learning by ear is great too, but if we go to the thread "whats this tune", the player has made up their own ending to the girl with the blue dress on, nothing wrong with that, except in my humble opinion its not so good. so learning by ear is really useful but sometimes can result in an inferior version, to the dots, contariwise occasionally it can result in an improvement, but the dots are useful as a reference point.dots are also useful to bring back into current repertoire forgotten tunes