[brandall10]

As a guitar player for over 30 years now, it's fascinating how quickly you can teach something like Smoke on the Water or Whole Lotta Love in the span of a few minutes to someone who has never picked up the instrument... sure the timing/fretting is off but it's close enough that their face will light up.

To underscore your overall point, I took lessons in 2 phases:

1) At 10 years old, had a cheap classical guitar. Did 8 'proper' lessons, went home on the 8th one crying after being sent home to learn Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring.

2) At 14 years old picked up a guitar mag with a tab for Living Colour's "Type", which is almost as simple as something like Smoke on the Water. After learning a couple dozen more songs like this my parents purchased a Squire strat and signed me up for lessons with a dude who looked like Jerry Cantrell. Practiced 5 hours a day, and after 9 months stopped going as it appeared I had outclassed my instructor.

As to your #1 point, I'd humbly disagree. I was in a guitar center with less than a year under under my belt noodling and some guy walked to compliment my playing and see if I was in a band he could check out. My practice partner was similar, went on to win our battle of the bands and dropped out his freshman year of college to helm a critically acclaimed jam band for several years (at their height they spent 3 months touring w/ Phish).

Nowadays with the power of online tools kids can get frighteningly good very quick, and some within a few years to session pro level playing in a myriad of styles. Bedroom guitarists that become obsessed with the likes of Guthrie Govan and Tim Henson.

[JKCalhoun]

Agree: TABS == good, sheet music == bad. (For beginners, anyway.)

[pclmulqdq]

A lot of people fluent in sheet music don't appreciate how incomprehensible and information-dense it really is. If you just want to play a song, it's the wrong way to go.

[analog31]

I'm a fluent reader, and I agree with you. Conventional notation has its use cases, but if you don't fall into one of them, then you're better off without it.

Playing "classical" music is the most familiar use case. I belong to a 19-piece jazz ensemble, which involves a hybrid of composed and improvised music, and everything we play is from sheet music. I'm the bassist, and my parts are a mixture of conventional notation and chord symbols. In this environment, tabulature is actually useless -- no arranger knows how to write it, and nobody can read it at performance speed.

On the other hand, there's very little sheet music in rock and contemporary genres except in some situations such as studio / commercial work. A complaint I've read about tabulature is that a lot of tabs found online are inaccurate. There's also a school of thought that relying on tabs is an impediment to learning how to play by ear.

Learning to read from day one is how I was taught, but it's no longer the preferred method. For instance, the Suzuki method has kids start out playing entirely by ear. Reading comes later.

[mathieuh]

I can sight read tab to a pretty high level, e.g. I was able to sight read my way through most of Capricho Árabe at first glance if that means anything to anyone. I just started teaching myself classical guitar in August and I've completely fallen in love, it's all I listen to and I practise hours per day.

But I am now teaching myself standard notation because I am running up against the limit of tab. I keep having to go back and forth between someone actually playing the piece and the tab so I can get the rhythm, and sometimes I'll find I internalise a rhythm incorrectly and then one day when I'm listening to the piece played by a pro it clicks and I realise I've been playing it wrong this whole time.

There are sites like https://www.classtab.org/ which try to add this rhythmic information to tab, but I don't think it works all that well.

Honestly at this point I wish I'd started with standard notation, or at least learnt both at the same time.

[balfirevic]

> I can sight read tab to a pretty high level

I don't think you can sight-read tabs, AFAIK sight-reading means being able to play something without seeing or hearing it before, and tabs don't have rhythm information.

> Honestly at this point I wish I'd started with standard notation, or at least learnt both at the same time.

Well, it would have required the same (or more effort) then, couple of months should hardly make a difference. Good luck!

[kzrdude]

Guitar is in a tricky spot because tabs give you information sheet music doesn't, which voicing to use (is it called that) i.e which string to play a given note on.

[Hesinde]

I have come to like sheet music - in part, because of its density.

Most voices, which we play in our music club fit on 1 to 4 sheets. This is the amount of sheets, which can be conveniently put on our music stands. Any more means page turning during a piece or multiple music stands.

A less dense format would mean that it does not find on four sheets on a music stand anymore. We would have to swap out paper binders for an electronic solution. This on one hand is expensive and on the otherhand bothersome. Paper with all its limitations just works. Electronic devices need to be charged, kept up to date, break easily, etc. Doing something offline lets me relax and focus easier.

That said I think tablets will become an increasingly better alternative for paper based sheet music. I don't like the glowing comparatively small displays though. Looking forward to big e-ink tablets running a general purpose OS.

A club member's setup is cool. He has an area dedicated to music in his house. Inbetween a dozen hardware synthesizers there is a master keyboard and behind it a big screen, which can be (at least in theory) used for configuring the synthesizers and display sheet music. This setup is expensive and stationary though and thus not a good fit for performing or playing music in a club.

I did not like sheet music in the beginning, but honestly I cannot think of a strictly better format to teach people how to perform a piece of music. I think a piano roll projected via AR technology would be a good contendor, but the technology is not there yet.

[kzrdude]

Lead sheets are great, they are not dense and get the most important parts across.

For other uses, the density is the thing and it can't be replaced by anything. Sheet music has syntax and structure in a way that makes it possible to learn to read it by chunks, unlike let's say piano roll.

[darkerside]

Do you appreciate those 8 lessons from where you were 10? In a way, you'd played guitar for 5 years when you strolled into that Guitar Center and started noodling.

[brandall10]

Unfortunately I didn't touch the guitar again until picking up that mag, so it was all lost, including my nascent ability to read music.

[darkerside]

Musical and muscle patterns that form in your mind at a young age don't disappear, they just wait for their time

[brandall10]

We’re talking a sum total of possibly 20 hours playing as a child over the course of a couple months.

As a lefty, I recall I was still in an awkward enough phase that when shopping for an electric I couldn’t decide on getting a left or right model, they both felt equally awkward, so just continued using right. Pretty sure I wasn’t able to barre chord. Things ramped up quickly once I started with the 2nd instructor.

[jamincan]

Would 8 lessons be enough to build that muscle memory though? It is pretty remarkable, though, how long muscle memory can last. I haven't played piano seriously since university except for occasionally noodling on my mom or sister's piano when visiting, and old repertoire seems to flow out of my fingers. Maybe a bit more rusty than when I was taking lessons in my teens, but still there somehow 20 years later.

[wccrawford]

If nothing else, being exposed to something for a short time has the effect of removing some of the fear of the unknown, at least. You might not be able to repeat any of the stuff you learned, but you'll go into it with a lot less fear the second time, and that's incredibly helpful. And I'm sure some of that stuff will come back to you, too.