Classical guitar and piano, classically trained on both.
While I admire those who can just grab an instrument and have a great time, musical notation isn't just a way to real and play something, it's the foundation of learning technique, growth, exploration and developing as a musician.
The idea that practicing correctly makes perfect (no, practice alone does not make perfect) is at the core of this. Musical notation (along with a teacher) provides the guidance and structure necessary to learn and grow.
There's also the ability to communicate about music in general. A simple example of this is a book I have with practice exercises for the piano. Once I taught my kids to read musical notation and use a metronome (super important) I could simply ask them to learn and practice the scale on page 42 and that was that. On the guitar, Scott Tennant communicated his practice exercises to the worth through "Pumping Nylon".
It's easy to say "Yeah, but I can just listen to someone playing the scale and copy it by ear". Well, that's missing the point. None of this material would have survived decades or centuries if it were not for the evolution of domain-specific notation as a means of communication in the art. That's the other aspect of musical notation, it's a means for making works of art survive for centuries, something that is impossible without being able to write things down.
To go into CS for a moment, the power of notation got driven into my head when my Physics professor in the early 80's convinced me to not take a FORTRAN class and sign-up for an APL class he was teaching instead. It was absolutely amazing. At the time it was like being from the future. In just a few characters I could do what took heaps of code in COBOL or FORTRAN, and the power of communicating such ideas through notation was just unbelievable. Sometimes I wonder if I took to APL (which I used professionally for ten years afterwards) because I was fluent in musical notation already.
All of that said, I think it is great to "just play". Nothing wrong with that. I'll also add that it took me a long time to be able to pull away from sheet music and "just play". And so I do have a level of admiration for people who are able to do that and came at it without any form of formal training. At the end of the day, if your goals in music are not to be a concert pianist/guitarist, frankly, if you are having fun, go for it. Just be conscious of the fact that once bad habits are learned it is extremely difficult to unlearn them. That's were a formal and traditional beginning in music tends to be useful and important.
It's no longer musical notation, but audio recordings that are the "text," or primary source for popular music. This principle applies even only from a practical perspective, as the pedagogy of popular music has a heavy emphasis on listening to and replicating or transcribing audio recordings.
But more fundamentally, you're approaching from an outdated common practice-period perspective what should be understood from a (post)modernist, electronic framework. Transcribing Stockhausen or Xenakis into notation would be a worthy endeavor, but the output of such an effort is secondary to the recording itself. Not just in terms of importance, but in that the recording represents the ultimate creative decisions and expressions made by the musician, whereas the notation is a mere reduction produced for convenience. This was certainly not the case for classical music, but music has changed since then.
And so the same goes for jazz, rock, or any other popular genre. Our music has evolved in such a way that those musical elements that do not lend themselves easily to being written down in standard Western musical notation have become central to the expression and stylistic idiom thereof.
Finally, if you're interested in what I've had to say, look up a concept called "notational centricity" by musicologist Richard Middleton, and a book called "Everyday Tonality" by Philip Tagg.
While I admire those who can just grab an instrument and have a great time, musical notation isn't just a way to real and play something, it's the foundation of learning technique, growth, exploration and developing as a musician.
The idea that practicing correctly makes perfect (no, practice alone does not make perfect) is at the core of this. Musical notation (along with a teacher) provides the guidance and structure necessary to learn and grow.
There's also the ability to communicate about music in general. A simple example of this is a book I have with practice exercises for the piano. Once I taught my kids to read musical notation and use a metronome (super important) I could simply ask them to learn and practice the scale on page 42 and that was that. On the guitar, Scott Tennant communicated his practice exercises to the worth through "Pumping Nylon".
It's easy to say "Yeah, but I can just listen to someone playing the scale and copy it by ear". Well, that's missing the point. None of this material would have survived decades or centuries if it were not for the evolution of domain-specific notation as a means of communication in the art. That's the other aspect of musical notation, it's a means for making works of art survive for centuries, something that is impossible without being able to write things down.
To go into CS for a moment, the power of notation got driven into my head when my Physics professor in the early 80's convinced me to not take a FORTRAN class and sign-up for an APL class he was teaching instead. It was absolutely amazing. At the time it was like being from the future. In just a few characters I could do what took heaps of code in COBOL or FORTRAN, and the power of communicating such ideas through notation was just unbelievable. Sometimes I wonder if I took to APL (which I used professionally for ten years afterwards) because I was fluent in musical notation already.
All of that said, I think it is great to "just play". Nothing wrong with that. I'll also add that it took me a long time to be able to pull away from sheet music and "just play". And so I do have a level of admiration for people who are able to do that and came at it without any form of formal training. At the end of the day, if your goals in music are not to be a concert pianist/guitarist, frankly, if you are having fun, go for it. Just be conscious of the fact that once bad habits are learned it is extremely difficult to unlearn them. That's were a formal and traditional beginning in music tends to be useful and important.