G” on string 1) and listen to them ring together. You should notice that they have a kind of “unity” sound. Pluck your 3rd string open and match it to other strings or notes. When you match it to another “G” note, you will get that unity kind of sound again. At this point in our series, this is all you need to know. We will be dealing with seven notes and their octaves. Later, we will discus the sharps and flats (the black keys on the piano and the notes in between notes on our guitar [ex: fret 2 on string 1]).

But let’s leave that alone for the moment. Time to PLAY! Download both exercises (from the links). Work on ” Notes on String 3″ first, and be able to play the examples with rhythm. Then work on “Notes on Strings 1-3″ next. There are midi links that will play you the two exercise sheets. Between this latest lesson and the first two, you will now have mastered eight notes! Okay, go practice and have some fun!

• Exercise 1 pdf (Right-click and “Save as”)
• Exercise 2 pdf (Right-click and “Save as”)

• Exercise 1 Download midi (Right-click and “Save as”)
• Exercise 2 Download midi (Right-click and “Save as”)

If you have questions or would like an extra work out sheet, email me at: peter@petersimms.com.

Also in this Series

• How To Read and Perform Music on the Guitar – Part 1
• How To Read and Perform Music on the Guitar – Part 2

In part #2 we are going to address String 2 (the B string). Now that you made it through the opening lesson, it should be rather easy to add 3 notes that are on the 2nd String. These notes are B, C, and D. See the chart below:

As you can see above, we have extended the range of the notes. We have our new notes B, C, and D on the 2nd string, and we also have E, F, and G (from the opening lesson) on the 1st string.

Your goals this lesson are:

1. learn how to “play” the notes on the 2nd string – rhythm included.
2. learn how to “play” the notes on the 1st and 2nd string together – rhythm included.

If you can obtain these goals, you’ve doubled your capacity! Now you not only know where 6 notes are on the guitar, but you can “play” them when you see them. Yahoo!

Remember that rhythm is IMPORTANT. You could say it is more important than pitch. If you played the wrong note in the correct rhythmical spot, you made “1” mistake. If you played the correct note in the wrong rhythmical spot, you made “2” mistakes = not playing the correct note in the rhythmical spot where it was supposed to be played, and playing a note where there wasn’t supposed to be a note.

Here are two exercises for you:

• Exercise 1 pdf (Right-click and “Save as”)
• Exercise 2 pdf (Right-click and “Save as”)

The first one is a set of exercises only using the notes B, C, and D. The other one is using the combination of all 6 notes B, C, D, E, F, and G. Below are also midi examples of these various exercises:

• Exercise 1 Download midi (Right-click and “Save as”)
• Exercise 2 Download midi (Right-click and “Save as”)

Now that you made it through the opening lesson. I’m not going to be using TAB anymore. Yikes! It’s very difficult not to look at the TAB when it is just under the notes. Your goal is to learn how to read music. Therefore, TAB will just mess this up… Yes, you can say it now… OH NO!

This lesson should be very attainable for you to accomplish. I’m trying to make it as easy as possible to learn how to read music. If you’re having problems, email me and, based on your level, I can make some suggestions.

I also have additional practice sheets with midi examples available for your studies. Just email me at peter@petersimms.com and I will be more than happy to send them your way.

Have Fun!

Also in this Series

• How To Read and Perform Music on the Guitar – Part 1
• How To Read and Perform Music on the Guitar – Part 3

I tell my students: “the only obstacle is that reading music takes a while to learn.” Therefore, if you want it, you need to be patient and have consistent practicing with it.

The “BIG MYTH” is that it’s difficult to do. However you obtained this idea, it’s wrong! There are many study guides and books that approach reading music in multiple ways. I found that the common problem they have is a proper learning curve in their method. Many of the books start out nice and easy. The student becomes confident, but not long after the first couple of lessons the learning curve inclines at an angle to which the student runs into major problems with the lessons. Most of this is due to the fact the student has not had a chance to get comfortable with the material he or she had just learned.

This year I’m taking an extra effort to help my students overcome the fear of learning to read music, plus find out how interesting and doable it is. I also plan on passing some of this information to you in a series rightly called “how to read music on the guitar” on the Guitar Noise website. I will present a step-by-step approach (lesson at a time) from the very beginning to intermediate linear (playing single notes) “PLAYING”. I like to use the word playing, because I have had many new students tell me they already know how to “read” music. Therefore, I write out a very easy composition for them to perform. Afterwards, they tell me that they “know” how to read music, but they can’t “play” it on their instrument. It’s music, so what’s the use of knowing it if you can’t perform it? Therefore, I teach “how” and then help you to “play” it. It’s a lot more fun that way!

For some of you, this course will be moving too slowly (it is suppose to be slow and easy to accomplish). Tom Serb has put together a two-part series (at the moment) that moves over a lot material rather quickly. I suggest you check it out Standard Notation. And you also have David Hodge’s guide Your very own Rosetta Stone.

