Sight Reading Intervals on Guitar
Sight reading intervals on guitar can be an essential part of guitar sight reading once you start getting sheet music with polyphony. At first, sight reading multiple notes on guitar can be a difficult task; it requires a different kind of organization and planning of the fingers on the fretboard, sometimes you may have to move your hand completely in order to be able to play two certain notes at once. This is just the nature of the guitar.
However, if you practice sight reading intervals on guitar, there will be less situations that will catch you off guard, and it is a great first step towards sight reading chords on guitar, and more complicated polyphonic music in general.
One of the benefits of the guitar is that intervals are movable. This means that learning how to play a major 5th in one place allows you to play it up and down the fretboard. So if you can learn to identify what a major 5th looks like in sheet music, and you know how to play a major 5th on the guitar, you are on your way to being able to sight read intervals on the guitar pretty well.
If you can apply this practice to all of the intervals and get it in your head what they all look like in notation and how to play them, then it becomes simply a matter of finding the lower note of the interval on the guitar and playing the interval shape.
In order to really get these intervals under you fingers when you recognize them it is helpful to look for guitar sight reading exercises with lots of intervals in them, or even exercises that are nothing but intervals. After a while of practicing these, you will find that guitar chords and other multiple note sight reading items will come to you much easier. It is a good strategy to approach guitar sight reading in steps, and learning how to sight read guitar intervals is a good basic step.
May 10 2009 04:22 pm | Guitar Sight Reading