I've provided this Sight Reading Guide because it’s a sad fact, but many guitar players fear sight reading and memorizing their pieces and try to avoid it at all costs. But in reality, sight reading and memorization is like anything else; the more you practice it the better you will get!
This guide is designed to give you the techniques that will lead to confidence in sight reading and memorization of your music...
Sight reading, or the ability to read and perform music notation in real-time without prior rehearsal offers several benefits to musicians. Here are some of the advantages of being able to sight read music:
Overall, sight reading is a valuable skill for musicians, offering increased learning efficiency, versatility, performance opportunities, musicianship development, and improvisation skills. It expands musical horizons and allows musicians to confidently engage with a wide variety of musical contexts and experiences.
You need to form habits so that they become second nature. You do this by doing it consistently, day by day, week by week, and year by year. If you’re like the proverbial 'tortoise' (as in The Hare and the Tortoise), you’ll find yourself gradually gaining mastery of not only sight reading and memorization of your music, but all of what you practice.
Trying to do a big, quick “brain dump” never works. Rather, it’s the “slow and steady” pace of the tortoise that always wins out. Which method are you going to use? Good! Let’s start with sight reading in Section 1 and move on to memorization techniques in Section 2.
Here's a little excerpt from the Sight Reading Guide...
Tip 8: Look for Natural “Phrases”
If you try to compare your music to that of a singer, you’ll realize there are always phrases (a unit of melody or group of notes in succession) in music. And at the end of each natural phrase, where the singer would take a breath. The guitarist also has to “take a breath” when playing music as this will indeed make your interpretation more musical and the whole piece “breathe” in general.
In other words, it won’t have the feeling of being rushed, stilted, or in some other way unnatural and unpleasant to the ears. Well, if you could detect the natural phrases in music, you’d stand a better chance of playing and sight-reading more accurately and successfully.
So what do you look for in phrases? Often times, the music will have “slurs” over it. These are markings that look like ties BUT cover a series of notes and mean that you play all the notes under the markings in a legato (smooth and connected) way.
These are NOT to be confused with guitar slurs, which are the Trill, pull off, and hammer on. Here is a piece from the beginner series that has slur marks over the phrases…
I hope you enjoy this resource I have made for you.
Here for you,
Trevor M.
And don't forget to make use of the F*R*E*E Classical-Fingerstyle Portal lessons...
Recent New Pages:
What is Classical Guitar Playing?
Arpeggio Beginner Guitar Lesson Classical-Fingerstyle Portal
Blog Technique Free Guitar Lesson
Guitar History Guitar Instruction Guitar Lessons
Guitar Time Line Malaguena Memorizing Music
Music Notation Music Notation Primer Sight Reading
Sight Reading Guide Theory Work Sheets Renaissance Guitar