I’m looking forward to the responses of the Guitar Noise readers. I hope you enjoy it as much as I like teaching it. When we finish this series, maybe we can forge forward in harmonic playing and theory, using the same learning approach. Let’s first learn how to read and PLAY!

This lesson will cover some music basics and “playing 3 notes” on the 1st string. I will be assuming that you can read TAB already. Therefore, I will have TAB underneath the notes as a guide for you. In order to really understand and use music notation, you will need music that doesn’t have TAB underneath the notes. Having the TAB under the notes is similar to having training wheels for a bicycle. Until the training wheels come off, you’re not quite riding on two wheels. I will be offering music without TAB. Including more practice material will make this article too long. You will just need to email me at peter@petersimms.com and I will be happen to send you some with audio.

Let’s start with the diagram below. I try and teach what you will only need to know for the moment. Therefore, there will be things not explained until later. Glance over the diagram now and then let’s move on to the explanations.

As you can see, there are a few things to learn. The staff is are the 5 lines that we write music on. It looks like TAB, but there are only 5 lines and the lines do not represent the strings. They represent “pitch”. The higher the pitch, the closer the note is to the top of the staff. Thus, the note on the top line of the staff sounds a lot higher than the note on the bottom line of the staff. The Measure is basically a representation of a group of beats. When the drummer of a band counts “1-2-3-4″, he is counting a blank measure. You can hear these groups. When you hear a Waltz (similar to the dance), you are counting in groups of “3″. The top number of the Time Signature tells you how many counts are in a measure. Therefore, a waltz is in 3/4;. We will leave the bottom number alone for now. Notes also represent Rhythm. If the note looks like a Whole Note, when you pluck that note, count to 4 and start counting the moment you pluck the note. (Dotted Half Note = 3, Half Note = 2, Quarter Note = 1).

I tend to teach my students to just count the values of each note. They will add up properly in each measure. Some teachers (most) have you count as the notes fall within the beat of the measure. The choice is yours at the beginning. Eventually it will work out anyway in the end. As for now the Time Signature is the symbol we use to indicate the pitch values of the notes, and this is the symbol we use for the guitar (plus many other instruments.

Now that we have enough information to move on, let’s look at the notes we are going to learn today. (see below).

Try and play these notes before attempting to play the exercises below. Listen to the midi examples and pay attention to the rhythm.

Download midi (Right-click and “Save as”)

• Notes on the 1st String Part 1
• Notes on the 1st String Part 2

Focus on 1 line at a time (4 measures). The audio example plays from the beginning straight to the end. This is your goal. If you have any questions, please email me. I will be more than happy to answer you. You can also request some extra exercises “without TAB” from me. My email: peter@petersimms.com

Until next time … Have Fun! …

Also in this Series

• How To Read and Perform Music on the Guitar – Part 2
• How To Read and Perform Music on the Guitar – Part 3

We’ve used ledger lines for the notes low E through fifth string C… we can also add ledger lines on the other side, above the staff. Just like the lower ledger lines, these will extend the musical alphabet:

We’ll be needing those ledger lines as we move into higher positions – for right now, you just need to know it can be done at either end of the staff.

Standard notation isn’t just about notes, though – it conveys all sorts of other information through special symbols. In the last lesson, I mentioned that the end of a section is often marked with a double bar:

The end of a piece is also marked with a double bar, but the second bar is thicker:

There’s also a sign where an end-of-piece double bar has two dots in front of it – that’s called a repeat sign:

That’s sort of a traffic signal in standard notation – it’s going to send you on a detour to some other place in the music. If that’s the only repeat sign you’ve come across, it means at that point you’ll go back to the very beginning, and play all those measures a second time. The second time you get to the repeat sign, you ignore it and keep going.

Sometimes the composer won’t want you to go all the way back to the beginning. In that case, repeat signs come in pairs, like in this example:

Here you’d play measure 1, then measures 2 and 3… and then repeat measures 2 and 3… and finally play measure 4. It’s a nice, compact way to write music – 6 bars of sound take up only 4 bars on the page.

You’ll also notice the time signature is 2/4. There’s no real limit on the number of beats that can be in one measure – the minimum is just one; some time signatures will call for 15 or more per measure.

Sometimes you’ll see repeat signs with numbers and brackets over them, like this:

This one’s a little different. At the repeat sign, you return to the beginning (since there’s no repeat in the opposite direction)… but the next time through, you skip any measures under the ‘1′ bracket, and go right to the ‘2′ bracket. In this case, you’d play measures 1, 2, 1 again, and then 3. There’s no limit to the number of different endings you can have – I’ve seen music with five different repeat endings, and there are probably pieces written with even more.

There are a few other directional signals you’ll see often in standard notation. The first is D.C.:

In this example, you’ve got a measure, then two measures repeated once, then one more measure with a repeat sign – and the symbol D.C. written above it. The D.C. is an abbreviation for an Italian term, ‘da capo’, which means ‘from the head’. When you see that, you go back to the beginning of the piece.

