Learn Acoustic Guitar – To Read or Not To Read?
What’s the deal with those pesky little black dots? Should you even care? Well being able to read music certainly has it’s advantages and you’ll be pleased to know that it’s easier than you might think when you leave the dots for a while and just focus on learning to read rhythms and charts.
Learn Acoustic Guitar – Q&A Series
Notated music tells us 2 things. It tells us what notes we need to play and in what rhythm we need to play them. That after all my friend is music. However it’s easier said than done on the acoustic guitar. As you saw in the video above certain notes appear in more than one place on the guitar unlike a piano or flute for example. So getting to know which ones to choose is quite tricky and that needs some study on it’s own.
That’s the bad news. Here’s the good news though… Reading rhythms is super easy and will help you learn acoustic guitar much faster. I always ramble on about the fact that Rhythm is so important. Well I’ll say it again. If you can’t read rhythms you’re actually delaying the speed at which you learn acoustic guitar. You need to learn some killer strumming patterns to make those chords sound like something. If you can read rhythms all you need is some notated strumming patterns and you’re ready to roll.
I just don’t get how people learn acoustic guitar with those silly tabs with no rhythm or lyric sheets with chord symbols. Sure you’ll get close but it’ll take you way longer to learn the tunes. After all we only have 24 hours in a day. Let’s make the most of it.
I’ll be releasing a new series soon called “Strumming Saturdays”. We’ll check out loads of rhythms and have ourselves a merry good time. What’s your take on these things then? Can you read rhythms? If not are you going to give it a shot? Let me know in the comments section.
Cheers,
Charl
