Learning to Read Music

Blaendulais

I promised my youngest that I would do the classical guitar exams with her.  She's a very good pianist and has started learning classical guitar.

I am really struggling to read.  The temptation is just to listen to the pieces, which are short, suss them out by ear and remember them.  I'm forcing myself not to do this and am far outside my comfort zone.  Its all first position stuff as well!

fretmeister

5 to 10 mins per day. No longer.

Little and often is far more effective than an hour on a weekend and nothing for another week.
Play it as slow as you need to get the note correct. Speed is irrelevant for learning to read.

Get a book with sight reading test examples - then you can jump around in Grade 1 and that will prevent you from playing from memory.

I went down this path a couple of years ago when I joined a jazz / swing band. It's a tough start but after a month or 2 it really does get easier IF you are doing a little every day.

Blaendulais

fretmeister said:

5 to 10 mins per day. No longer.

Little and often is far more effective than an hour on a weekend and nothing for another week.
Play it as slow as you need to get the note correct. Speed is irrelevant for learning to read.

Get a book with sight reading test examples - then you can jump around in Grade 1 and that will prevent you from playing from memory.

I went down this path a couple of years ago when I joined a jazz / swing band. It's a tough start but after a month or 2 it really does get easier IF you are doing a little every day.

Thanks @fretmeister ;

DulcetJones

Use a metronome at painfully slow tempo, at first, but stick with it.    It's worth it.

Panama_Jack666

Does anybody have any recommended resource for learning how to sight read on guitar?

It's not something I've ever been particularly interested and I would just try use the bare minimum I need to get by for a gig... basically figure out what key it's in and try look out for any weird stops or whatever. I'm terrible a sight reading proper musical notation and have a gig where it's all notated. Luckily it's a covers gig so I'm just learning the tracks as per the record and just use the charts to figure out if they're in the same key and have the same structure.

So! Are there any recommended books, videos, websites you can recommend so I can improve on my sight reading? Would it help if I worked on it using a piano before guitar?

duotone

I wanted to get this before Christmas (it’s only 25 pages) I emailed & never heard back from them if they would deliver to the U.K., so didn’t bother to order it in the end.

https://shop.carolkaye.com/product/guitar-sightreading-studies-by-carol-kaye/

fretmeister

DulcetJones said:

Use a metronome at painfully slow tempo, at first, but stick with it.    It's worth it.

I disagree with that when starting.

Even painfully slow causes wrong notes to be played under pressure. Far better to get the note right every time.
Painfully slow also prevents 2 easy notes being played together more quickly if the player is confident.

I'm with Jeff Berlin on this one... at least when learning the notes. Later on I prefer a drummer 

sev112

If you are going from being a guitarist to reading classical ...
get the rhythm of the bar established first in your mind before working out what all of the individual note tones are.
reason this helps is that many/most fingerings will fit to a conventional chord that you already know, so once you do work out some notes and you know the key signature (because it is marked in the stave) there will only by 5 or 6 chords needed for that key, so that will almost always define where your fingers will end up
so if you religiously replicate the written rhythm of the notes , then the note tones should come more easily and you will have a piece of music.

what will eventually happen is that you will automatically “recognise” what a C major, F, Bb etc chord looks like on the stave, so at that point you won’t need to work out what the individual notes are.

chords work quite nicely on a stave. Because a chord is 1 3 5 ,  that means that on a stave those 3 notes will almost always be on 3 consecutive lines or 3 consecutive spaces.  So if you see 2, 3 or more notes that are on adjacent lines, you know you’ve got a chord.  And because you already know most chords, and you already know the key, you will easily know how to finger it

and then what you find is that much melody music is able to be played within the range of your fingers while in a chord position.

so, chunk that down to a method to approach a piece of music :
1. Read the Key from the stave
2. Work out what the 6 main chords are in that key, and write them down
3. Remind yourself what the fingering of those chords are (and possibly at the next position)
4. Work through a group of bars, say 8, working out just the chords that are in place in the piece
5.  Play the chord progression over and over a few times to get used to the changes
6. Then work on the rhythm of each bar - the crotchets and quavers etc
7.  Then look at the key melodic notes and try to fit them around the chords and rhythm that you’ve already worked out

Now I’ve type it, it sounds more complex than I intended it to be, but
I find find I get to a musical reproduction much quicker with this approach, than just working out individual notes from the start
good luck; great fun

Jalapeno

This used to be THE book to get -->https://www.amazon.co.uk/Music-Reading-Guitar-David-Oakes-ebook/dp/B00FJ6E6O6

Seems to be quite a selection on Amazon these days

koss59

I highly recommend getting the app sight read machine ( SR Machine )
You can ask it to generate what types of keys/rhythms and the range it plays in then randomly generates new songs for you to read.

