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Well i say the fastest way to start playing is learning how to read tabs because tabs are fun and easy to understand. but please i say do a lot of finger tip push ups because playing th guitar is not as easy as it looks.
Practice every day and you will be able to play up to an hour in a week or two.
Thanks
Have you checked out the tab thread here
some good ones have been posted
Well i say the fastest way to start playing is learning how to read tabs because tabs are fun and easy to understand. but please i say do a lot of finger tip push ups because playing th guitar is not as easy as it looks.
Practice every day and you will be able to play up to an hour in a week or two.
When you say "playing" what do you mean exactly? Do you mean the physical act of strumming strings? Because you can do that instantly to a detuned guitar. That may not sound great but it is playing.
You might want to define what you consider "playing", as I would not agree with your example, for a number of reasons, but the main one is that tabs teach you to parrot what someone else does, but it doesn't "teach" you the guitar, in terms of taking you beyond playing others songs. I could count on both hands the number of students who discount the songs they know on guitar and still say they feel they haven't "learned" anything.
Instructor
First I'll say that learning to read is not a bad thing by any means. Anything new you learn is a good thing but each person needs to figure out if all the effort is really worth it. If time is limited then concentrating on something else may be a better choice.
First the pro's and con's of both. Reading music shows you what notes to play and the rhythmic value. The cons is it does not normally tell you where to play these notes. On very rare occasions if it is written for the guitar it will tell you the position.
Tabs shows you exactly where to put your fingers. No questions at all as to where they should be! Tabliture is much more guitar friendly. The negative is that it does not tell you how long to play these notes.
So what I do with my students that have no interest in reading music is we use tabs and I teach them to read the rhythms in the standard notation. This way they are able to figure out how exactly the piece of music is played rhythmically and they know exactly where they are supposed to put their fingers.
You may say well you will learn the names of the notes by learning to read music but there are other ways of doing this also. There are tones of memorization methods out there that are easy to learn.
The thing with most students is that reading standard notation is going down a dead end. If you can keep their interest beyond the first few strings you can possibly get them to learn the first position. After that only the students that are getting into jazz, classical or going onto music school will learn the other positions. Most students that are into rock styles will never bother with reading standard notation beyond the things they read in the note reading books.
Since most students want to jam and have fun playing their favorite songs using tabs and teaching them to read the rhythms will improve their playing alot more then teaching them to strictly read standard music. I also teach them what notes are on the lines and spaces on the staff when teaching theory. Yes I teach them both aspects of reading music but when they are put together most students will resist and will not practice it. So why bother if they will not practice it? It makes more sense to teach them something that they will absorb and actually work on.
What they will be more willing to work on is playing their favorite songs by tabliture and instead of working on pretty simple rhythms and learning to sight read the first position I can teach them to read very complex rhythms and learn to analyze the songs from the bands they actually want to learn. They end up enjoying themselves more which in turn they end up advancing much more quickly doing it this way. On top of that if they ever really want to learn to read music they have the tools to do it.
To end off I'm not putting down standard notation. If you are going to be a jazz, classical or studio musician it is a must. If you have a yearning to learn to read then by all means go for it. To learn how to play the guitar or even become a professional musician learning to read music is not necessary. Their are tons of very skilled and talented players out there that can't read stitch of music. Actually the only time I ever use it is when I'm teaching kids to read music. Even then this is extremely easy note reading. I'm glad I learned it but I've also been playing for around 30 yrs and I'm a guitar teacher.
Hey Sean,
If you haven't got to it yet I just sent you an e-mail. It's here that I found your site. I found the other post and realized that Instructor was you! Welcome! I pretty much new here also but Welcome anyways!
Don! Great to see you, makes sense now. So YOU were the link that I saw on MY site that led me HERE to discover this interesting guitar forum, and now, you're also enrolled as one of MY Academy Guitar students! How cool is that!
No wonder I thought you made great points in the post above!
I see you're making your way to lesson 4 when I last looked, hope it's been a benefit. I have been posting in some of these theory sections, and you're welcome to jump right in.
By the way, I completely agree with your take on sightreading. Industry figures show that among 100 people that pick up a book 1, 13 percent make it to the next book in the series. That's a 13% success rate. Not acceptable for me.
In my experience, what I find is that, say those getting to graduate the Academy, they become "addicted to the rush" of having learned so much about the guitar that for many it becomes a natural "next step" to complete their knowledge, by getting into sight reading. I use one resource that I will live and die by, and in my opinion the best for learning to sight read as a guitarist, and thats "Music Reading for Guitar" by David Oakes, on Musicians Institute Press. Essentially what you have is Semester 1-2 of MI's Sight reading cirricula in book form for under 20.00, and it's perfect for those who need to learn lead sheets for session work, or jazz ensemble. By far the most intelligent work (Sorry, William Leavitt) on sightreading on the guitar, IMO.
Instructor (Sean) Cats out of the bag now!
Yes I am one of your students. Very cool stuff. I finished the first module and can't wait to get started on the next! Even though I know the stuff presented already I'm learning some very new and innovative ways of looking at things. Good stuff!
