Consistency in Guitar Sight Reading Practice
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.
By repeating sight reading exercises, you build up connections in your brain that tell you when and how to play a certain note you see on a page. If these connections are just barely built up, they will disappear quickly. An example of this is when you just practice playing something a few times and then try to play it few days later. You may have completely forgotten it. On the other hand, if you take the time to build really strong connections in your brain about the notes you see on a page, they will last a long time, and will come back a lot quicker with a reminder.
This is an important thing to note. Although it is crucial to practice sight reading consistently because it helps build strong connections, its not like you will need to practice it everyday for the rest of your life to be able to do it at any time. Once a certain level has been obtained it will be there as long as you stay somewhat fresh with your reading, and if not, it will not take that long to refresh yourself and get back to your old level of sight reading.
Its like anything else that you try to learn. Guitar sight reading is about repeating and practicing until it has a near permanent place in your head, but in order to get to this point, you have to have consistency. It would be better to practice it for ten minutes everyday than for an hour once a week. If you practice for a while on one day and wait a while to practice it again, you might just forget everything. So when learning how to sight read on the guitar, focus on getting consistent practice time in rather than long practice periods. Of course, those don’t hurt either.
January 22 2010 11:50 pm | Guitar Sight Reading