Learning to read standard music notation can open up worlds of opportunity for any musician, both creatively and professionally. Yet many guitar students rank learning to read music right up there with visiting the dentist. People studying other musical instruments aren’t nearly as averse to learning to read. What is it about guitarists that makes them resist musical literacy? And, as teachers, what can we do to encourage them?

A History of Illiteracy
Guitar tablature is so readily available in books and on the Internet that many students don’t see the point in learning how to read music notation. And in the United States, the guitar’s link to popular music, such as rock, blues, and folk, means it is also linked to the many guitar heroes who never learned to read standard notation. Some of these fine musicians (blues legend Robert Johnson, for instance) deservedly became mythic, larger-than-life figures; they were creative geniuses who changed the face of music and touched many people in the process.

Consequently, when teachers insist that their students learn to read nowadays, students often respond with a familiar refrain: “So-and-so never learned to read, and look how good he was. Why should I learn to read?”

A Common Language
I asked several guitar instructors how they answer this question. Chris Buono, a professor at Berklee College of Music, stresses the importance of reading notation in order to make a living. “You just can’t juggle multiple tasks without being able to read down a chart on a gig or session,” he tells students. “You have to be able to interpret music quickly and make it sound like you wrote it or have been playing it for your entire life.”

Other teachers focus on the benefit of reading music in a group setting. Jazz educator Amanda Monaco says, “If you have a band, you can write music and give the parts to the other musicians.” Classical instructor Anthony Bez echoes this, explaining to his students that “reading simplifies the coordination of ensembles.”

Most of the teachers I spoke to agreed that reading can help open up new worlds for students. Monaco elaborates: “You can figure out songs from a book that you find and are curious about. It’s a lot like discovering a short story by an author you had never heard of before and are excited about.” North Carolina-based teacher Django Haskins feels that reading can “open you up to learning all kinds of music that you may not be able to dissect and analyze by just listening.”

Why not just look at the tablature if it’s available, students may ask. Although tablature helps players decipher where they should play the notes on the fretboard, since most tab transcriptions don’t include rhythmic notation, the tab doesn’t tell how or how long they should play those notes. So guitar students need to be able to read rhythms and note durations, if nothing else. Even instructors who don’t insist on having students read standard notation recognize the value of understanding rhythmic subdivisions--both for improvisation and for playing in group situations.

Making Reading Fun
With all of these great reasons for learning to read, it’s up to teachers to keep the students interested. When I asked my students for ideas on how teachers could make learning to read standard notation more interesting, many of them suggested that teachers use popular songs as music-reading examples, instead of the standard beginning guitar repertoire of “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” and “Amazing Grace.” Others proposed having students write their own examples to teach them about composition as well as reading. A teacher could ask a beginning student to compose a piece using only three notes (such as E, F, and G on the first string) and whatever rhythms the student is working on at the time. As the student progresses, the teacher could allow her to add more notes and more difficult rhythms.

In classroom situations, the teacher could turn this sort of exercise into a game. Have different students volunteer to come up to the board and write one measure each. Once eight bars are written, the class can play the song the students wrote.