Are you kidding. @John_E will tell you, heck I’ll tell you, lol. First 4 hours is just merely about making usable and repeatable sound, if your instructor will let you touch the instrument that is, lol.
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If some genius come up with another method of learning music notation on audible, I’ll be the first to preorder. I don’t read books anymore, I listen to books an I’m a prolific consumer too. I hate wearing reading glasses, lol.
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I know that speaking for myself, when I am learning something I am happy to get all the resources I can. Chord charts, tablature, sheet music - all are great tools.
I’ve never been in a real studio to record, only home, but what I have heard (and read as well) is that generally you don’t want to show up there needing to read anything while playing - you are expected to know your parts, have them down, and use the printed material as a reference (if you use it). Time is money there. This probably differs substantially for professional session musicians who are likely able to show up and play anything (and are probably expected to be able to do so) off a sheet or chart. But again, based on what I have been able to tell, for most bands, in the studio you are expected to simply have your part down, kind of as table stakes.
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I’m just here to defend the honour and virtue of the much maligned tab 
I wonder if organ players got a hard time for playing tab? Organ tablature - Wikipedia probably not since standard music notation wouldn’t be around for another 300 or so years so there were no standard notation snobs yet. 
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I will be the first to admit that a lot of online tabs do suck though. But then again, so does a lot of online sheet music. It turns out that transcribing correctly is the hard part, not the medium 
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This is the same kind of silliness you get from amateur photographers who insist that real photographers only shoot in manual exposure mode while most professional photographers are shooting in whatever mode gives them what they need with the least effort.
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Actually, no. Most band musicians don’t go into the studio and recording their music with sheet music, especially in major studios The session musicians do. Studio time are expensive and requires lots of external moving parts. Very few bands get to record their own music. They get to learn what their songs after it’s been recorded.
In the book the “Birth of loud” it said that using a session musician like Carol Kaye to record the music of the day is like using a nuclear warhead to destroy an ant hill. She/they are that good.
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so if i have a book of written music and I play/record it, does that make it an audio book? 
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Thank you for going to the trouble of listing that all out.
That is a steep learning curve.
So after one month I would have spent about $200 on lessons and nowhere near playing a simple song.
After two months I would have spent $400 and still nowhere near playing a simple song.
I wonder how a sax instructor keeps his students enthusiasm for the instrument up?
All my teachings have songs that have music sheets with standard notation and TAB notations, plus chord charts on them.
I can teach a complete beginner, someone that has no idea how to even hold the instrument, to play Happy Birthday in 2(Two) hours on the Uke in week one. Not perfect but recognizable.
After a week of practice, at the start of week two, they have it down perfectly, and usually memorized.
I usually teach groups of three or four at a time and you should see the look on their faces when they all play together at the start of week 2. It makes it all worth while for me.
By the way I do this as a volunteer so there is no cost to them for lessons. And before the wise asses here say something about you get what you pay for I have taught well over 1000 people, in the 6 years before Covid hit, and there are now a total of 4 jam sessions in my local area whereas before there was only one with about 6 players. Jam sessions now can be anywhere from 10 to 40 players, closer to 100 at Christmas when we put on a concert. Good times.
Guitar is a bit different to teach because the chord shapes are a lot different and require a lot more practice. As an example a C chord on a standard tuned uke is a one finger chord, on a guitar a three finger chord. 
You’re right I will stick to Guitar and Ukulele, for teaching.
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One of the best things about YT is getting lessons from guys like Leland Sklar and James Taylor, especially with Taylor’s unique strumming style. Ringo star give some good drum demos too. So many people play his stuff wrong because he’s left handed playing a right hand drum set.
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That’s very interesting too. I imagine true for a lot of AOR and pop.
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That can add up to a lot of money and you still can’t play a single simple song.
It amazes me that a sax instructor can keep his students enthusiasm up.
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Yeah. A lot of the tab sneering you see (not just here, in most forums) really comes across this way to me too. And I admitted above I was overstepping with my own characterization there as well.
I seriously doubt professionals shun any form of input.
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Most woodwind and brass instruments are like that. Months of practicing scales, arpeggios, developing your embouchure and learning to produce a pleasant sound that wont attract stray animals. And then you get to play some simple children’s songs 
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With keyboards, you get lured in by the initial simplicity of pressing keys to make nice tones.
That escalates quickly 
You also learn to hate your off-hand.
And while theory itself is much easier to visualize and learn on a keyboard, scales are the opposite. You just need to memorize them all. All the scales, once for each of the keys. With bass it’s just a few shapes and you have them all. Piano is not that way, lol.
I don’t actually know how many scales I have memorized, but not counting modes of Cmaj, it’s probably just a handful and their relative minors, and some parallel minors. The rest I have to figure out on the fly.
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A friend of a friend writes/directs an orchestral rock band. He travels a bit and they only bring the main core of guitarists, keyboardist and singers i think? For strings and any other orchestra instruments they get local musicians to sit in. I should ask how he initially writes/distributes his music to the guitar/bass players as i seem to recall that they play from memory during the performance.
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That would be really interesting. For this kind of thing I bet you are looking at sheet music for the whole arrangement with chord notation for the guitarists, and sheet music for the bass players. Would love to find out.
Just also pinged a friend of mine that was semi-pro for a while, to find out what they did while they were raking in the big bucks and rockstar lifestyle of a locally gigging bar band
Back when our band was gigging it was totally non-pro, mostly parties - we were only ever nominally compensated with cash, usually beer and… well, you get it.
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That’s where i find a lot of theory tutorials/demos are lazy, they almost all demonstrate everything in the key of C and it leads to a lot of concepts not being very clear like people thinking the dorian mode always starts on D
I love that about bass, it makes it much easier to just think about intervals instead of the note names. My goal is to become as fluent on bass as i am whistling or humming a song. In the past i was good at playing an instrument, i always had a lot of musical ideas but was somewhat lacking the ability to get things from my head out of the instrument when i wanted to improvise.
i visualize a lot of stuff in my head while i’m out and about and work on it mostly at starbucks with just my laptop and that’s why i often find it easier to write in tab, because that’s what i see in my head.
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“Wait - I thought D was for Dorian and A was for Aeolian!”
I worked for a recording studio owner who recorded Sheryl crows “if it makes you happy” and a few artists you may recognize like Alanis Morissette, and Paris Hilton. Hey, he’s not proud of it either, lol. I don’t work at the studio but as an executive chef in his restaurant. That’s how I get the signed Yamaha BBNE2.
I’ve seen a few recording and trust me it’s not that glamorous. It’s almost boring most of the time. Lost of sitting around and the mixing is just torturous. Not everything is as it seems. I remember one of the session I love the drum sound, it was awesome, when they took the break I asked if I could give it a go on the set they said sure. It sounded like nothing I heard in the mixing room. They use plugins to trigger sounds and the drum set is pretty much tune for feel not tone. I learned something new that day. That’s some high tech stuffs and it was even before the first iphone released.
I sure wish I was into my basses then, I’d own lots of cool stuffs for sure.
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