Sight-reading guitar music?

[wcap]

I have a question for the really experienced, accomplished guitar players out there...

How many of you can sit down with a new piece of music and sight-read it (from standard notation) and play it reasonably well while sight-reading the first or second time? How common is this skill among accomplished, professional guitarists?

I know folks who play band instruments who can do this. I think this skill is quite common among those who play band instruments. In fact, my wife's band just had a concert in which they played a piece (sort of a Sousa-style march...it was pretty elaborate) that they had only played through once before, and it came off really well.

There are also a lot of piano players out there who can sit down with a new piece of music and play it pretty well the first time through. My wife can do this with a lot of music (though she tells me that it took her months to learn each of the Bach pieces she plays so well now), and our church pianist/organist is amazingly good at this.

I might just be rationalizing things here to explain why it seems so amazingly difficult to me to learn how to do this on guitar, but it seems that guitar (and banjo) present special additional challenges that complicate things a lot, not the least of which being the fact that you can get most notes in several (or many) different places on the neck.

I don't sight read worth a darn with any instrument, though I can see how it could be feasible to sight read single note melodies on guitar, or even some somewhat more complicated things. But complicated fingersyle pieces (e.g. Chet Atkins-style) and a lot of classical pieces seem like they would be overwhelmingly difficult to play by sight-reading the music. When I learn these sorts of pieces from tablature it seems each piece has so many unique issues to deal with, and it seems this sort of thing takes a lot of time to figure out. I can sight read guitar tablature (sort of), but I can't play any of these sorts of pieces smoothly and accurately until I have them memorized and have played them a lot.

Is sight reading a skill that most professional guitarists have mastered?

[Chris S.]

Originally Posted by wcap

Is sight reading a skill that most professional guitarists have mastered?

The short answer is yes and no. ;-) Part of it is how you define "professional" – there are literally hundreds of guitarists out there making a living playing music who can't read a note, or have very limited skills at best.

If you're talking about <u>stage or studio</u> musicians, the answer's going to be a qualified "yes." I'd say most guitar players in those situations are going to have some level of proficiency at reading – and the guys doing the top Broadway gigs or L.A. studio sessions are all pretty much aces – but it's going to vary a lot from player to player. I knew guys back in college who could "read fly specks" as we used to say – there was almost nothing you could put on a sheet of music paper that they couldn't read flawlessly the first time through. But I'd also say they're the exception rather than the rule.

There are also a lot of piano players out there who can sit down with a new piece of music and play it pretty well the first time through... but it seems that guitar (and banjo) present special additional challenges that complicate things a lot, not the least of which being the fact that you can get most notes in several (or many) different places on the neck.

That's exactly right, and it's why sight reading on a guitar can be so maddening. Bill Leavitt, the guy who wrote the Berklee books, once told me, "You have to figure that any instrument where you have <u>20 different ways to play middle "C"</u> is going to be difficult." =:-O

What often happens is you're tooling along doing just fine, then all of sudden you hit a passage that requires you to play something waaay out of whatever position you're in, or worse, that's actually impossible to play on guitar (certain chord structures, usually). So you have to make a snap decision as to which notes you play, and which one(s) to omit. Fortunately, in actual practice, there aren't too many times where you'll ever have to read something absolutely "cold" in a live situation; usually there will be some sort of rehearsal beforehand, or at least a chance to quickly scan the piece to map out any trouble spots.

I can see how it could be feasible to sight read single note melodies on guitar, or even some more complicated things. But complicated fingersyle pieces (e.g. Chet Atkins-style) and a lot of classical pieces seem like they would be overwhelmingly difficult to play by sight-reading the music.

I've only ever had that particular situation come up <u>once</u>, in a studio session for a TV commercial about 15 years ago. The composer (who was also the producer) had written out a Travis-style fingerpicking guitar part. Unfortunately he was a piano player, not a guitarist, and he had just written what sounded to him like it would make a nice guitar part, then printed out the score from his midi file. Well, it would have made a very nice guitar part – IF it had been possible to play it all the way though on guitar, which it wasn't. :-\ I had to tell him we would have to do the actual guitar part as an overdub. We then used his midi file as a scratch track for the bass and drums, while I went over the part with him measure by measure and sort of "corrected" a few passages.

In the end, it all worked out, but it definitely lengthened the session by an hour or so (NOT a good thing). And most experienced composers are familiar enough with the guitar's inherent limitations that they'll usually either shy away from those sorts of parts, or just write out chords with a melody line and say "Fingerpick this part" rather than write out every note.

But overall, especially compared to other instruments, we guitarists don't have a great reputation as sightreaders. :-| That's been my experience, anyway. I'd love to hear what some of the Nashville guys have to say. Hope it helps, CS

[Joe-Bob]

Studio players can sight read anything.

Band players sight read well because all they have ever done is play single notes at a time, and they are in their comfort zone.

Guitar is a different story.

I can sight read on classical very well. It's in keys I know and has standard rhythms. On jazz guitar, I sight read chord charts very well, but single line melody stuff is alot harder. It's in flat keys and has odd irregular rhythms.

Even the chord charts aren't all that easy. For our last jazz big band concert, we played 17 tunes. Out of those, every chart looked different exept for two that were similar. So, that's 16 different fonts or handwriting, 16 different ways to write out chord names, and all the other notation items. It really complicates things, but the guitarist is expected to be able to handle any kind of lead sheet that comes his way.

The biggest thing is to practice sight reading. Make it a part of your practice routine to sight read a page a day. Make it something different every time. Try to join an ensemble that plays from music. Sign up for the evening jazz band at the local community college, it's big fun.

