Guitar Notations: You Don't Need To Read Music To Play The Guitar

Way back in high school I had a friend who took formal piano lessons.
Often, I was able to come with him in his class.
I found out that learning to play the piano is actually harder than learning to play the guitar.

WHY? Because, you need to learn how to read music first before you can start to play.

At first, they were taught where the notes should fall on the staff and how long they should hold the notes. After a couple of weeks, they eventually moved on to practicing scales and so on...

Every time they play, they always follow a piece of paper or a book with musical stuff written on it.
My friend and I found it very difficult to understand.
Slashes, even more slashes, bars, dots, weird symbols... Shocks!!!

One afternoon, I came in his class and heard him playing a weird sounding piece.
I asked him, "What's the title of that song?" and he answered, "I don't know!"
That's because they were just instructed by their teacher to practice song after unrecognizable song that they didn't even wanted to play.

On the other hand, I can say that guitar notations are easier to understand and playing the guitar actually does not require you to know how to read music. Thanks to those early musicians who, through the years, developed a way to communicate basic ideas such as chord construction, chord progressions, rhythmic figures, and song structure in a much simpler manner.

And that's what I am going to share with you.

In my next posts, I'll be showing you how to read the following:

- Guitar chord diagrams
- Guitar rhythmic slashes and strumming symbols
- Guitar tablature (tabs)

It has been said that many great guitarists don’t know how to read music, and many who can read music learned to do so after they learned to play the guitar.