Many guitarists mispronounce da capo, because it looks so much like capo. The D.C. term is dah-KAH-po; the thing you use to change keys is a KAY-po.

You’ll often see D.C. combined with the term ‘al fine’, which means ‘to the end’. When you see that, there will be the word ‘fine’ (pronounced fee-NAY or fih-NAY-ee, meaning end) somewhere above the staff, usually over a double bar. You’d then go from the instruction ‘D.C. al fine’ to the beginning (D.C.) and play until you reach the double bar marked ‘fine’.

By the way, Italian is the standard language of music. By the end of these lessons, you’ll know a whole bunch of Italian words!

A closely related symbol is D.S., which is an abbreviation for ‘dal segno’ (doll SAYN-yo, from the sign). That’s always combined with this symbol somewhere in the music:

When you see D.S. over a repeat sign, you find the symbol, and play from that point in the music.

You can actually have a double segno sign too – and the instruction for finding that would be D.S.S. – but it’s really rare.

Finally, there’s the coda (KO-duh), which is used pretty often. Coda is Italian for ‘tail’, so it’s a piece of music that will come at the tail end of a song. Somewhere in the music will be a coda symbol,

and somewhere else will be an instruction above a repeat sign – it’ll say “D.C. al coda” or “D.S. al coda”. When you reach that instruction, you’ll go back to the beginning (D.C.) or back to the sign (D.S.), and you’ll play until you reach the coda symbol – at that point, you’ll jump to the coda section, which is written at the end of the music. Most publishers will place a second coda sign over the beginning of the coda section to help you find it quickly, and most will separate it slightly from the main body of the music, or begin the coda on a new line.

Here’s the same music I used for the numbered ending example re-written to use the coda instead:

Like the segno, you can have a second coda – noted with

but like the double segno it’s extremely rare.

Now that you know some of the navigational symbols used, let’s get back to reading!

The letter-named notes leave some gaps in the fretboard. To fill those gaps, we use the symbols # (sharp) and b (flat). If you see a sharp, the note will be played one fret higher, and if you see a flat, the note will be played one fret lower.

The bar line between measures serves as a ‘reset’ button for sharps and flats. So when you see this:

The first measure is E-F-F#-G, played open-1-2-3 on the first string. In the second measure, the notes are E-F-G… because we’ve had a bar line, the F# note has been ‘reset’ to F.

At times, we’ll want to use a note like F#, and then use F without the sharp – which is called F natural – before we get to a bar line. To change a sharp or flat back to a natural before a measure is over, we use a natural sign, which looks like this:

Here’s a measure with F-F#-F#-F, and a second measure with B-Bb-B-Bb:

A couple things about this measure… in the first measure, the third note doesn’t have an accidental. It’s still an F# note, because the sharp for the second note keeps on working until the bar line – unless we use a natural sign, which doesn’t happen until beat four.

Next, the second measure… the B note is the open second string. Bb has to be one fret lower than that, so you’ll need to move to the third string, third fret to play it.

We usually use sharps going up and flats going down… that keeps the music clear by minimizing the number of naturals we might need. Here’s the entire chromatic scale in the first position going up:

And going down:

Accidentals are used often in minor keys, because the harmonic and melodic minor scales use notes ‘outside’ the key. Here’s the C major scale:

The A natural minor scale uses the same notes, but with A as the root:

The other two minor scales alter tones… the harmonic minor raises the seventh note:

And the melodic minor scale raises the sixth and seventh notes going up, but not going down (the natural signs aren’t required because the bar lines cancel the sharps, but I’ve included them as a reminder):

So far we’ve only done one note at a time. That’s fine for noting many solos, but it doesn’t do much for rhythm parts. The solution is to put more than one note head on a stem, like this:

The first beat includes a C note (first fret, second string) and an E note (open first string), so you’d play those two strings together. The next beat has the open B and E strings played together, and the third beat has a five-string open C major chord.

So notes can have one head for a single note, two for a double stop, or three to six for a chord. Beginning readers find it rather hard to navigate chords… but that’s because they try to read one note at a time. You don’t actually have to read each note in a chord – the real trick is to recognize what chords go with each key.

You’ll notice that C major chord doesn’t have any accidentals, so all of the notes must be in C. Working with just basic chords, each major key will have one 7th chord, two major chords, and three minor chords – here are the chords in the key of C major:

Now I’ll show you a trick for instantly (or at least quickly) recognizing the basic chords without accidentals. See how most of those chords have three notes grouped closely together – one in every space or line? Those three notes form a triad – the basis for the chord. When you see that, the lowest note of the three is the root of the triad. So when you see this:

You’re dealing with a C chord type – that’s the lowest note in the set of three. Now, if you know the basic chords in C, you can pretty quickly pick out the triads. The one to be careful of is the G/G7 chords – the top note will tell you the difference:

That means you’ve got most of the basic chords in C down ‘at sight’ – spend a little time working at remembering the Dm chord and you’re all set for this key in open position. I’ll show you more tricks as we get into higher positions and more complicated chords.

