Why Don't Rock Musicians Need Musical Scores?

Also, reading classical music at speed is about identifying far more than individual notes - it’s about the structures and patterns. Here the notes go by at a rate of over 600 a minute, but also isn’t something which comes solely from muscle memory either.

As others have noted, MOST rock music is simple enough that sheet music is neither necessary nor helpful.

But there are rockers who’ve transcribed their work and required auditioning musicians to play unfamiliar pieces based on sheet music. Frank Zappa comes to mind- Terry Bozzio says Zappa intimidated auditioners by presenting them with extremely complicated sheet music.

Even Zappa sometimes hired musicians who couldn’t read music (Adrian Belew, for instance), since he had his band drill, train and practice rigorously for months before going on tour. On the rare occasions that Zappa made impromptu changes to the music, he’d give fresh sheet music to those band members who could read it… and then have the guys like Belew do something non-musical (dress up in drag and dance around, or something).