subject: Two fundamental skills that you should have for learning guitar [print this page] Two fundamental skills that you should have for learning guitar
Learning guitar was never this easy before the internet days. I remember my story, going to the tutor every Sunday afternoon just for 2 hours long tuition and then come back and practice it, it was more or less quite monotonous. The resources were really limited other than your instruction book, your tutor and may be few friends. But now things have changed for the better. If you want to learn anything about guitar, you just have to type in a phrase in the search engine and you get thousands and thousands of sites listed.
If you are looking forward to learning guitar and want to become an expert guitarist, then you must posses these two fundamental skills, able to read the staff notations and tablature. But I recommend learning staff notations thoroughly and then move on to learning tabs. I will tell you the reason why. There is no doubt that tabs are quite handy and easy to follow than the staff notations. But there are many drawbacks to tabs as well. Here are some of them,
First of all it cannot provide you the time signature i.e. or 4/4 or 6/8 and so on.
There is no way to denote the time interval between two notes, whether it's a normal 4/4 bar or there is half note interval, or a whole note etc.
It cannot denote the type of notes that you are expected to play, like 8th or 16th or 4th etc.
You wouldn't get the tonal details like a whole tone, or semi tone or 2 whole tones and things like that, which are very critical for building scales and chords.
These are few of the drawbacks that came to my mind now. But there are many others as well, which you will come to know when you use it. So I would never recommend you to learn only tabs. You should always couple your tablature along with staff notation to be able to play the song or lead segment as it is expected to sound.
Now coming back to guitar learning - a person who is completely new to guitar or wouldn't know where to start. He wouldn't know the terms like staff notations, time signature, tones or anything. So it is very important to have a good tutor who can guide him in a step by step and logically structured manner, rather than he learning from random sites and videos. It is highly essential to learn music or guitar in a structured way, as one is related to the other in the learning process. So if you don't know the basics, you will find the concepts in the next step will make no sense for you.
