5 tips for better sight-reading as a Guitarist
So you're there, you can play a couple of Ed Sheehan song's and the chorus from 'Sultans of swing' - Surely there's nothing left right?
As a guitar player myself I'll be the first to admit that compared to some of my friend's (who are brass players or piano players), my sight-reading could still use a little work. Even to say I started my journey as a classical guitar player.
Though despite all that why do I practice my sight-reading? Well although I'd argue there are many benefits to reading notation (aside from the obvious - that you can read music) the main reason I do it is fretboard familiarity, nothing makes you quicker on knowing your notes in my opinion - an important skill.
So let's say I've convinced you or that you are already convinced, how do you go about getting better then?
Here are my '5 tips for better sight-reading as a Guitarist'.
Practice your melody and rhythmic reading separately
One common mistake is for people to concentrate entirely on their melodic reading and when it comes to rhythmic reading be completely incompetent. I even had this realisation myself at the start of my learning.
One great overall resource that I use to keep sharp is
The great thing about this site is that under the free version you can still use the rhythm practice and it's a great warmup with varying difficulty settings.
Buy a Classical Guitar Book
Classical guitar books are great resources for practicing your sight-reading. Classical music, in my opinion, is much easier to read than jazz or pop music in general, the reason for this is that the rhythms tend to be very straight and the writing usually includes few accidentals.
A couple of books to look into are:
120 Easy Guitar Solo's - By Richard J. Cobby
The Classic Guitar Collection. Volume One -Harvey Vinson
First Repertoire for Solo Guitar. Book 1 - Simon Wynberg
I'd really love to add to this list in another more verbose post so if you do have any suggestions - please comment below with them and I'll be sure to check them out.
Use Your Smart Phone
There are some really great apps to help with your reading for your phone, the real benefit of these is they tend to have a feedback function that really lets you know how you are managing.
For a beginner getting to grips with rhythmic reading, I would really suggest 'Rhythm Cat', The developer's have managed to make reading into a fun little game, best of all its free and available for iOS and Android.
An app that has a little more difficulty scaling and some wonderful other features such as interval practice is 'Perfect Ear'. It does have some free features but definitely is worth paying for the interval trainer alone in my opinion.
Notate Your Own Music
Now, this isn't exclusively music you've written, transcribing other people's work as well works wonders. If you've spent some time to figure out a song what better way to make sure you never forget that than writing it down? - after all, that's one of the thing's notation was created for in the first place.
A really great free tool is 'MuseScore', for anyone who has ever messed around composing music and has run into 'Sibelius' - it's essentially that but yet again it's free of charge.
Knowing Your Scales
Knowing your scales can really take a lot of work out of reading music.
Most notation you will read will have it's key signature at the start, using that key signature as a reference for which scale to use means that you don't have to mess around too much with which note you should be playing.
For example; if you are playing a piece in the key of G major the key signature will have an F# in it. If you simply follow the G major scale you won't have to worry about that as F natural isn't in the G major scale.
Ending Note
Now for those of you about to start your notation reading guitar journey. I salute you, there's a reason guitarist's are notoriously bad at this skill and it isn't just due to the advent of tablature and that we are all lazy (although they do help).
One of the biggest obstacles is that guitars have the same notes up and down the neck - meaning that you have to learn how to read in different positions, it isn't as simple as just learning all the notes on the first four frets.
With patience and routine practice we can overcome this problem, sadly there is no easy way around this but in my opinion being able to competently read notation is worth its weight in gold so Good Luck.
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