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Honestly, I'm not sure you get good at sight reading until you find yourself in a few sink or swim situations.
I don't consider myself a good sightreader. I can look at a chart and figure out what it implies...but reading eighth notes on the fly? Can't do it. Why? Too lazy, limited practice time as it is, and I simply haven't been in a situation where "my life depended on it."
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05-02-2014 02:39 PM
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I don't have a work around but I've been using Sibelius on a Mac forever and only on a Mac and have never had a Mac related issue.
Originally Posted by targuit
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Great thread....
I think one of the reasons sightreading is difficult is that when you are reading a piece cold it doesn't take long before you "learn" the part and then you're not reading anymore. It becomes more or less a visual cue and not a strict reading situation. Therefore, in order to be a great sight reader you have to be reading new unfamiliar material constantly to develop the skill.
Im not a great sightreader but I can read. Most of my experience sight reading was in musical theatre where maybe a week before you saw the score. A couple times through and then you are doing runthroughs with the cast. A week in to the show you are no longer "reading" you're just picking up visual cues from the score. Then the only real challeges arr when the musical director makes changes (they love to do that!) In any event, real "sightreading" is very short lived in any given situation. Plus, once you are familiar with certain genres it becomes second nature to start dusting off the score and aside from a few key things that had to be there there was a lot of opportunity to embelish a score usually met with approval or at least no expressed disatisfaction.
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This thread has me thinking...I'm trying to think of this story, somebody here probably knows it...
A young (currently well respected) studio musician was at a recording date and there was another older, more experienced studio guitar player also on the date. They got their parts like 5 minutes before the light went on, and the young guys part was really hard...the older guy's part wasn't. Seeing the young cat start to sweat, the older guy simply switched their parts on their music stands...and then pulled it off without a hitch.
That's some serious sight reading...
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Okay, so I'll just ask a doofus question. In charts for your gigs, do you play things up an octave for melodic parts (concert pitch) ? I know that reading out of a real book you'd take it up an octave.
My point is that all of the guitar-centered sight reading and instructional material is transposed down for guitar. Almost seems like reading out of 'guitar' books is a waste for real world application unless you're reading a lot of music specifically written for guitar....
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I'm pretty sure it was Tommy Tedesco and Jimmy Bruno....but I could be wrong Originally Posted by mr. beaumont
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I know exactly what you mean. I've created a sightreading template (on paper, no excel)specifically to address that space repetition issue. My approach is specifically design so that my reading is at the same level in all keys and tempo. Originally Posted by Jonzo
Also, I should note that most of my reading consist of reading real music (fakebooks, leavitt's modern method, etc.) But I see this as a nice addition to my sightreading approach. I'm feeling good about where I'm going with this. I want to push myself so I can be as good as Barry Galbraith (I will get into his Bach book in due time) and some of you guys, such as Reg, Henry, etc.Last edited by smokinguit; 05-02-2014 at 04:51 PM.
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How do you guys feel about transcribing solos yourself and coming up with logical fingerings of your own as a way to improve your sight reading? I think this might also be a good strategy to help with sight reading. I've been doing this a lot lately and it seems to be paying off.
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Definitely, transcribing will help you with sight reading, because you're bound to run into some of the licks you transcribed, and you'll know how to finger them, how they sound, and be able to play them effortlessly on sight. You'll also be able to have a deeper understanding of rhythms than you had before.
Someone mentioned Barry Galbraith, and I've gotten the most out of his book "Fretboard Workbook", but only when I carefully read the preface, which details the secrets of sight reading on the guitar, on one page!
Reg, as usual, is right about the six month, six hour a day sight reading period. All of the greats eventually hit a brick wall on a gig, studio session, show- whatever, and had to go through this period of intense study; Jimmy Raney couldn't play a concert piece one of his students wrote, and spent six months sight reading through a ton of music he had never seen or heard, and came out of it a great sight reader.
Even a rocker like Jimmy Page was forced to deal with this situation, when he was literally fired from a studio session for not being able to read those 'grapes'. He spent a lot of time in the woodshed, and got to the point wher he could handle studio sessions with people like Burt Bachrach, etc...