The key of A minor is really just as easy – chords in A minor, at least in simple songs, usually use only the G# accidental, and usually only in the E rooted chord. If you’re in Am, and you see a chord with a sharp and an E root, it’s usually E7.:

Chords are often combined with bass notes. The result is music with two voices – one is the melody created by the bass line, the other is the rhythmic accompaniment of the chord strums. To keep things clear, the music is written as two separate lines, typically with stems in opposite directions – when there is a bass note, there’s a rest in the chord strum, like this:

You’re probably wondering why the bass notes wouldn’t simply be written as quarter notes… if they were written that way, they’d only get one beat, so you’d need to dampen them at the second beat in each measure. Here we’re letting the bass notes ring, and if we didn’t use the rest to show it’s two separate lines, you’d end up with five beats worth of notes in each measure.

One last thing for this lesson – key signatures. If you’re going to apply a sharp or a flat to the same note throughout an entire piece of music, and that note will rarely appear without the accidental, it’s easiest to just write it once, in the beginning.

Let’s say you’re working in the key of G. The G major scale is G-A-B-C-D-E-F#-G, so you’ll probably have almost all of the F notes in the piece raised to F#. In the very beginning – after the clef, but before the time signature – you write F# on the top line:

This sharp (or sharps, or flat or flats) is called a key signature. The advantage to using a key signature is that you won’t clutter up the music with a lot of accidentals – instead of writing this:

You’d have this:

Since all the F notes are now F#, some of the chords you’ve learned will be a little different… the main chords in the key of G are:

The really tricky one here is the D major – it’s written identically to the D minor chord in the key of C! With a bit of practice, though, you’ll recognize these odd chords right away, and the triad rule still holds for the open position key of G:

Reading in key signatures takes some practice, because you have to remember to sharp or flat all the indicated notes. We’ll take the keys one at a time, and I’ll put a practice piece at the end of each lesson for you to work on.

Since the holidays are drawing near, have fun with my little arrangement of Jingle Bells:

Also check out… Standard Notation Part 1

Oh yeah – the illustrations are copyright 2002 by NoteBoat Inc. (my publishing company) because I’m basically just cropping artwork that appeared in my theory book… the ones labeled “Exercise #…” are created for this article, and are copyright Tom Serb 2005.

First a few preliminaries for those of you unfamiliar with standard notation…

Standard notation is written on a set of five horizontal lines called the staff:

Guitar music is usually written using a treble clef, which looks like this:

The purpose of a clef is to identify the names of the lines and spaces. Each line or space will represent one letter of the musical alphabet, which is the letters A through G. Using the treble clef, the lines are (from the bottom up): E-G-B-D-F, which you can remember using the mnemonic Every Good Boy Does Fine. The spaces, from the bottom up, spell out the word F-A-C-E. Combining these two, we can write the notes from E through F on the staff:

Standard notation is very visual: the higher a note is on the staff, the higher it will sound.

Notes are symbols that indicate how long a sound lasts. Notes are made up of one or more of three basic parts: a head, a stem, and flags or beams.

The head of a note is a roughly circular shape:

If a note has ONLY a head, the head is always hollow (as shown), and the note is called a whole note.

A stem can be added to a note. When a stem is used, the head can be either hollow or solid:

Notes with stems and hollow heads are called half notes; notes with stems and solid heads are called quarter notes.

Notes with solid heads can have flags:

Notes with one flag are called eighth notes.

We can keep adding flags to a note, getting sixteenth notes, thirty-second notes, and so on:

The shapes of notes tell us how long the sounds last. A half note lasts for half the time of a whole note, a quarter note lasts for half the time of a half note, and so on.

Music isn’t just made up of sounds, though – it’s also made up of the silences between sounds. We need rhythmic symbols to indicate how long to NOT play, and we call these symbols rests.

Each note has a corresponding rest… the ones at the far left are double-whole note/rest, which is pretty rare in notation; at the far right is the 128^th note, which is also rare:

Since the shape of the notes tell us how long they last – at least relative to each other – we can now start worrying about pitch. We can put notes on, immediately above, or immediately below the staff:

But that only gives us notes from D (below the bottom E line) through G (above the top F line). That’s eleven notes… and we can play a lot more than eleven different notes on the guitar.

To handle the ‘extra’ notes, we’ll use temporary extensions of the staff called ledger lines, and keep going higher or lower as needed:

Ledger lines are identified as if the staff just kept going:

We’re almost done with the preliminaries… just a few more things…

We know that a half note is half as long as a whole note, and twice as long as a quarter note – but we need to know what note represents one beat in order to count time. That’s shown by two numbers called a time signature that appears right after the clef. It looks sort of like a fraction, and it can come in a lot of different varieties:

To begin with, we’ll use only these three time signatures:

In each case, the bottom number is 4 – that tells us that a quarter note will get one beat. The top number tells us how many beats will be in each measure.

