Hello everyone! I've been playing the guitar for some months now but I haven't really improved. I seem to find it dull because I can't read scores and I can't play freely without having to ask people how to play. It's like a thing where I'm limited to what I do with the guitar. Think of it this way: Having a wonderful voice but not being able to use it because you haven't figured out how to use it without depending on someone every second. Same with guitar, right? Should a person go learn more about music theory before skipping ahead and trying to master learning full songs?

Well learning how to play a song is not that hard, especially with guitar. Sometimes you just learn the chords, listen to the strumming, and duplicate the strumming ... and voila, you're playing a song.

However, as you learn more about music, you will find it difficult to progress if you don't know the fundamentals such as reading the musical notes and scores.

So in short, you can still improve your guitaring a bit without learning music theory (since you're still a newbie), but sooner or later, you'll need to learn the basic fundamentals of music to understand it.

depends on what you play. if you only play pop songs and follow tabs then you definitely don't need much theory. just enough to know what chords are what. just play a wide range of styles on guitar and that will already make you a better guitarist imo. paul mccartney couldn't read a note and yet he's great as a musician. lol, maybe that's just one case out of a billion but if you're just playing guitar, unless you're a composer who sets out to compose in specific styles, any theory above chords and scales is really useless to you. i have max grade theory and i ever think of it when i play guitar. singing is similar imo, you imitate the song you listen to just like you play back what you hear on the guitar. voice techniques would be useful but not theory.

Thanks for responding guys. So, what should I know in order to read scores and interpret them to play correctly?

Google is your best friend ...

Just a quick search of "how to read musical score" right now and it came up with this:

http://www.dolmetsch.com/musictheory1.htm

A brief look at the site it looks really good. It's more towards an classical orchestra music towards the middle and the end of the lessons but the basic music principles, theories, and fundamentals are the same for guitar. It's so detailed and with images of notes and staff with plenty of explanations. I'm gonna bookmark this as well since I probably forgot lots of these theories and fundamentals since I took music classes many many many years ago.

Another "ok" source is the entries in Wikipedia. I only say "ok" because anyone can make edits and write about anything so it may not always be accurate.

Thanks snake. I've been using 8notes but I'll favorite this site and look back to it again.

actually for me, im self-taught, no formal guitar lessons at all, and really u can learn a lot by urself, for an instrument like guitar.

the internet basically can teach u everything.

if u know how to read tabs, u can learn anything,from a simple song with just chords to like super fast solos.

after a while tho, when ur alot better, ull feel taht u hit a roadblock or something like that, where u cant seem to progress much by urself. then u would want to start looking into lessons and music theory. im expericning that myself so, i took Rudiments and am bout to have some guitar training to improvee... yepp, but seriusly u can get so far without any help.

just teach urself

oh check out: www.ultimate-guitar.com everything from lessons to a database of tabs

Same stuff for me. I survived without any theory knowledge for years, but now I feel that it's a necessity if I wanna go forward even more.
But you can go quite a long distance without any deep theory knowledge.

Thanks for the motivation guys!

HMm for me i think that u must learn the music if not u cannot make it far :D