Why Learn Notation?

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 confined to a very small repertoire.
• If you learn standard notation you can read music for any instrument. You might want to make a guitar arrangement from a piano score, or simply learn the notes of a song for which you will 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.