TOP 10 GUITAR LESSONS MYTHS #1 CONTINUED

TOP 10 GUITAR LESSONS MYTHS #1 CONTINUED

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:  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.

See the full Lee Ritenour Article

Play it your way.  The Cypher Way.  Rock on — Jimmy