I wold love to be able to read music but alas its probably too late now. However, I have been playing guitar/banjo.mandolin/etc for over 50 years and admit that I can sort of understand when dots mean up or down. I recall a music teacher (Christian Brother) thrashing the whole class because we could not understand his attempts to teach us to read the dots. I now hold as one of my most treasured possesions his end of term report for me where under music he wrote -Musically speaking this pupil is dead from the neck up - and thats perhaps why I have never learnt to read music and took to playing banjo at an early age - he also advised me that the banjo was the instrument of the Devil - but why should he have all the best tunes.