Tomo Fujita Guitar Wisdom

Dear Tomo / Community,

Thanks, Tomo and everyone else here for helping and pushing us all to be better musicians / guitarists.

I am curious, as a beginner, should I just rely on ear to learn songs, or is it ok to use tabs / tutorial videos. Using ear, I can get some of the easy songs, but the difficult songs (difficult, relative to the current skill level) are really difficult to learn by ear :-). My concern is, if I use tabs, then I am relying on "crutches" to learn music, and I will never be able to get good at learning songs by ear. But if I don't use tabs, I will not be able to play songs (currently) that I really like and may eventually lead to loss of motivation. I know we need to be patient, but it is somewhat a trade-off: giving up on ear skills to play what I want (instant gratification?) or being patient to develop ear to be able to eventually (hopefully) play what I want but that may keep me more motivated (playing new songs)

Just curious, how everyone else learn difficult songs (difficult, relative to your current skill level).

Thanks again to the awesome community! Also, maybe we can start a song challenge so that we can all post our videos, trying to gamify the learning experience, and to not be shy to record and post videos :-)

Thank You!

I don’t consider reading music or tablature a crutch. You should learn tab and how to read music. They are both useful ways to communicate and not that difficult to learn. My memory is not sufficient to remember every piece of music so I need much of it written out.

Always use your ears in conjunction with any written music. Much of the tablature on the internet is incorrect or greatly simplified. Song books in musical notation are likewise many times simplified versions of songs. I still find much of it useful. A well trained ear will help you sort it out.

Hi Sushant,
I agree with all the points that Charlie has written. I've been playing for 6 years, learning songs with tabs in conjunction with Youtube instruction videos - and there are some very good and not so good lessons out there. In some of his Youtube videos Tomo has mentioned some of the good sites on Youtube for learning songs.

The point I want to make is as we learn from the lessons that Tomo has created on this site, we eventually won't need tabs and song instruction videos - we will be able to figure songs out on our own. It will take time. So in the meantime why not continue to learn songs with tabs and videos while learning here from Tomo - a real professional guitar instructor.