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Comment by zozbot234 | Hacker News Reader

> If you're saying to not use tabs but to play by ear

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.

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- Sheet music: It looks like a completely different language, I don't have an idea of how it works nor can I read it. I can't believe that people can read it without specifically learning it?

- 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

> Haven't heard the term, and I'm not from a western country

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.

Ahhhh... This brings back sweet memories of a music theory/practical harp, grad student that I used to date. She was always able to instantly play any pop songs I requested as harp arrangements; watching someone truly play an instrument as if from feeling is magical. But I really feel like guitar playing is a different beast all together. There is no other instrument with the amount of "players" that the guitar has, ranging from low skill to high. But in general, I've watched multiple people teach themself up to a level where they can go no further on their own. Then you take your learning on a specific path. Classical training if you want to end up as a studio musician or composer; non classical if you want to be the guitarist in a moderately successful hardcore band. (Does playing Warp Tour make you a success?) That's what happened to the three best guitarists I've known, and I suppose my point is this: GP can, and should, skip the not-so-fun stuff for the time being. Guitar is unlike other mainstream instruments, and simply playing is the best way to improve (even if it means developing bad habit)

But why is it that musical awareness of what you're actually playing on the instrument has to be the "not so fun" part, compared to just mechanically following some existing tab? I would dispute that point. I would also dispute the notion that "the guitar is too unlike" other instrument families and standard learning methods cannot possibly be applied to it.

But how do I know what solfege note I'm playing with a single note, since it's all relative?

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?

When you learn a song by ear, you'll know how each note of it relates to the key (which is the "home" note, and the one that the song might end with). You also know where the half-steps are in the scale. These are basically enough to know your solfège/solmization syllables for that song. Note names and perfect pitch are irrelevant because most of the time you'll be playing fretted notes, so just shifting your hand location on the fretboard lets you play different pitches - the actual "note" pitch is arbitrary. Notes played unfretted (that you can't just move around) are rarer, so you can always think of them as falling outside the pattern and learn them as such.

I don’t agree with a lot of what the other poster said but I will vouch for chord charts which are easy to use.

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"

And all they’re telling you is which chords to play when.

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.

> would let you play directly from sheet music, chord charts or lead sheets

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).

IMSLP has some ads and a little nag screen if you aren't a subscriber/contributor, but nothing terrible.

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