When I started playing in the early sixties, I had two records (remember them, large black things with a hole in the middle?), one by Joan Baez, and one by Bob Dylan. A couple of friends had some others, notably Gary Davis and Elizabeth Cotten, and from these we listened, scratched our heads, swapped ideas, listened again, scratched our heads again, but above all we persevered. There were no Tablatures available, no CDs which you could replay with a remote control, no videos, in fact there were virtually no audio-visual aids at all
I remember watching Tom Paxton on TV playing "Last Thing on my Mind", and what you missed the first time through was gone forever - needless to say we didn't miss much! We used a little notebook to jot down the chords as far as we were able and went to every folk-club we could to watch as many artists as we could and talked to as many as we could. They were almost always willing to show us how they did things, and shared picks and licks. I suppose what I am trying to say is that I learnt in a rather traditional way, by listening, learning the music and words by ear, and by observation, and being shown some basic things from which you developed your own technique.
This appears to be different in many ways from the modern approach where a CD/Video with Tab can enable anyone, with application, to learn a series of Songs/Tunes, without having to go through the process of learning to play by ear. This was brought home to me recently when an excellent young guitarist at a festival was playing along with me on some instrumentals, but not on some jigs and reels with a mandolin player. When I asked him why he had stopped he said that he hadn't got the tab for those tunes, and when I pointed out that just playing in G or D would have covered most eventuallities he said he couldn't play by ear!
And then the recent requests for Tab for some tunes in Mudcat got an abrupt response from some, who appeared, perhaps to feel that such music would be better worked out by ear . I've even been told that I played The Entertainer wrong cos it wasn't the same as the Tab he'd just got from the Internet. Any Comments?
Dave Bennett