[Tim Bowen]

I'm not a monster sight reader. For something like a classical piece, or a jazz head with highly syncopated rhythms, I need to stumble through a few times, and, in many cases, need to analyze and isolate certain passages, prior to being able to nail them. I've read that Andres Segovia regularly tossed out clams upon his first few readings of new pieces; obviously, he found a way to distinguish between "reading" and "performance", as a means to an end. A guy like the late Tommy Tedesco could sight read like the devil, and it was his job to do so. He did so day in, day out, several hours per day, for the bulk of his lifetime.

Professional session guitarists are not all cut of the same cloth. One of the most revered Nashville "A-teamers" of our time does not "read" a lick of standard notation - but rest assured that he certainly understands how to quickly and effectively navigate and communicate the language, in his own way. I'm not a "session cat", but when I've had charts placed in front of me at dates, there's usually been enough time to navigate and work out the bugs, prior to the downbeat. For me personally, while I'd love to be able to sight read like a bat out of hell, the biggest thing that I've taken away from the ability to read, is that of being able to execute someone else's musical idea, in at least a *somewhat* timely fashion.

The only reason that I'm half decent at reading is that I teach music several days a week. Most piano teachers (even those that have never performed publicly) can sight read me under the table. I tell my students straight away that I'm not a great sight reader. Some of my folks have been with me for quite a while, and the difficulty of the pieces that we read has increased exponentially over time. I do sight read (on-the-fly) with students. However, my preference is to have a go at the pieces in advance. Not so much because I'm afraid to toss out a clam (doesn't matter, I'm going to do so now and then, anyway), but because there is more to music than simply playing the right notes with the right time. After I've played a piece a few times, I can offer more insight as to execution of technique, as well as fingering options (and any subsequent differences in timbre, etc.), as well as provide more possibilities as to use of pick, pick and fingers, thumb and fingers, and whatnot.

I've recently had an upsurge of new bass students, and a current hurdle is that of not confusing bass and treble clefs. Additionally, I have extreme difficulty in sight reading 'hand-written' charts, as opposed to those that have been lithographically reproduced (as with the more legible graphic presentation of printed media).

[Tim Bowen]

Neglected to mention a couple of "games" that I like to employ with sight reading.

* Read a piece "backwards", from its last measure toward its first.

* Play the first measure of a line, skip down to the first measure of the second line, on to the first measure of the third line, and so on, and proceed as such, with the 'second' and subsequent measures of each line.

Good studies in concentration, and in shifting the eyes (as they'll need to be able to do so quickly, with such as first and second endings, codas, and whatnot).

[wcap]

Thanks everyone for your comments.

I find it amazing that anyone could pick up a complicated fingerstyle or classical piece (e.g. pieces like some of the more complicated ones here: http://frettedinstrumentsnyc.com/advanced.html or here: http://frettedinstrumentsnyc.com/chetatkins.html ) and play it smoothly the first time through, or to play it well at all without a lot practice of the piece. The fingerings are everything in playing these sorts of pieces, and it is amazing that a person would be able to figure the fingerings out all that well on the fly. However, my amazement is probably just is an indication of how far I have to go in my guitar playing skills! (also, as one of you pointed out, playing a piece through by sightreading the music and performing it well are not necessarily the same thing.....though as I mentioned in my first post, people who play brass and woodwind instruments in bands do this sort of thing all the time, and it sounds like some professionall guitar players do this as well).

I feel a little better about all this though when I read Bela Fleck's description inside his CD jacket of the process he went through in learning the classical pieces on his wonderful classical banjo CD "Perpetual Motion". He says there that he does not play banjo from standard notation very well, and he had to convert these pieces to tablature and work on the fingerings a long while before he could sit down and really learn these pieces. It also sounds like the time and effort invested into learning these pieces was enormous.

I came to guitar from 5-string banjo, where the fingering issues are a bit more challening I think, because the intervals between strings are so small, and in fact, after the 5th fret the first and 5th strings are in unison in standard G tuning. This means that most notes are fairly easily playable in 5 different locations without moving your left hand too far, so the range of possible fingerings for a sequence of notes is greater. This arrangement of things on a banjo makes it harder to do cool walking base lines and the like (because the distance between the highest and lowest notes that are easily reachable from a given left hand position is less than on guitar), but fluid sequences of rapid notes are remarkably easy to do....but only if you figure out the right fingerings. Of the dozen or more possible ways to play a piece, usually only one (or possibly a few) works really well, and many of the imaginable fingerings are essentially impossible to play. You have the same situation on guitar, of course (which is what prompted my initial post) but the problem is more extreme on banjo.

(Guitar presents its own challenges though. The larger number of strings and bigger range of notes playable from a given left had position opens up more opportunities for having more things going on at once...melodies and counter-melodies and chordal accompaniment all at once on one guitar, for example....yikes, things can get complicated (and very very cool) very quickly on guitar!)

I guess what must happen though on banjo, or on guitar, is that an experienced player gets to be programmed to handle various sorts of musical situations with reasonable fingerings fairly automatically, and the player brings this foundation to any new piece. To make an analogy to computer programming, I'm thinking it would probably be reasonable to say that with lots of practice and experience, a really good, experienced player has developed a large set of subroutines that can be called up in different unique orders when a new piece is being played for the first time. The result is that for all practical purposes, a new piece is mostly not really an altogether new piece for a really good player, because all or most of the components of the piece are already familiar, and the main thing that is unique and new is the sequencing of the "prefabricated", already-mastered subunits.

All this being said, I'll say that even though I am really just an obsessed hobbyist and am not (and probably never will be) a professional player, I think it would be cool to be able to sit down and play even just a simple melody or harmony line on guitar on the fly from standard notation. Not having to memorize everything first before being able to play it would greatly expand the the sorts of music I could play with my wife (who plays violin, recorder, and piano (and trombone....).