Measures in music are the space between ‘one’ counts. We set vertical lines called bar lines between measures in music to help us keep our place:

Since the time signature here is 4/4, there are four beats in each measure, and a quarter note represents one beat. There are four sixteenth notes to a quarter note… here the sixteenth note flags are joined together into beams, with each beamed set being one beat. After every fourth set of beamed notes is a vertical bar line, which helps us keep track of the ‘one’ count.

It’s common to use a double bar to indicate the end of a section or piece of music:

One last thing and we’ll start to play… the time signature 4/4 is so common in music that it’s sometimes indicated by the letter C. Musicians refer to this as ‘common time’… it’s not really a letter C, but that’s a music history lesson for another article. If you see C instead of a time signature, count it as 4/4.

Ok, so we’re done with the basic tools – you know the note shapes, the letter names of staff positions, what note gets one beat, and how many beats are in a measure. Time to pick up your guitar!

We’ll start with the first position, and take one string at a time. The notes on the first string, first position are E (open), F (first fret), and G (third fret). These correspond to the top space of the staff, E; the top line of the staff, F, and the note immediately above the top line, G:

Get comfortable with the idea that these notes represent the sounds of the open, first, and third frets of the first string… then play this:

Exercise 1

Make sure you’re getting the count right – the first note takes four beats, the next two notes two beats each, etc. Go slow – this takes time to read ‘at sight’.

Now let’s look at the second string. The open second string is the B note on the middle line of the staff; the first fret is the C note on the second space from the top; and the third fret D is the second line from the top:

Ready to read? Let’s go!

Exercise 2

And now let’s try both strings:

Exercise 3

Now let’s try another time signature… in 3/4 time we have notes that represent two beats or four beats, but we don’t have a note for three beats (one full measure of 3/4 time). The solution is to put a dot after a half note:

Dots after notes mean the original note value is extended by one half – a dotted half note is a half note (two beats in 3/4) plus half the value of the original note (one more beat in 3/4) for a total of three beats.

Ready for a stab at waltz time?

Exercise 4

There’s one other way we can extend note values, by using another rhythmic symbol called the tie. Ties are curved lines that connect two notes of the same pitch (we’ll have other names for curved lines that connect different pitches later on). This is a way we can write a note that lasts for an odd amount of time, like five beats. When you encounter a tie, you play the first note, and hold it for the value of both. In this example, the last note of the third measure is held until the third beat of the last measure:

Exercise 5

If we’d used a whole note to represent this sound – a whole note is also four beats – the third measure would have ended up with six beats… two too many. The solution is to split the note into two parts and connect them with a tie.

Now let’s add the third string. It’s only got two first position notes, the open G (second line from the bottom) and second fret A (second space from the bottom):

And let’s introduce another concept, partial measures… sometimes you’ll see a piece of music that doesn’t start on the ‘one’ count. To save space, publishers will often have an incomplete measure (less than the required number of beats) at the start of a piece or section. It used to be convention that the last measure of a piece like that would also be a partial measure – the first and last measures would add up to one full measure – but lately I’ve been seeing pieces that don’t end in a partial measure, so some publishers are discarding that convention. When you see a partial measure, start from the appropriate count; the next example will start on beat ‘three’.

At any rate, we’ve now got a full octave to play with, so let’s play!

Exercise 6

On to the fourth string; we’ve got three notes: the open string D is the first note below the staff; the second fret E is the bottom line of the staff; and the third fret F is the bottom space of the staff:

Let’s put together everything so far:

Exercise 7

Of course, we can divide beats… in 4/4 time, an eighth note represents one half beat (two notes to the beat). Publishers usually beam notes in beats or sets of beats – two beats in 4/4 time – to keep it easy to read. Count these notes “one-and-two-and-” etc.:

Exercise 8

Now we’ve reached the note below the staff… to go any lower we need to start using ledger lines. All the open position notes on the fifth and sixth strings will need these temporary extensions to the staff.

On the fifth string, we have the open A note (two ledger lines below the staff), the second fret B note (the space below the first ledger line beneath the staff) and the third fret C note (the first ledger line below the staff):

Exercise 9

The sixth string has three more notes in first position: the open E (the note beneath the third ledger line under the staff), the first fret F (on the third ledger line beneath the staff), and the third fret G (under the second ledger line below the staff):

Now we’ll introduce one more rhythmic twist: if we dot a quarter note in 4/4, we get a note that represents one and one-half beats. The next example includes dotted-quarter/eighth pairs, which are counted ONE-and-two-AND-THREE-and-four-AND. Give this a try:

Exercise 10

Well, that completes the strings in first position. There’s still a lot more to discover about standard notation, though… find some music, practice in this position, and in the next article I’ll explore accidentals, double stops, chords, and key signatures; after that, we’ll start moving up the neck to other positions.

