Guitar Sight Reading
This section will contain all the guitar sight reading information you need, including guitar sight reading exercises and sight reading for guitar music. Guitar sight reading is an important skill that many players do not learn. All it takes is practice to become a good guitar sight reader.
On the subject of practicing guitar sight reading again, one of the most important parts to keeping up a practice routine and not getting burnt out on sight reading is to make sure that you are practicing reading music that you enjoy. This means not only should it be at that perfect challenging level that is still playable by you, but you should also sight read styles of music and songs that you like. Not only does it help to know how something should sound in general, but you will feel like you are actually producing music instead of just practicing. This should be your general philosophy of sight reading practice.
February 01 2010 | Guitar Sight Reading | No Comments »
If you are looking at this site, it is probably because you want to learn how to, or get better at sight reading on guitar, and there is one key piece of advice I can offer: practice consistently. If you are trying to improve your sight reading, it has to be a consistent effort. Sight reading is pretty much pure memorization, both mental and physical memorization, and one of the keys to memorizing things is repetition. You must read some music with enough repetition to memorize a few notes and take it from there.
January 22 2010 | Guitar Sight Reading | No Comments »
There are many great articles on guitar sight reading online, but some of the most helpful information for someone looking to master sight reading on the guitar would be to learn how to recognize the basic intervals in notation. This guitar article will talk about how to learn these intervals and apply them to sight reading.
When learning to sight read more than one note at a time on the guitar, it helps to know the intervals so that you do not actually have to read each note as you come across them. To understand why this is true, you must realize how the human brain works to process information. This is something that more music articles should focus on.
December 23 2009 | Guitar Sight Reading | No Comments »
There are many parts of the guitar that can be upgraded in order to improve the quality and look of the instrument. More players should take advantage of this because it can be an easy way to have a better instrument without paying a lot of money for a new one. One of the best ways to upgrade the guitar for just a small cost is by getting a new guitar truss rod cover. These are the parts that cover the opening to the truss rod at the bottom of the headstock, and they are usually one of the parts most in need of replacement.
December 17 2009 | Guitar Sight Reading | No Comments »
The benefits of guitar sight reading have been covered here in detail, but they can be more than just musical benefits. Along with all the ways that learning to sight read can impact your playing and understanding of music, it can also affect how much money you can make from music and what opportunities it can give you. These alone may be reason enough to start taking another look at sight reading.
One of the most important financial benefits it can give you is opening up more gigging opportunities to you. If you want to be available for the full range of guitar gigs, you will need to be a proficient sight reader. Jazz and classical styles will always require you to sight read, and these can add up to a lot of missed gigs if you cannot do them. Virtually any style except rock may need you to sight read something on the fly, so you can create a lot more work for yourself if people know you as a good reader.
Besides freelance music gigs, knowing how to sight read on guitar can open up a lot more long term employment chances. To be a guitar teacher in a school or music shop, you will likely need to know how to read. Even if you just want to teach on your own and find your own students, knowing music notation will expand the number of students you are qualified to teach.
There are also more long term performance jobs that will want you to sight read. Getting a job as a cruise ship guitar player will require you to be a very good sight reader, and this can be a perfect position for people looking to be professional musicians.
Sight reading can lead to making a much better living as a musician, which is something that a lot of people probably don’t think about. If you want to have music support yourself, you need to find out how to sell your music online, as well as pick up all the gigs that you can. Its hard enough to make a living from music, you should give yourself every opportunity that you can.
December 01 2009 | Guitar Sight Reading | No Comments »
It may not be obvious, but there is a type of effects pedal that can help you learn sight reading on the guitar. Everyone knows about the overdrive, distortion, and multi effects pedal, but this is one that has a slightly different function. The pedal I’m talking about is a looping or repeating guitar pedal.
These will record the input from your guitar in some fashion and then loop that phrase over and over. There are a few different types that can achieve various degrees of complexity in their looping. Some will just loop a short phrase and allow you to continue playing over it, and some can save different phrases so that you can actually construct a looping song. To help sight reading, all you need is a pedal that can record a few minutes of input at least.
November 18 2009 | Guitar Sight Reading | No Comments »
Sight reading can be a very important skill for music composers just like it is for any other types of musicians. This is because it has many benefits beyond being able to read music. Learning to sight read on guitar will help you learn the fretboard in a much more immediate way. This will enable you to write better music, whether you notice it or not. Having a good command of intervals and notes on the fretboard will always help you in any playing situation.
Learning sight reading on the guitar will also help the music composer understand more theory. Being able to see music theory in notation and not just as names in your head will help you internalize the concepts. Reading through music and being able to recognize how different chords and scales look will increase your awareness of them and this can effect how you use them in compositions.
Film composers could benefit from being able to sight read music in the same way. Their understanding of how chords work could be improved by reading through good examples. This brings up another point. When you read music you get exposed to much more of the great classical music that has been written. In many cases this is some of the most complex and well constructed music that has been made, so it is always good for any composer to be able to play and listen to it.
November 04 2009 | Guitar Sight Reading | No Comments »
There are two main types of chord sight reading that you will encounter as a guitar player. The first, and most common for most styles, is reading chord symbols and names written above notated parts or just as a chord sheet by themselves. This is by far the easier situation. The chord symbols simply mean you should play that chord in any voicing you want on the guitar, unless it specifically states a certain bass note or something. Since you most likely already have chords memorized by their names, it shouldn’t be that hard to be able to sight read a chord sheet.
These types of situations also open the door for chordal improvisation, which can be fun.
The more difficult type of chordal guitar sight reading is when you encounter notated chords. These can be hard to work with as they require you to recognize how the notated chords look in notation and then be able to play them on the guitar. It also means that a specific voicing is required that may only have one place it can be played.
October 26 2009 | Guitar Sight Reading | No Comments »
One beneficial aspect of learning guitar sight reading is that you will gain practice playing without looking at the guitar fretboard, which is something you have to do while sight reading effectively. This is an often overlooked aspect of playing guitar, which is a very visual instrument. Even though you can always look at the fretboard while playing, you need to develop a pure feel for the fretboard which will allow your hands to find their own way over the fretboard. This is why guitar sight reading practice can help you become a more fluent player besides just when sight reading.
June 24 2009 | Guitar Sight Reading | No Comments »
Guitar sight reading can lead to an understanding and ability to perform music transcriptions, which themselves can be an important practice tool. Transcribing music is the act of notating music that is heard, and can be a very challenging excercise. But in order to do it at all, you need to be able to identify the notes on an instrument to know what is being played, and being able to sight read music is also important if you want to notate it. So guitar sight reading can help in this regard as well. Plus, once you can notate music yourself with the guitar, you wont have to pay money for a music transcription service.
June 13 2009 | Guitar Sight Reading | No Comments »
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