However, I went to a workshop with Jack Wilkins, and he treated the subject of sight reading like an art whose usefulness in the market place has long since disappeared.
He said there was no more session work in NYC, and he didn't see the need to even cover it in the workshop. He just said that you should work on flute and clarinet literature, if you wanted to work on your sight reading.
A friend of mine that goes to a weekly sight reading session with about four guitarists, said that one of the guitarists there, the busiest session man in NYC (don't know his name) literally can't read standard notation to save his life.
I found it kind of funny when one of the previous posters said he sent demo tapes and copies of the music to the guys on his session, and they 'sight read' it perfectly!
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Sight reading is a bitch for most of us for many good reasons. I'll wager that most of us start out self taught with a book of chord diagrams, at whatever age we did, no teacher. We learn some chords, progress to playing our favorites songs, might jump into learning to play some blues/rock lead stuff, and 4, 5 years down the road we sound pretty darn good and never had to read any music, all done by ear.
Johnny started clarinet in 4th or 5th grade in a public school music program, very limited personal instruction, mostly classroom, but from the word go they have you working with written music. Here's a C scale. Play these 1/4 notes. Play Hot Cross Buns, Mary Had A Little Lamb, recognize those rhythms...very fundamental stuff, but you're learning to see these rhythms as patterns that come up again and again, not like letters in the alphabet, but like words in a sentence. Graduate from high school and you've been playing constantly with written music in front of you for 8 or 9 years, you are a sight reading machine!
When most guitarists decide they need to learn music notation, they're probably not beginners anymore, and the goal is usually to learn some new stuff to apply to their advancement on the instrument, not sight reading for performance. So a few more years go by and you are comfortable with notation for deciphering and figuring stuff out. But you still can't "sight" read.
Finally, you tell yourself you've got to get it together, but...you don't realize the fundamentals of sight reading begin with the same simple stuff Johnny was working on with clarinet as a 10 year old, Row, Row, Row Your Boat.....recognize rhythms as phrases, not individual notes. We jump in at a level that is over our head and fail, over and over again. And believe me, a 30, 40 year old doesn't have the same mind as a 10 year old sponge. The learning curve is much bigger for someone older.
So...you think you finally get there and guess what? You are in a situation where there is so little demand for a guitarist sight reading lines, that all that hard work starts slipping away because there is little practical use for it. Are you a first call studio, pit, jazz musician? If not, sight reading chops will always be a struggle to maintain. The horns in my big band get it, because they know I have outrageous chord charts to deal with and only an occasional line, and they know if they laid off reading for a few weeks, their reading chops would start going to hell.
Get as good as you need to be, and don't sweat it if you find out you don't need to be a great sight reader. IMO
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Was that me. Well sorry but I'm serious. The music was very difficult. I said I was pretty confident no one but the pianist had even glanced at the music. I KNOW the bass player didn't. He had the most difficulty. The drummer, who had played with Corea, Wayne Shorter and a bunch of other folks didn't look at the stuff ahead of time but listened on the plane. And the music was HARD, even for the drummer. A lot of hits and time signature stuff. The pianist glanced through and made some notes and thought about the little suggestions I added. Originally Posted by sgcim
I found it kind of funny when one of the previous posters said he sent demo tapes and copies of the music to the guys on his session, and they 'sight read' it perfectly!
I was I pretty anal about the charts. I created a website for the guys. But most of them never looked.
I worked with the pianist a lot over the years. He's a great reader. He was a double jazz and classical major in the masters program at Eastman. He's been Bobby Hutchersons pianist the last 7 years or so and had played with just about everybody. I've never seen him struggle over any sight reading chart. We've worked on several long term bands and he's played a lot of my music.
So I don't know if you were being tongue in cheek, but I still consider my two day, 16 tune studio extravaganza a sight reading festival. I had a lot of notes for them to play. We weren't playing standards!
