[natejenkins]

I'm guessing you are coming from a classical music background where if you can read the music you can pretty much play the tune. I tried applying this method to jazz and it was a complete disaster. I could happily play transcriptions of all of my favorite artists, but the second you took away the magic book with the black dots I was helpless and couldn't make my own music.

If what you want out of music is to press the correct keys in the correct order then reading music will get you a long way. But if you are leaning more towards jazz or pop and making your own music then reading can be a horrible crutch. And the better you are at reading music the more you will rely on it and you rob yourself of developing a functional ear.

And what happens when you fall in love with an obscure indie artist where no transcriptions exist?

Concerning which string on a guitar is used, you can often tell by the tone of the note. Even with muted strings that give a percussive "pluck" you can often tell which note was fretted. For the most part if you are familiar with the style of music you can make very good guesses as to where on the guitar something was played, and if you cannot tell the difference then I would argue that it doesn't really matter.

Finally, out of the long list of musicians I admire in jazz, blues, and pop, I cannot think of one example where they admit they cannot play by ear. In the subset that teach I cannot think of one example where they do not strongly suggest learning music by ear.