Do players need help with music?

[John Cadd]

When you talk to players do you find they need help with music or different keys at all? Or are they all fully trained in every key.Is there room to help them to help themselves.
This is a question not only about classical playing.
Do players wish they could escape the TABS system.TABS is good if you can`t read music.
If you had a system to convert from TABS to music would it be welcome? TABS is good. Music is good Both is better. Is there a demand? I could help them.

[Ned Knepp]

Rob,
I agree about remembering that a guitar is a "percussion" instrument. I've tried to explain this to other guitar players that didn't seem to understand it. Some get it and some don't. It's all timing and I don't do such a good job of explaining it but try to get them to see it's often a "hair's breadth" of hesitation or attack that I'm talking about and it just isn't there in the written music. Without it, the music sounds sterile or mechanical to me.

I play in a small group at my church that preforms once a month or so (the only public playing I do) and I like to sit back in the corner with our drummer. I like it back there, whatever style of play I'm using for a given song.

Ned

[Rick Gentry]

This has been a very interesting discussion, but the fact remains that learning music notation and performance techniques is work it cannot done overnight. Whatever instrument you learn on, the nuances of keeping your elbow low when you play a certain position, reading two bars ahead, not tuning to a major chord during the performance of atonal music, or a million other things that can only be learned from time and experience (that experience sometimes being the harsh eyes of your more experienced fellow ensemble members). One tends to learn pretty quickly in front of several hundred paying ticket holders.

While some people are quicker than others, the fact remains there really are no shortcuts. Has anyone here ever had to play in a band with a Suzuki musician? Even their method requires practicing the same thing 10,000 times.

[Ned Knepp]

Well, I have to laugh at myself after reading you post, Rick. It sounds to me like you know much more about it than I do.

I'm a self taught, play by ear ( and a bit of tab) guitar player. In fact I don't know a name for most of the chords I play. I have a lot of bad habits, like hanging my thumb over the edge of the fingerboard to get an F# / D and I probably played that note for 5 years before I found out that this is what I was playing. I tend to grip the neck too deep in the palm of my left hand, I seldom play anything exactly the same way twice and until just now I wasn't even aware that I need to hold my elbow low for anything other than arm wrestling.

I agree, though, that playing any instrument is and, I think, should be work. If it wasn't, it would have become boring long ago. I've often thought that the way I go about it IS too hard and it MUST be easier to know where the notes are and how to read them. But them I think about how hard I've worked to learn some of the techniques I use now and realize that reading music is only one facet of the gem. I used to be embarrassed when someone asked me to play some sheet music but I finally realized that I didn't have anything to be embarrassed about. The truth is that not everyone can do what I do. We are all different. Suzuki method or not, it all takes work and anyone that has done enough work to make some music has my respect.

In my experience, it seems that most people who play for a while usually figure out that even the "best" players are still learning. Personally, I found that a very freeing idea. It was like it of gave me permission to accept my playing ability where it was and allow me to have fun and not worry that I'm not "good enough". This gift that we have to make music is a wonderful thing

Ned

[Tom Krebs]

In my humble experience: The "you either got it or you don't" rule is a good measuring stick. Driving, loving, desire, and practice can also equal success and/or personal satisfaction no matter the method(s).

[John Cadd]

If you follow the current trend of the internet everything will turn to stone.Nothing new will ever be allowed again.A large dark cloud will descend and the world will end.(Exits left sobbing)

[John Cadd]

This is a very late answer but the previous posters forget I was aiming the charts at newbies who want to get the tune.None of them are going on stage tonight in front of an audience.They are not being paid .They just want to get a tune.Simple as that.

[Larry Schultz]

Hoping I'm not going to step on anyone's toes, I'd like to make some observations:
1. People have been trying to reinvent written music since it was first invented, for exactly the reasons noted above. A number of years ago, a local musicologist here in Milwaukee (i think his name is John Stokes?) became enamored with the music and technique of the great guitarist Michael Hedges and he invented a type of tab notation that tried to convey all the wonderful things Hedges could do on his guitars, thinking this would revolutionize written music. The end result was so complex that it was almost unintelliglble to even the most proficient guitarists. Complete dead end.
2. If you know your multiplication tables through the 12's, you know way more "facts" than is required to know the guitar fretboard: 6 strings times 12 frets to the octave equals 72 "facts". And just like learning the multiplication tables, it takes practice, practice, and more practice to learn these facts and to be able to execute them. Not an easy task, but hardly beyond the reach of people who have the desire to learn them.
3. The number of people in this entire world who can fluently sight-read guitar music is miniscule in the extreme.
4. While I can show anyone how to play the individual chords of a tune, the ability to play "legato" (smoothly) between chord changes CANNOT be taught! You either got it or you don't. The best musicians will find a way to make a song "sing" even through the most demanding changes. Changes that, in most cases, require- yes, you got it- practice, practice, and more practice to execute smoothly.
5. The study of music that was written on, and for, the guitar will show you that not all composers view the fretboard as "horizontal" (across the fretboard) as opposed to "vertical" (up and down the neck).
6. My own view of formal notation versus tab is that, since tab does not readily reveal note time values, you might as well bite the bullet and learn to read music. Tab has its place and it can be of great value in determining where exactly on the neck notes are being played, but in the end it is written music that pulls it all together in a manner that is most accessible to most people.

[John Cadd]

Larry ,I shall get back to you on this one.Agree with everything you say though.I want to make it a freebie on an Amazon site.It will save all the printing hassle.You will like it.

[Robert Bander]

I think Finale software will transfer music into TAB and visa versa.
Robert

[Robert Bander]

Another thing to consider is that before music notation was developed hundreds of years ago, lute music was written out in tablature. Modern TAB rarely includes dynamics, but it could if anyone took the time. But these days all you have to do to get the dynamics is listen to a recording, something not available in centuries past.
Robert