Also check out… Standard Notation Part 2

One of the arguments here, that when you learn another instrument such as piano, saxophone or even drums, that the teacher will teach you to read notation, is very telling I think.

It is certainly possible to learn to play guitar, to play it one’s whole life in fact, and not ever read a single note of music. Or TAB, for that matter. This is the “classic” argument you’ll hear time and time again…”Paul McCartney (or pick any musician you’d like to use as an example) didn’t read music and he’s certainly done okay…”

And, as an argument, there’s not too much that you can say about that. Not because of what it says but because anyone who uses that argument is probably not interested in reading music.

How can I get that out of this simple sentence? Well, seriously think about it… Any guitarist (or musician) that we consider has “made it” has done so, in all likelihood, without his or her ability to read music even entering the picture. There are so many factors involved in being able to make it as an artist that to focus on this one thing (technically, this lack of one thing) is an approach that would only be resorted to in order to close down a discussion rather than to start one up.

Much more important to consider is this – What, if anything, has so-and-so’s decision to not learn to read music (and it is a decision much more often than a disability – more on that later) got to do with me as a guitarist? After all, I’m not Paul or Jimi or Stevie or whoever.you decide to pick as an example.

I can’t speak for you, but as someone who is, even at the age of forty-seven, constantly trying to become a better guitarist, musician, human being, I will gladly welcome all the help and advice I can get! Why on earth would I walk away from anything that could possibly help me get better? I don’t have the luxury, or the patience to sit and reinvent the wheel. Nor do I have the ego that makes me think that my reinventing the wheel will make me a superior person.

I could claim it’s hard work, but, quite frankly, so was learning the guitar in the first place. I could claim I don’t have the time, but I make the time to practice. What would spending an extra five or ten minutes a day for a few months cost me? I could say I’m too old but I know a lot of people who’ve learned to read music at a late age. And when I make that statement, I’m also assuming that all of us would agree that learning to read music at seventy-eight or eighty-two to be considered “late.”

Basically the decision whether or not to learn to read music has to be in an honest manner by the person making the choice. And the easiest way to do that is to, again honestly, list all the pros and cons about being able to read music. No lie! Get a piece of paper, draw a line down the middle and list all the good things about being able to read music in one column and all the bad things in the other.

Writing out a list of pros takes no work at all. And most of these were mentioned in that Forum thread I mentioned earlier. There’s being able to read a lot of guitar music that isn’t done in TAB. There’s the ability to know when a piece of TAB is wrong or, even better, to realize that there’s an easier way to play something than simply by what the TAB suggests. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve seen a difficult stretch dictated by a TAB only to realize that there was a simpler way to get the same note. And being able to read what the note was is what made me see that.

Another “pro,” and this is also a huge benefit, is that you’re not limited to guitar music. You can get some really great ideas and arrangements from being able to read piano music (quite a few of our song lessons, in fact, come from this), not to mention being able to put in horn parts or fiddle tunes or just about any sort of music you can think of.

And it’s important to note here that the “pros” we’re listing (and hopefully the ones you’re listing as well) are all tangible things. These aren’t opinions; they are facts. There are real things that you can accomplish simply by knowing how to read music. The same is not so on the other side. In fact, it’s in listing out the “cons” where I run into an incredible problem. I’ve been trying to do an itemization of this nature for the better part of two months now and, for the life of me, I cannot come up with any “cons.” And I suspect that others can’t either, because if you read any discussion of this, no one offers any real reasons to not read music, specific things like

If I substitute the word “excuses” for “cons,” then I can indeed come up with a list. In addition to the “so-and-so doesn’t read music” argument, there’s the “it’s too hard” or “it takes time” that we’ve also already discussed.

And there’s also the “coolness” factor, I think. Whether or not we’re honest enough with ourselves to admit it, the idea of being a “rebel” or an “outsider” appeals to most of our natures. So being able to do something without being part of the norm strikes us as being cool. And, personally, I think this is also why a lot of musicians make a big claim to not knowing how to read music. It’s part of the image. The truly silly thing about this kind of posturing though, and again it only works if you’re able to honestly look at things, is that we tend to really delude ourselves with this sort of thinking. Advertisers know this; it’s in fact the heart of most pitches: Be unique by buying the same thing everyone else does! And I really shouldn’t get started down this particular path…

But doesn’t the fact that I can’t list a single item in the “cons” column that is a genuine reason to not learn to read music, instead of an excuse, make the point for me? If not, then take a look for yourself. Write out what “cons” you have. Chances are very likely, if you’re being honest with yourself, that your reasons are simply clever (or not so clever) translations of “because I think it’s stupid” or “because I don’t want to.”

