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If you're saying to not use tabs but to play by ear I do that too, though I find it a time consuming process and sometimes just want to go by tabs.
These are not the only possibilities. A musically-based understanding of the fretboard would let you play directly from sheet music, chord charts or lead sheets. (Classical guitarists do this as a matter of course.)
Of course ear training (what you do when playing by ear) is a big foundation for that skill, but that should not be time consuming, either. A good player should be able to "find" the right note on the fretboard on the spot, not just by trial and error.
> some of the terms you mentioned are new to me
Is solfège new to you also? You know, the old Do-Re-Mi etc. That's something that even most "self-taught" people learn to sing to from childhood, and properly used it can be a great foundation for thoroughly understanding a relative instrument like the guitar.
- Chord charts: Never heard of this and Google doesn't give me anything relevant either. All I'm seeing are pictures of 6 strings with the frets to play highlighted with a dot symbol. If you mean that, then I think that's even easier than tabs and anyone who can read tabs can read it.
- Lead sheets: Never heard of it either and on googling it looks like sheet music, and I can't read it either.
- Playing by ear: I'm training myself by playing nursery rhymes but admittedly it's slow especially on higher bpm songs where I find it hard to remember or distinguish individual notes. E.g. I recently figured out Amazing Grace, but I know I'm very far away from being able to figure out the solo of Sweet Child o Mine by ear (which I learnt from YouTube). I wish there sequence of recommended tracks for the same, to slowly upgrade the skill of playing by ear.
- Soflege: Haven't heard the term, and I'm not from a western country and we don't use Do-Re-Mi. Though if you mean "scales" (specifically the major scale I guess?), sure I know them, and understand how they are all relative, but again fail to understand how they are related to being able to play a new song on the guitar.
I'm glad to hear your perspective on things because learning music is not something I ever bothered to do until recently, thanks for sharing your thoughts
Most of them look like this:
Am C D F
There is a house in New Orleans
Am C E E
They call the "Rising Sun"
The ones with 6 strings are just giving you a reference for the chords if you don’t know how to play them.
I play guitar for a church and we use chord charts for all our music.
Understood. Indian music uses Sa-Re-Ga-Ma-Pa-Dha-Ni, but it means the same thing. The key to understanding that system is that Mi-Fa and Ti-Do (Ga-Ma, Ni-Sa) are half-step intervals (consecutive frets on the guitar), every other interval is whole step (skip a fret). Historical Western solmization doesn't even use Ti (the indian Ni), so everything always revolves around that single Mi-Fa and there are fewer syllables to remember - "mutations" where the syllables rotate in meaning are used instead. (If you search for videos talking about "Italian solfeggio" there's an episode of the Nikhil Hogan podcast talking about why these older systems actually make musical sense, despite seemingly being more complex. This system was what professionally educated musicians learned back in the 18th century.)
So if you know what solfège note you're playing, that tells you immediately how nearby places on the guitar fretboard will relate to the scale. Notes on other guitar strings are also related musically via interval relationships that depend on the tuning, and can be derived quite easily or committed to memory.
BTW, I think anyone who's interested in music to any extent should learn to read standard notation, even if they only play guitar. It's the language that literate discourse about music has relied on for hundreds of years, at least in the West. And the basics are quite simple, being founded on the diatonic scale just like solfège.
From what I can think of, I can either need to know the song's key (and will have to rely on the internet for the same because I don't have perfect pitch?), or I'd need to have at least 3 or 4 notes to figure out what major scale it might possibly be? (And still it isn't enough I might be wrong).
What am I missing?
Are the sites for those less terrible than they are for tabs? The problem here isn't using tabs to learn things, it's that the tabs sites are full of ads and popups (and terrible layouts and all kinds of other things not so easily addressed with an adblocker).