NOTE: This article was written before modern guitar tab was invented — Jimmy Cypher
The Necessity of Reading Music by Lee Ritenour
SOURCE: Guitar Player, June 1979.
Guitar players (regardless of style) have the reputation of not being able to read
music, or at least the reputation for being poor readers. This attitude has changed slightly
in the past decade, but not enough to convince many musicians that the guitarist should
be allowed to sit in with a symphony orchestra. Although this article will not involve any
musical examples, it will suggest some very practical ways in which to improve your
reading skills.
First, I think we should list several guitar styles and show the levels of reading ability
among guitarists in each genre. This analysis is based on my 20 years of experience in
crossing all types of guitar players, and by no means is the final word (there are plenty of
exceptions); however, trust me that the general assumptions are accurate. The list starts
with the best guitar readers and ends with the worst and takes into account the overall
ability to read music, knowledge of the fingerboard, sight-reading facility, horizontal reading (single notes), and vertical reading (notes stacked upon one another chords, counterpoint, etc).
1. Studio 4. Rock 7. Blues
2. Jazz 5. Pop 8. Flamenco
3. Classical 6. Country 9. Folk
It’s not hard to guess that studio guitarists would be the best readers. They have
usually spent the most time practicing their reading in preparation for becoming session
players. In general, jazz guitarists have also spent a great deal of time with written music,
and in many cases have attended universities that stress the reading of music. Classical
guitarists usually spend a large amount of time in learning to read music; their goal is
usually to learn how to read well enough in order to read or transcribe classical guitar
compositions and then memorize them. Unfortunately, classical guitarists are usually
poor sight-readers.
Starting with the rock, pop, and country guitarists, the levels of reading drop
considerably for a few simple reasons. In the case of the rock guitarist, he or she usually
starts to pick up the guitar by ear. This is by no means a detriment; in fact, I’ve noticed that
many rock and pop guitarists have better ear training than the studio, jazz, or classical
players. As we know, some of the most innovative guitar playing has come from rock
guitarists who did not read a note (e.g., Jimi Hendrix). So if you plan to be in that category
you need not read further.
However, for those of you who are a little more practical, you
can see that the days of the rock guitarist not needing to read music are over. There are
just too many guitarists out there competing for the same job.
The blues, flamenco, and folk guitarists are usually the worst readers, but I don’t
mean any insult. The traditions for learning such styles run very deep, and in the past
have had very little to do with reading written music.
Looking at this list of guitar stylists and their general reading abilities, you might get
some idea of where you fit in. For example, if you are a folk guitarist looking to break into
the studios, you just may have a great deal of work to do in the reading department.
There are several steps you can take right away to help improve your reading. First of
all, give yourself this test to determine your weakest points:
1. Randomly select a note, such as B b. Play it on each string, starting with the sixth up
to the first, as fast as you can. For example, if you were using the note B b, you
would go from the sixth string’s 6th fret to the fifth string’s 1st fret, the fourth string’s
8th fret, the third string’s 3rd fret, the second string’s 11th fret, and the first string’s
6th fret. If you can complete the test from the sixth string to the first string in
between one and two second’s time, you have an excellent knowledge of the
fingerboard. Three to four seconds is average; if it takes longer than that”well,
you know you need some work. Try this exercise with all the chromatic tones.
You have to listen to recordings for that or go play with these musicians to learn this musical rhythmic “dialect.” So it stands to reason that you’re going to have trouble playing pop music that’s based on all of these modern genres. Scrap this clef idea and follow the model of your heroes! If you want to play guitar like a certain person, find out how that person learned guitar and do the same thing! Do not be browbeat into using this archaic system for modern popular guitar because people are out there in the industry, in the trenches, where it is brutally competitive — making money, getting paid, honing thier unique sound and craft, making fantastic recordings, having fantastic musical experiences charting on Billboard who never ever use this. I should know, I’m one of them! I haven’t used it since music school!
It’s a bit like wanting to be a great American English novelist but the first thing you do is go to learn Japanese. Well, it’s great to know some Japanese when you have a publishing deal with Random House and you’re on the best seller lists and your book is being translated into other languages and you’re doing a book tour of Japan. Very handy for that but not to actually write a magnificent masterpiece work in English. I don’t know anyone who would say “yes that sounds like a great idea” and yet this is what is routinely done when you buy these guitar books off the shelf: these archaic guitar methods that are 50-100 years behind the times! I will post a link to the Lee Ritenour article below and hopefully you will see that reading or not reading off this clef has absolutely no correlation whatsoever to the quality of your guitar playing ands success in guitar lessons. The people who read this stuff are paid to read: studio musicians being best, academic second, and down from there.
