reading notation

[dijos]

AAAAGHHHH!

I'm doing it, but it's sooo painfully slow. and , I have to know the tune (I'm doing real book heads and charts). It is working, though, and I feel like a guitar ninja-I can read music for other instruments!

[Leon Grizzard]

Ya know, that's really all you need, unless you going to be a studio cat or something. I read badly, but enough to work through real instructional books. Reading rhythm is my weakness, although it gets painfully better. Say, you were talking about moving to Austin - what's up with that?

[Tim Bowen]

I feel like a heretic for participating here, because I'm definitely NOT a great sight reader, but I do work on it.

Originally Posted by dijos

AAAAGHHHH!

I'm doing it, but it's sooo painfully slow. and , I have to know the tune (I'm doing real book heads and charts). It is working, though, and I feel like a guitar ninja-I can read music for other instruments!

Yep, definitely easier when you know the tune. That said, for working the discipline itself, it's a good idea to work with unfamiliar tunes - a useful agenda is to have recordings available for the melodies - that have not been listened to in advance; the idea is to first purely sight read, and then go back and check yourself after the fact.

You said that you read for other instruments, so I'm probably "preaching to the choir" here, but a few things that I work with my students (they hate 'em all!):


* "Say and play game". With a metronome, say the names of the notes one time through, then play 'em. Lather, rinse, and repeat.

* Read well known melodies 'backwards'. It doesn't matter how many gazillion times you've heard "Red River Valley" or "Aura Lee" - if you play them from end to start, they're entirely different beasts.

* Sustained notes present an opportunity to multi-task. Depending on tempo, sustained notes could be half notes, dotted half notes, whole notes, notes tied across measures. Whenever this occurs, use the "down time" to scan ahead to the upcoming measures. The multi-tasking aspect is of course that one has to keep the count going all the while.

* What my students REALLY hate is when I play rhythmically different figures against their sight-read melodies. The reasons for doing this are quite obvious; for starters, musicians working together will be working with different rhythmic agendas anyway. Secondly, it ups the concentration level for keeping solid time when the saftey net of hearing an exactly doubled part has been removed. When I really want to raise the blood pressure in the room, I'll have the student and I play some counterpoint pieces; Bach two part inventions are an obvious choice.

The above ideas are great for one-on-one student/teacher interactions, but what of your plight?

Okay, flip through your Real Book and look for a Gershwin tune that you're unfamiliar with that indicates "medium swing". Record yourself comping the changes with a metronome bpm setting that feels like medium swing to you, complete with Freddie Green-style "four on the floor", with some jabs thrown in on the 'ands' for good measure - play whatever you'd play if chord comping were your only concern. Or, look for some unfamiliar Latin tunes by Louis Bonfi or A.C. Jobim and record what feels like pretty good Samba or Bossa accompaniment across the chart(s). Sight read the unfamiliar melodies along with your pre-recorded rhythm tracks. Check yourself after the fact of pure sight reading. Either count and analyze, or go listen to some recordings of the tunes (various recorded versions of which will probably play with time a bit anyway), and make an assessment that's practical for you.

Originally Posted by Leon Grizzard

Reading rhythm is my weakness, although it gets painfully better.

No doubt, syncopation is a tough read. It's certainly easier to play Steve Cropper's signature hook for "(Sittin' on) The Dock of the Bay" if you've heard the Otis Redding record, than if you haven't, and are attempting to read it.

One useful approach is to initially throw notes and pitch out the window, and concentrate entirely on the rhythms for starters. Louie Bellson's percussion texts are a great foundation for this approach.

[jazztele]

Another reading advocate here who really has to work on rhythm and syncopation daily to keep up on it.

When you encounter a passage that's giving you the fits, there's nothing wrong with writing the counting in right above in pencil. Nobody has to know...I played with a sax player once, who wanted me to do the melody to desafinado in unison with him.

Unison.

That song hasn't been played straight in it's history. And now I have a chart in front of me, and about 5 minutes to get my act together. Thank goodness for that pencil...(to be honest, I didn't get that gig, but it wasn't for my performance on that tune!)

[Larry F]

Now that I can finally look at a score and mentally hear it, to a fairly high degree, I realize how important it is to mentally group things together. If you focus on a particular type of reading, you will see that there are not that many rhythmic patterns in a given measure. For example, if I see descending notes, I look to see if any of those are outside the key; then I look to see if they descend straight down, or go up by a step everything now and then. Rhythmically, are they all even 8ths, or 16ths? Are there 8ths with pairs of 16ths? Do the 16ths start on the first, second, third, or 4th beat of a 4/4 bar?

This may sound like way too much work for the task. But with practice, you can read patterns of pitch and rhythm instead of note-to-note, which is no good at all. This will help you pre-hear the music you are about to play, which you then play by hear, not by symbols.

[dijos]

Originally Posted by Leon Grizzard

Ya know, that's really all you need, unless you going to be a studio cat or something. I read badly, but enough to work through real instructional books. Reading rhythm is my weakness, although it gets painfully better. Say, you were talking about moving to Austin - what's up with that?

Yeah, I was thinking that it's probably sufficient for my needs. I'm still looking at Austin-I just graduated a month ago, and I'm trying to find a job there and make a plan. The sooner the better, I'm ready to get out.

[octatonic]

Reading rhythm is pretty much every guitarists problem.

The secret is to get your picking right.
I use 16th note alternate picking pretty much 100% of the time.
Like this:

1 e & a | 2 e & a
d u d u | d u d u

D being down pick
U being up pick

Then you read a section like this:

By observing the picking pattern.
The above example starts on the 3rd 16th of the 1st beat.
This is an upstroke.

Keeping straight 16th picking makes it much easier to keep your place.
It takes work but give it a go.

If I am playing a piece that is straight 8ths then it isn't necessary to desirable to observe a 16ths picking pattern.
8th picking patter is simply down pick on the downbeat, up pick on the up.

Other useful advice.
You need to read every day.
I cannot stress this enough.

It takes a couple of years of daily work to be able to sightread anything meaningful.