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Ok, cnev - you basically raised three things...

1. The types of gigs Jon Finn does are very high profile - he's played with the Boston Pops, backed folks like Petrucci, etc. When he made that comment, his point was very much what you imply: he was already "good enough" to play at that level. But he couldn't. Because he couldn't read. Producers at that level will not waste their time with a 'good' guitarist who can't read - it takes them too long to learn the material. Learning to read speeds up learning. There's no getting around that.

2. Of course people who never intend to read don't need to learn. If you don't intend to ever use it, you don't "need" it. It may still help, for reasons I laid out earlier. And as I said earlier, I don't urge ALL of my students to read - there is that group you're referencing. But here's how it breaks down among the guitar students I see:

- about 1% have aspirations that absolutely require reading at sight. They want to do studio work, pit orchestra stuff, etc.

- about 10% have short term goals that can't be met without reading pieces fairly well. For example, they're auditioning for the high school jazz band... band directors here give out about 8 audition tunes in standard notation only, and hand them out as little as 2 days before an audition.

- about 10% have clear long-term goals that will never require reading. Those are the folks you're talking about - all they want to do is play for their own enjoyment, or with a group of friends. And they're sure they'll never want anything more.

Now that leaves almost 80%. Those are the folks who SHOULD be reading, and typically aren't. The reason isn't obvious: you start to read by playing simple melodies (Mary had a Little Lamb, etc). If you pick up this skill while the melodies are still at least slightly challenging - that is, when you're a beginning or early intermediate guitarist - you'll be a lot less bored than if you're a shredder. As David said, learning the basics doesn't take long - basic notes in first position, and durations of whole note through eighth take about a month. Learning the basics of sharps and flats, how key signatures work, and the basics of figuring out simple chords will take another month or three... and that's the level I think is appropriate for most guitarists. You've got enough foundation so that if you find you need sight reading in the future, you're not starting with stuff that will bore you out of your mind. And you're not taking much time away from the technique stuff that non-readers seem to think is much more important.

3. I don't know where you got the idea that I said reading automatically gives you better technique. Here's what I said: learning to read will not guarantee you'll be a better musician because of it, but it will improve your chances by exposure to more musical ideas. Not learning to read will not improve your chances in any way What part of that do you think isn't accurate?

No I didn't base my comment on anything you stated and I didn't mean to say you said that, I was just asking the question,

What happens when someone that can read music can't play the music they read and someone that can't read can play it, just wodering where the person falls in. I would guess that it happens and to me that would tend to help prove that the two skills are are for the most part seperate from each other.

And the 80% you say should read what is your rational for that? Because I would think the majority of those 80% will fall into the 10% that will never need it that leaves 90 % that will never need it. I'm just curious at this point not really questioning it heck you teach music I'm just a hack and I am by no means trying to defend my decision to not learn how to read, but I also realize my view is centered around playing strictly rock music and even if I was a young man I still would have no interest in playing sessions or the Boston pops or weddings. If I was young my goal would be to play in a rock band and see how far it took me with the chance of needing sight reading almost nil.

you wrotelearning to read will not guarantee you'll be a better musician because of it, but it will improve your chances by exposure to more musical ideas. Not learning to read will not improve your chances in any way
But to me that last sentence needs to be qualified by stating that it will not improve your chances of impoving as a musicain in any way but you still can improve as a player.

Personally if I had a choice that I could acquire one skill automatically and I had a choice between having a good ear or having the ability to sight read I'd pick having a good ear but I digress.

Since this thread is attracting a lot of very good responses from those who do read music, can I ask this: Do you find that reading music has to be done regularly to be maintained? My reading skills are horrendous, but I'm working on them. However, I find that this is something I have to do every day and, when I've taken breaks from it in the past, I find my ability to read diminishes very quickly.

Also, am I the only person who finds it impossible to just follow the dots if a piece has TAB below? I can't stop myself using the TAB for pitch/hand positions/etc and the dots just for rhythm and it's really annoying when I try to use a piece that has TAB below for sight reading practice. :cry: Any tips? Beyond lots of thin strips of paper and a good stock of blu-tak? Or retyping every damn piece in GP5? Thanks.

Scrybe,

I would think like any other skill if you don't use it you lose it especially until you are at the point where you are proficient at it, then maybe the time needed to refresh the brain diminishes.

And I like how you subtly inferred that the responses from the non-readers were not good! Ha

I am not the poster boy for anti sight reading I am just playing devils advocate here. In actuality at one time I was able to sight read at some level when I was younger and played trumpet in the school band, but now that I'm a lazy rock star wanna be I don't need no stinkin sight reading skills.

Since this thread is attracting a lot of very good responses from those who do read music, can I ask this: Do you find that reading music has to be done regularly to be maintained? My reading skills are horrendous, but I'm working on them. However, I find that this is something I have to do every day and, when I've taken breaks from it in the past, I find my ability to read diminishes very quickly.

