Guitar Sight Reading Practice Philosophy
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.
It may sound like a hard task to find good pieces of music for a beginning sight reading student, and at times, it may be, but it should be possible to get some good exercises from easy material in your genre of choice. Someone interested in jazz for example could find some of the easier standards to read. Some of the melodies in jazz can be very straight forward, and then they can get very complex as well, so there will be plenty out there for you to practice.
This is true of classical music and every other style as well. There are easy pieces and hard pieces and everything in between, you just have to put some effort into looking. Another thing to keep in mind is that you can sight read any piece at a very slow tempo if it is challenging. In this way, you can use pieces that may be too hard for you under normal circumstances.
The point of doing this is to make sight reading musically enjoyable, and to make it more like performance than practice. If you can get into this mindset, you will be able to get a lot more out of your practice. Approaching guitar sight reading from this kind of angle will allow you to not only practice reading but also practice making a musical rendition of whatever you are working on. This can help you become a more expressive and subtle player, where as just running through some sight reading exercises really just helps you memorize notes and rhythms without much musical emphasis. In the end, its about the music after all.
February 01 2010 12:40 am | Guitar Sight Reading