Nothing wrong with playing by ear - I also started with chord diagrams and my ears, over 45 years ago. It served me well. As I played more, I realised that, no matter how good my ear was - and it pretty good - I needed something more if I wanted to get right into music. I'd started getting into music hall songs, ragtime, early jazz and stuff from the 1920s and 1930s, and wanted to dissect these things thoroughly. So I started buying sheet music and learning the dots - and found it incredibly useful for this type of music.

I still enjoy winging it at sessions and informal music gatherings - good training for the ear that it is - but I'm very glad that I can go to the SheetMusicDirect site (for example) and get 5 pages of a professional score for £.099p. I can print this out, analyse it, adapt it for my guitar style, play it, write out my arrangement in a professional manner - and enjoy the learning experience by doing all this.