Sheet music is about reproducibility, and is a means to quickly learn a piece. You learn new pieces MUCH MUCH MUCH faster once you have decent sight reading skills. It also allows you to put in your own notes, compose your own passages or variations, and have them available for reading years later. It also gives you a common vocabulary and framework for talking about musical and instrument techniques and common patterns in music.
Learning an instrument without learning how to read music is like learning to code without learning anything anything about programming theory and methodology, and without going back to look at any of your past work. Yes, you can do it, but you'll cut yourself off at the knees with all the bad habits you pick up, and any ability to deeply reason about it will be coincidental (just a "gut" feeling most of the time).
Do yourself a favour and do it right. Get a teacher. Learn proper posture (stops you from getting tired or injuring yourself), proper techniques (allows you to play more complex things with less effort required), and a good training regimen (so you can get maximum coverage of all techniques available to you at a manageable pace).
People ask me how I got so good at guitar in so short a time, when they've been plucking away at it for years, even decades. It's simply because I chose to find a teacher FIRST, and an instrument SECOND, and went through all the fundamentals, starting with very boring and basic pieces like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ysOIJFm3Rg
Learning an instrument without learning how to read music is like learning to code without learning anything anything about programming theory and methodology, and without going back to look at any of your past work. Yes, you can do it, but you'll cut yourself off at the knees with all the bad habits you pick up, and any ability to deeply reason about it will be coincidental (just a "gut" feeling most of the time).
Do yourself a favour and do it right. Get a teacher. Learn proper posture (stops you from getting tired or injuring yourself), proper techniques (allows you to play more complex things with less effort required), and a good training regimen (so you can get maximum coverage of all techniques available to you at a manageable pace).
People ask me how I got so good at guitar in so short a time, when they've been plucking away at it for years, even decades. It's simply because I chose to find a teacher FIRST, and an instrument SECOND, and went through all the fundamentals, starting with very boring and basic pieces like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ysOIJFm3Rg