I apologise in advance if I got this wrong, where you talking about violinists when claiming that not reading notation might make you subject to someone else’s interpretation?
I agree 100% and anyone who can’t read yet probably should give it a try.
I was talking about guitarists reading tab of music not written for guitar.
Just for example, if I look at this piano piece and want to do a guitar rendition:
https://musescore.com/user/36967599/scores/11716417
I immediately have to make a bunch of decisions. The range far exceeds that of a six string guitar, so I need to solve that. It’s meant to be super fast, so I need to make that manageable: is it better Yngwie-style USX with economy picking? DSX with hybrid? Tapped? Which of these things can I even do? And so forth… whatever I am as a player will entirely inform how the tab ends up, which may be completely at odds with how someone who comes across the tab can even play. And if that person can’t read notation at all, they will probably just be stuck thinking “I clearly can’t play this because I can’t do what the tab says to do”. I will allow that maybe once in a while someone will just have a good ear and realize they can move X note to make it playable for them, but I feel pretty confident that’s less common than someone being like “oh, well I don’t like putting that F# there, I’m going to move it here”.
Definitely, and I’m not saying anyone needs to become a master reader or anything like that, it just gives us another way to understand things, and a formalized way of understanding rhythms.
This is the oversimplification that I find misleading. Imagine a person with a moderate level of experience struggling to find C4 in almost every string and being doomed to go fret by fret until they find the pitch that matches. The guitar layout is fairly mechanical and reading music doesn’t necessarily give you a tactical advantage at learning how it works. Heck, you don’t even need tabs either. The design is that intuitive.
Now, just to clarify, reading notation is a valuable skill which I appreciate and I keep it in my practice routine.