And, again, that’s why I don’t think it’s worth an argument. If you can’t see how the pros of being able to read music can honestly help you out, and how there’s nothing about being able to read music that can make you a worse musician or guitarist, then what can I possibly say that will change your mind.

This answer can be edited and improved by you on the Guitar Noise Wiki. Go to Reading music and select edit to make improvements.

I want to examine what some of this confused thinking is, and how people get this confused thinking into their heads, and why it stays there.Why do some people think they shouldn’t learn to read music, when they should? Why do some people think they should, when they shouldn’t (at least not right away)?

Every Strength is a Potential Weakness

Some people are very “natural” guitar players, they learn to play by watching and listening to other players. And that is fine, in fact, that is great. The ability to just watch someone do something like play the guitar, and somehow “learn” how to do it yourself, is a great ability. However, every strength can also be a weakness, and that is true here.

Often, the person who is able to learn this way starts to get an “attitude” about the more formal aspects of learning music and the guitar, things like taking lessons, or learning to read music. They begin to form certain belief systems about the subject. And these belief systems can be dangerous, because they prevent the person holding them from growing and developing as they otherwise could.

Even if you are a “natural” guitar player, there will come the day when you will run up against certain musical concepts which you will be locked out of understanding because you don’t know how to read music. Learning how to read music is one way to increase your chances of being the best musician you can be.

Let’s examine some of the reasons why a person might adopt a belief system that says “it is a bad thing to learn to read music, at least for me”.

I’m a Genius, and God Whispers Directly in My Ear

Unfortunately, most people have an ego, an “idea” or “image” of who they are, and whatever that image is, it carries along with it certain limitations. Whatever our particular image is, it also becomes our act. We have to live up to it. We have to keep a mental list of all the things that support our act, and also a list of the things we have to avoid because they don’t fit our act. In some professions, keeping up your image is essential to survival. Politics is one, probably the first “I must, at all costs maintain my image and my act” profession. Being an entertainer/artist is probably second.

So, it is very common, especially in the beginning stages of being a musician, to decide to play the “I am a natural genius who just picked up a guitar and played like Jimi Hendrix” routine. The musician playing this role has decided they are the “romantic, inspired artist”. This is the image of the artist who gets his inspiration from some divine source. He or she likes to believe (and likes others to believe), that God, or perhaps one of his angels, whispers directly in their ear, and they best not tamper with the process. If they interfere with the process by getting some “education”, then, God might get mad, and stop whispering in their ear. God will stop directly inspiring them with all those great musical ideas and they will just be another jerk playing the guitar.

Underneath this feeling is the feeling that they are, in fact, just another jerk playing the guitar. That is why this particular routine is common with beginners, because most of us do feel like we are just another jerk playing the guitar when we first begin to play. And we usually have a little outside help in the matter, in the form of parents or “special friends”, ready to tell us to get real when we dare disclose our secret dreams of actually being professional guitar players.

It is very important to grow past this little game. If you do decide to make this image a part of your professional career (as many artists do) you must at least stop believing your own hype. If you don’t, you will not move yourself into contact with the resources and situations that exist to help you grow and develop. Beethoven comes to mind. There was never a musician who was more “divinely inspired” than Beethoven. Music flowed into him and as it came out when he played, people were left sobbing with intense emotion, or moved to feelings of awe. When he was young, he would tell people, “I never listen to other composers music, it would interfere with my originality”. He would say that, but he was full of “you know what”, and he knew it. He was really busy studying with all the greatest composers and music theory teachers of his day. So he was not only listening to their music, he was studying it note by note. But he was smart. He knew he had a good thing going with all these people worshiping him. He was young, and knew he had to struggle to build a career as an artist, so he would use this image of the “divinely inspired artist” to his advantage, and help foster and maintain it in people’s minds. But he wasn’t dumb enough to believe it himself, or let it get in the way of the development of his creative powers.

Another artist, and a supremely great one, who typified this attitude was Louie Armstrong. When asked if he read music, he said “not enough to hurt my playing”. I believe he was being a bit tongue in cheek here, and probably also was promoting the “look, I’m just a genius” image, but there is some truth to what he was trying to get across.

He was trying to get across the fact that reading music, like reading words, does not give you talent. Being able to read doesn’t mean you will actually have something to say, and when you are a musician, having something to say (in a musical sense) is what it is all about. However, if you have talent, if you have something to say, learning to read music will not make you less of a musician, but more of a musician.

Having Talent/Nurturing Talent

If you are an artist, if you feel you want to be a guitarist, then, you would really be much better off eliminating the word “talent” from your vocabulary. You should not even be concerned with whether you have any or not. You should only be concerned with how much you love music and the guitar. You should only be concerned with how much you need to do it. Whether you have talent or not is for other people to waste their time wondering about.