I have had incredible success tossing out this treble clef and relegating it to the closet where it needs to be for reference until you’re already an expert/professional guitar player. I can’t tell you how much faster you will learn when you start learning notation in guitar lessons for your instrument the guitar:Â guitar tab and rhythmic notation only. To understand the absurdity of this let’s just reverse the roles: imagine the looks that you would get if you insisted when someone comes to school for piano that they’re going to have to learn to read for their piano on guitar tab! Now we start to see the folly of it in terms of paradigm shifting here to borrow from Thomas Kuhn and the role that social conditioning plays in this discussion. There’s absolutely no reason to start your guitar studies there and often not to ever use this at all depending on what you want to do as a career or hobbyist with the instrument.
TOP 10 GUITAR LESSONS MYTH #1: In order to play guitar really well I must learn to read a treble clef that was designed for piano. FALSE!
This is about one of the most awful things that you can do. This is to be assiduously avoided when you are starting out in guitar lessons. It may or may not be a great thing to know once you’re a professional guitar player and you’re out getting work where you’re communicating with horn players or piano players and so forth but to actually learn the guitar, you want to stick with the notation system designed for guitarists. The problem with the treble clef is that it shows you the alphabetic pitch for example (the middle C in this video) and on the piano that’s in one place so you know exactly where to play. On the guitar it’s in multiple places five or six or more when you start generating harmonic overtones and different things like this.
“Many rock and pop guitarists who learn by ear have better ear training than studio, jazz or classical players. Some of the most innovative guitar playing has come from rock guitarists (e.g. Jimi Hendrix) who did not read a note.” — Lee Ritenour
There are so many reasons not to use a treble clef to learn guitar that I scarcely know where to begin. Guitar World magazine took the treble clef out in year 2002 and now only put the guitar tab staff and rhythmic notation. Of the four most influential and innovative guitar players of the 20th century arguably Andre Segovia, Jimi Hendrix, Eddie Van Halen, and Yngwvie Malmsteen, only Segovia reads off of a traditional treble clef when learning OR performing. Eddie Van Halen who was a concert pianistas a child does not read the clef for guitar in fact quite the opposite! As you can see in this Smithsonian interview, what Eddie was playing was so highly innovative that there wasn’t even a written language for it! They had to invent modern guitar tab – as he talks about in the Smithsonian interview – just to explain what he was doing because there was not a language for it. Jimi Hendrix never read a note of music. Yngvwie Malmsteen when he was starting out didn’t read music. Only Segovia read music.
As, renowned studio guitarist and jazz player Lee Ritenour says in a guitar player anthology article, the secret of the classical guitarist is that most actually don’t read very well and are poor sight readers. Most classical guitarists only read well enough to memorize the music that they are going to play when they’re looking at that piece of paper. Usually, they already know the composition which shows just how hard it is to read off of this thing. It’s absolutely torturous: you’ll spend three years learning to sight read a treble clef for guitar and in that time you’re not necessarily becoming a better guitar player: in fact you probably won’t because you have to limit yourself to simple things that you’re able to read off of the thing!
Whether you should learn to sight read is very situation specific: If you’re Brian Setzer orchestra and you have to score out parts for a 16 piece horn section, you need to know that language to communicate with your horn players. If you’re Steve Vai and you’re playing with zappa, you need to read… but not with Whitesnake! But if you’re in a guitar/bass/drum band or singer songwriter or solo acoustic player, you absolutely don’tneed to do this and it will hold you back. I cannot tell you how many guitar lessons students come to me who struggle with this six months, nine months, a year, two years who can hardly play anything and within two weeks I’ve got them playing the kind of music that they want to and accelerating like they never have before. Duh! It’s a notation system written for another instrument (the piano) designed hundreds of years ago if not longer. Before the phonograph was invented. Or Pro Tools recording software. Or Appalachian country. Or Mississippi Delta blues. The rhythmic notation system doesn’t even capture things adequately like a simple 12 bar blues shuffle. And it certainly doesn’t capture Hendrix’s “Red House.”
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