Yes, definitely. I had a couple of years away from guitar one time and my reading and technique suffered for a good while after.
Also, am I the only person who finds it impossible to just follow the dots if a piece has TAB below? I can't stop myself using the TAB for pitch/hand positions/etc and the dots just for rhythm and it's really annoying when I try to use a piece that has TAB below for sight reading practice. :cry: Any tips? Beyond lots of thin strips of paper and a good stock of blu-tak? Or retyping every darn piece in GP5? Thanks.

I'm the opposite. If I try to read the tab, I can't stop my eyes wandering up to the notation, where it all looks so much more meaningful.

If someone has the ability to play something, and someone else doesn't, what's the root cause?

Take John Mayer's "Neon". I can read it, but I can't play it. And no amount of practicing will ever let me play it (although a travel guitar might). The reason I can't play it has nothing to do with technique - Mayer frets a bass line with his thumb, and his hands are bigger than mine.. at one point the span between his held bass note and another note exceeds my reach. If a non-reader with bigger hands can play it, did I waste my time learning to read instead of spending it growing bigger fingers?

There are lots of reasons a piece may be playable for one guitarist and not playable for another. Some of these, like speed, can be improved by practice and don't depend on reading. Others, like playing complex syncopated figures, are easier to solve if you DO read. It's a lot easier to count something precisely from notes that you can see.

Technique and reading skills are not mutually independent. Yes, time spent learning to read is time taken away from the metronome. So what? Over the course of ten years you can acquire both. And that's my justification for the 80% who should learn to read the basics.

Scenario 1: you work on your chops for ten years, and you're now 'good'. But you don't read. And you now have an opportunity that's going to require that skill. So you need to learn... and it's not going to go any faster because you've got chops. You're still starting with slow tempos, long note values, and stuff like Mary and her lamb.

Scenario 2: you spend a few months working on reading the basics at the same time as you learn to play. Mary and her lamb are kind of challenging, since you're learning to count, alternate pick, etc. at the same time. After a couple months, you decide your time is better spent on other stuff. Ten years later you also get the opportunity that's going to require reading. As long as you've done a little reading every now and then (and I'm talking about maybe 5 minutes a week!) you do NOT start with Mary's lamb. You start with the pieces you'll need to read. You have the ability to solve the reading problem right away, because you've got the basics. You are months ahead of the other guy, and you weren't bored as you learned.

Scenario 3: you spend a month learning the basics. The opportunity never arises. You've wasted five hours of your life (15 minutes a day, five days a week, for a month).

How bad is the third scenario, really? How good is your crystal ball - can you truly look out 10 years, or 20, and say you'll never have a cause to wish you read?

That's my justification for the 80%. And I've never heard a reason why that thinking is flawed.

By the way, ear vs reading is another false choice - you can have both. And as I said earlier, ear skills tend to come faster with with reading.

Scrybe, yeah - there's some maintenance involved. For minimal reading skills, it's a few minutes a week (just enough to not forget which note is where, etc). The higher the skill level you want to maintain, the more often you need to do it.

To keep up 'sight' reading you have to play things you've never actually seen before - you play each piece just once. A limiting factor is the amount of music you have at hand. So I'll get fake books and other anthologies and do a few tunes a day - roughly 10-15 minutes worth. That seems to be enough for me to be pretty confident I can handle random stuff thrown in front of me without spending a fortune (I spend about $100-200 per year on music specifically for keeping my reading chops). And remember, in a gig situation sight reading isn't as hard as you can make it in practice... you always get a little time to look over the music first.

Note I am coverted, but my comment on having a good ear vs sight reading was a total hypothetical situation kind of like if a genie granted me one of those instantly I'd take the good ear.

you may have seen me as a guitar player on TV......

I love this thread. what a great and important read. it IS a good thing, for all reasons DH and Noteboat have written.
my first few guitar lessons had me looking at the strings and the black symbols on and between the lines written on sheets of paper on a stand in front of me.
I learned Every Good Boy Does Fine and FACE on paper and then on the strings. I soon discovered that if I could hum it I could play it. if I could hum it I could read it and visa versa, etc.
that was an intro into notation. I call it sheet music.
I kick myself that I did not keep up with reading sheet music. I used my ear, as I found it to be really keen.
I think I would be a much much better player than the one I am now if I stuck to it; made it a life habit reading and learning songs by sight.
true. DH and Note are correct.
just because I know the three notes that make a chord I believe I can talk theory?
no way. I know my place. I am not the typical loud in your face electric guitar player, either.
there aren't any on this forum. good thing.
loud and proud is awful.
music is incredible. much more than on the surface.
I sure am glad I still have the key, somewhere, to unlock the secrets.

I play music for fun . When I started playing guitar (40 years ago) there was no place on this whole planet that produced musical scores for the music I liked . You were lucky enough to get the chord diagrams written on top of the piano part . Guitar arrangements were unavailable to me so what was I to do ? Not play ?