When you stay focused on your love for what you are doing, the path of your development will become clear to you. If you love blues guitar, if you want to play like Jimi or Stevie Ray, and that is all you want to do, then it will become clear to you over time that learning to read music is not high on the list of priorities. Playing constantly with other people who play that style is high on the list. Learning and copying the solos of a hundred other players is high on the list. Of course, along the way, maybe you WILL feel the desire to learn to read.

When I was starting out, my friends would show me blues scales and licks. I wasn’t much interested in just learning finger patterns, I wanted to understand in a mental way, what I was doing. I wanted to know the note names and so forth. That was just my personality. I didn’t know then that a few years later I would be captivated by the classical guitar, which is a style that absolutely requires note reading and musical understanding in a technical sense, in order to develop. I was just following my nature. So, being in touch with yourself, your true nature and needs for musical statement, is the first thing. But don’t interfere with that awareness by clinging to some dumb “self-image” that says you “shouldn’t” read music.

Should YOU learn to read music?

What I say now should be understood and used in the context of what I have already said. There are many players for whom this question never even comes up. They know already, intuitively, the right answer to this question as it applies to them. But many people do have questions about this issue, so I will try to provide the clarity they need.

IN GENERAL, everyone can only benefit by learning to read music. Believe me, if you DO have talent, if you have something to say as an artist, you are not going to lose it by developing your mental understanding of the “theoretical” aspect of music. The only people who will lose their artistic ability by education in music are the ones who didn’t have any artistic ability to begin with.

If you DON’T have much natural ability for music, or much experience in playing music, then learning to read can open up a whole world of understanding for you. It can give you the keys to understand the “mysteries of music”. I love to teach students to read, because then I can teach them music theory. In fact, for the guitar student, learning to read is like an insurance policy against future confusion. So many guitar students, as time goes by, start bumping up against concepts that they can’t understand, and it is a source of great frustration for them, because understanding these concepts is the doorway to new and more sophisticated playing abilities.

I often get questions from students (other peoples students) like “can you explain secondary dominants”, or “how do I use a harmonic minor scale in improvising”. Unfortunately, I can’t answer these people. They don’t realize that in order to understand the answer, a knowledge of music theory is required. And in order to learn music theory, you must know how to read music. In other words, I have to use a particular language to answer these questions, and they don’t know the language. So we can’t communicate. They are stuck with their question.

It’s like trying to learn grammar without being able to read words. You may be able to get some understanding if you find a creative teacher, but you will never achieve a complete or satisfying understanding of grammar in the way you would if you could read.

So, in general, I always recommend learning to read music.

Who Should Learn to Read

Specifically speaking, the following are the types of people who definitely should learn to read music.

• Anyone who really wants to.
• Anyone planning on someday having a complete and sophisticated understanding of music and music theory.
• Anyone planning on a career in music, unless it will be a career as a rock/blues musician, or folk musician. Even then, of course, it won’t hurt, it is just not as necessary.
• Anyone who wants to play the classical guitar.

Who shouldn’t Learn to Read Music

• Anyone who really doesn’t want to.
• Anyone who is planning on being only a blues/rock musician or a folk musician.
• Most people who are just starting to learn to play the guitar.

When to Begin to Read Music

There is a common belief that students should learn to read music right from the beginning. I don’t think so. I rarely do that with students. Usually, it is just a way of throwing water on a fire that is just beginning to burn. With guitar, it is very easy to teach music in the beginning without learning how to read. By doing so, the student is connected right away to music in an emotional way, and it is the emotional aspect of playing music that made them begin lessons.

Learning to read music is a very complex, mental affair, dealing with many abstract concepts. Doing it in the beginning is kind of like reading your girlfriend an essay on the philosophy of love on your first date, instead of just being romantic with a box of candy and flowers.

So I believe in fanning that fire first. I find a song they love that has easy chords, I teach them how to practice, and we’re off and running. After a few months, I bring the subject of reading music up, and by then there is no problem in doing so. Also, by then they are more able to understand why it is important.

Teaching children to learn to read is very tricky, and requires great skill. It is often done badly. Suppose, for instance, that you are trying to teach a third grader to read, and you have to teach the concept of dotted notes. In order to understand dotted notes, you have to understand fractions, you have to understand the concept of “one half of something”. They most likely DON’T understand that. So, you have to be a math teacher for a bit. It can take six months to really have a 10-year-old understand this one musical concept.

In fact, I believe many adults who have had trouble learning to read music are the victims of bad teaching. There are often a lot of unexplained, and under-explained vital concepts along the way, which are the real culprits, not a lack of ability to “get it”.

And finally, it should be understood that learning to read music can be a long process, in the same way that learning to read words can be. It takes enough work, over a long enough period of time. You can learn to read enough to go slowly through music, as you can learn to read slowly, or you can become a “speed reader” and read music you haven’t’ seen and still play it up to performance level.

Whether or not to learn to read, and how far to take it is up to you. But it is certainly a subject you should make an informed choice about, based on careful consideration.

Copyright Jamie Andreas, Guitar Principles.