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.

I'll teach you how to play the guitar

Photo Source

Okay guys. Let me get this straight.
As I've told you in one of my previous posts, I made this blog in order to help aspiring guitarists learn how to play the the guitar.
Of course, I can start right away and just feed you with bunch of reading materials that you can read but I'd be pretty sure you probably won't even bother doing so at all.
That would be boring, don't you think so?
Who cares if your the brightest professor in the University, with a mind like that of Einstein (probably with same hair too), if you're so boring that students would often fall asleep when you teach. Right? (can you picture out someone?)

"So, how do you plan to pull this off?"


The following list tells you how The Online Guitar Lessons Blog will teach you about guitars:

1. Fun with Photos. You can simply look at these photos and form your hands as shown.
This is very useful in helping you visualize different fingerings that you need to know.

2. Audio/Video Clips. You can listen or watch these materials in order to figure out the exercises presented along with the topics. Once you begin to play, you can refer to these clips

3. Guitar Tablature (or Tab for short). Guitar Tabs are guitar-specific shorthand for reading music that actually shows you what strings to strike and what frets to hold down on the guitar for creating the sound that’s called for. Guitar tabs are much easier to read than the standard form of musical notation.

Guitar + Photos + Audio/Video Clips + Tabs = Awesome guitar teaching methodology!

What do you think? haha...

I'm just so excited about this!

Watch out for my next post. See you!