Jalapeno

MODS: Threads merged

Panama_Jack666

koss59 said:

I highly recommend getting the app sight read machine ( SR Machine )
You can ask it to generate what types of keys/rhythms and the range it plays in then randomly generates new songs for you to read.

Apple store only - will look for an equivalent! 

Panama_Jack666

Jalapeno said:

This used to be THE book to get -->https://www.amazon.co.uk/Music-Reading-Guitar-David-Oakes-ebook/dp/B00FJ6E6O6

Seems to be quite a selection on Amazon these days

Cheers!

Funkfingers

fretmeister said:

... prevent you from playing from memory.

There are some amusing stories from Frank Zappa's Eighties touring band auditions. Aspirant musicians, faking sight reading, in front of a room full of mofos who can sight read Zappa compositions - even the drummer and the percussionist!

Faking sight reading is asking to be found out. All that the Grade exam assessor has to do is say, "well, done. Now, try this other manuscript that you have not seen before."

For the record, my manuscript/TAB reading is the equivalent of two-fingered typing versus proper touch typing. I have no qualms about admitting that I cannot sight read.

DrJazzTap

I used to memorise the music when I was about 13, I managed to get to four pages at a push. I got found out when I was asked to play bar 31 to 35. 

duotone

koss59 said:

I highly recommend getting the app sight read machine ( SR Machine )
You can ask it to generate what types of keys/rhythms and the range it plays in then randomly generates new songs for you to read.

@koss59 ;This one? https://appadvice.com/app/sight-reading-machine-practice-music-reading-skill/662692296

octatonic

fretmeister said:

5 to 10 mins per day. No longer.

Little and often is far more effective than an hour on a weekend and nothing for another week.
Play it as slow as you need to get the note correct. Speed is irrelevant for learning to read.

Get a book with sight reading test examples - then you can jump around in Grade 1 and that will prevent you from playing from memory.

I went down this path a couple of years ago when I joined a jazz / swing band. It's a tough start but after a month or 2 it really does get easier IF you are doing a little every day.

I'd say a little more than that but little and often is the way to do it.
There is something about picking it up and putting it down that cements things in the brain, where doing gruelling reading sessions is counter productive.

I was doing 5-10 mins 3 times a day when at music school and it helped.
I'm still not the greatest sight reader on guitar, better on piano and drums.

fretmeister

koss59 said:

I highly recommend getting the app sight read machine ( SR Machine )
You can ask it to generate what types of keys/rhythms and the range it plays in then randomly generates new songs for you to read.

I use SR Machine a lot.

its great! Very good practice.

koss59

duotone said:

koss59 said:

I highly recommend getting the app sight read machine ( SR Machine )
You can ask it to generate what types of keys/rhythms and the range it plays in then randomly generates new songs for you to read.

@koss59 ;This one? https://appadvice.com/app/sight-reading-machine-practice-music-reading-skill/662692296

That’s the one!

Phil_aka_Pip

lots of good advice here.  following on from what @sev112 said, anything on consecutive lines (or spaces) is likely to be a pattern you already know how to play, and anything on alternating lines & spaces is likely to be a fragment of a scale that you already know how to play. I find reading pitch is a lot easier than reading rhythms, so the advice about sorting the rhythm before playing the notes is probably good. Loius Bellson's book is good for reading rhythms.

ESBlonde

The late tommy tedesco was reputed to be able to read fly s#it as a compliment to his sight reading ability. Of course he worked hard at it and once he decided to be a professional session guitarist he dedicated time and effort to get to be the best, that way he got more calls and became probably the most recorded guitarist in history.

He had a few tricks like always play in time even if you miss a few notes out on the first pass. He never admitted to a mistake, others who would do so took the heat off so Tommy could get another play through at thier expense and get it better.

He wrote a couple of good insperational books and the best has been re-published "Tommy Tedesco For Guitar players only". It has some great hints and tips as well as exercises. In addition It's a great read, the bloke could be an asshole and was a keen gambler, but a great racontour with an interesting life story.

Here is the myth himself later in life.