I realize that today there is so much more material produced for budding guitarists but it certainly wasn't available to the common masses back in the late sixties . I have always wanted to know how to read music and consider what little theory I've learned as very valuable to my playing . However things like private music lessons cost money and , I'm sure there are many GN'ers who can relate to this , that money wasn't available to me as a ten-year-old .

Maybe there are people who don't mind playing music they can't stand for profit . That's called a job . More power to them . I won't look down on them , and I don't expect them to look down on me . I'll play what I like and if other people enjoy it too , great !

People who hire my band hire it for the music we play not for the music we could play .

This is a question for the moderators . Why does the site delete all indentations at the beginnining of a new paragraph ? To save space ? If I want to separate my thoughts I have to use a whole blank line .

I have absolutely no idea why it does that. My initial thought it that it's in the phpBB software the forums use. Since it's not word processing software, it shouldn't act like one I guess.
But, I have found, through trial and error, that if I type out an answer and then put it all in "code" that it does give you the paragraph indentation you're looking for. That's probably more trouble than it's worth, though.
Oh well.

Peace

And it went and created a new line between the first two paragraphs but not between the second and third. Strange, no?

Peace

Since this thread is attracting a lot of very good responses from those who do read music, can I ask this: Do you find that reading music has to be done regularly to be maintained? My reading skills are horrendous, but I'm working on them. However, I find that this is something I have to do every day and, when I've taken breaks from it in the past, I find my ability to read diminishes very quickly.

Yes and no... :mrgreen:

There are two main elements to reading. One is understanding what the dots and symbols mean. I don't forget that any more than I forget the alphabet. Once I fully entrenched the information about which note lived on which line or space, and what the various marks means, then it's there until dementia steals it away again.

The other element is how quickly and accurately you can translate the information into a finger movement. That can rust if you neglect it. One reason that you need to keep working on that aspect is that it's not a fixed thing. On guitar, the same written note can be played in more than one position. Initially that might look like a disadvantage of notation over Tab, but as you progress a little further it quickly becomes an advantage, because you gain a useful understanding of the other options you have. The same note on a score also means something different to me (in terms of physical movements) whether I'm playing guitar, piano, clarinet, or whatever. But it's still the same 'language' across them all and, as such, is incredibly useful and informative.
Also, am I the only person who finds it impossible to just follow the dots if a piece has TAB below? I can't stop myself using the TAB for pitch/hand positions/etc and the dots just for rhythm and it's really annoying when I try to use a piece that has TAB below for sight reading practice. :cry: Any tips? Beyond lots of thin strips of paper and a good stock of blu-tak? Or retyping every darn piece in GP5? Thanks.

Initially I was like you - I'd stare at the dots for a bit and then look down at the tab. But now I'm more like Fretsource, I find tab clunky and limited and switch straight back up to the score. Retyping, or hand writing, is one of the best ways to entrench the learning, so I wouldn't knock that. :)

It's just like any other language. At some stage you stop mentally translating everything in and out of your first language, and develop the ability to think in the new one you're learning.

Cheers,

Chris

... the reverse snob issue you raised about reading music is similar to the guitarists that claim they were all self taught as if that makes them somehow better than those that have taken lessons...invariably somehwere in a conversation they will make the statement, "And I never took lessons learned it all on my own" and my response to that is so what, you either play well or you don't, they use that statement as either an excuse for the lack of skills or as some sort of badge of honor like saying haha I did this on my own and you needed a teacher. It's all BS and I can't stand people that preface everything they say with those words as the first thing out of their mouth...just shutup and play the guitar nobody cares how you learned to play.

Hi Chris,

I share your lack of enthusiasm for the "self taught" claims. :) In that context and spirit, here's how it all seems to me:

I don't NEED to learn a Gsus4, for instance. I could simply say some version of "I'm not botherin' with all that fancy college boy stuff, three chords is good enough for me dammit..." But it turns up in the version of Maggie May that I've got here, and - hey - it's not hard to play when I checked it out - so I learnt it.

Reading score is like that. I don't NEED to learn it. But it's not a choice between ear and reading any more than it's a choice between learning the E A and D strings or the G B and E strings. It's just another part of learning the craft. I don't read because I want to get paying jobs; I don't read because I think it might impress somebody; I don't read because it's a required part of some course I'm doing (in fact I've never had a practice schedule of any kind and my major learning style is noodling around and experimenting). I learned how to do it because it's so darned useful and it makes things EASIER.

I can walk into any music shop, pick up a book and read useful and interesting information. I can use a book of songs and learn more about the details, far more quickly than if I couldn't read.

It really is just one more (incredibly useful) tool in a players kit.

Cheers,

Chris

Wow ... such discussion. Again, I over simplify, but how could reading music not help you? It's a no brainer to me, but the origional idea that us less than musically literate musicians are inferior just because ........... well thats silly too. Have I mentioned I don't really care what other musicians think of me? :lol: Yeah, thats probably a lie. :lol: Necessity is the mother of invention though and if I don't have tab I will read the music if I want to play the song. I too am from a generation of less than adaquit fake books and learning the notation was the only way to get some of it right.