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“What I think I was trying to ask is, if you don’t read notes, does playing by ear and memorizing slow you down or enhance your learning?”
I don’t know the answer, but I have several thoughts.
When learning something new the brain needs feedback in order to learn. A good example of this is free throw shooter, they can see when the ball goes on the basket. Now if you hid the basket so they could not tell if the ball when it or not they would never get better. For guitar our ears are our feedback, so being able to determine by ear when a wrong note is struck or timing is off is essential.
This works great for songs where you know how they should sound. This issue is when you don’t know the song, you have to rely on the tabs/notes to figure out what it should sound like. Overtime you will learn what it sounds like and your learning with happen at a faster pace because you can rely on your ears, but until that time you will struggle. If trying to play mainly individual notes like we have been doing with Fast Car this week I find being able to read the notes as quicker than the tab.