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If I may interject one suggestion. Using clarinet or violin sheet music for practice is less desirable in my opinion for one simple reason - these instruments, apart from double stops on violin, are melody instruments. Single note lines. While you begin learning single note lines on guitar, the whole deal is to learn to see melody lines in context with harmony. An example would be the elementary Sor studies and the more advanced versions. That is why I would suggest considering a Christopher Parkening method book or Carcassi or Sor etudes. For the more sophisticated I would recommend reading lute music, where you can find many examples of performances. Back in my callow youth my classical guitar teacher, the President of the state's Classical Guitar Society and founder, would play through one or two pages of exercises for me and then allow me the pleasure under his critical gaze. Then you went home and presumably practiced for the next lesson where you showed off your homework and learned a couple more. Lute music is "guitaristic", though many of the stretches and fingerings are harder on guitar than lute.
The comment about the busiest session guy in NYC being a poor notation reader strikes me as curious. Certainly from what I hear the LA crowd working on movie scores mostly read well .Last edited by targuit; 05-03-2014 at 01:33 AM.
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I used to read Carcassi and do Sor and worked out of a Parkening book. But classical guitar is a WAY different animal.
I hear what you're saying and it is a limitation not reading vertical harmony, but for me and my purposes 98% of all charts I read are essentially horn charts for guitar. They're lines I have to read. Maybe unison or harmony with the alto or trumpet, or doubling the bass. Sometimes the piano and might have some intervals. Rarely more than three notes at a time. Very rarely from my experience.
Most movie scores seem to be independent tracks where the guitarist could easily be given cues. Most of the guitar stuff I hear in movie scores doesn't sound like the guitar playing complex ensemble parts with an orchestra. Sometimes. Not even John Williams wrote much for guitar, as I can recall.
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I was being a little T.I.C., but if you were nice enough to send them the charts and provide demo tapes, and obviously pay them, they all should have worked on the music, no matter how good they are.
When I play shows, many of the pianist/conductors are real taskmasters, and they don't let you look at the book or give you a demo tape beforehand.
You have to sight read the first rehearsal down cold, or they'll fire your ass, right then and there.
Then again, I've done shows where they send you a xeroxed copy of the score, plus a demo tape, which is the farthest thing from sight reading there is.
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sgcim - Sounds like you have experience if I understood properly in musical theatre pits. I've never played that type of gig, but do the charts for guitar tend to be simple melody lines? Playing horn charts sounds relatively easy.
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I've done a bit of musical theater--but I'm thinking much further "off broadway" than sgcim, if ya catch my drift....West side story, and a few stage adaptations of gospel stuff like Andrea Crouches "I'm gonna keep on singing."
The charts looked like high school big band charts from hell...rhythmic hits, unison lines, 28 bars of silence, "guitar" parts..."vertical harmony" often as chord boxes, or chord box above note cluster...not necessarily same thing on staff and box! Mostly single note lines. I remember the Crouch stuff in particular being basically a piano score with chord boxes and occasional parts highlighted "electric guitar" (iirc one low riff was written in bass clef as it was guitar and piano!)
Anyway, these were small time deals, so I had the music weeks in advance--but I was expected to know my parts by first rehearsal...so by that point, little in the way of sight reading, as I'd define it...more like "sight cues and remembering."
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The theatre pit jobs I've done had guitar charts that were all over the map, rhythm section, unison lines, solo, all in the same arrangement. You have to be on your toes, a musical can have tunes covering many different styles of music, and the conductor has to be very involved with being on top of the pace of the show and what's happening on the stage to have the music ready to go at exactly the right moments. You have to be aware of your chart, but also have to keep focused on the conductor's directions. A singer/actor might miss a cue, so the pit might have to repeat a 4 measure pickup to get things back on track, live theatre has it's challenges and flubs that have to be addressed by a very attentive conductor and pit.
Last edited by cosmic gumbo; 05-03-2014 at 04:02 AM.
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Mr B and Gumbo have it. A wide range of stuff and pretty dynamic. One minute you're doubling the bass, next a horn part. Lots of riff oriented stuff and quite a mix of rhythms. Cha cha to tango to R&B to rock and then back to cha cha. You're all over the place. Never a dull moment and lots of fun. I really wanted to do a show called Chess. Great guitar part but never got the chance.
I did did a show called Big River which was very country. 6 string, 12 string and banjo. I was like an octopus grabbing a new axe every tune, lol. That was a work out, lol.
But yeah, all the sight reading is early on. 6 shows a week and a couple of weeks in to the run and your just working off cues, really
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sgcim- I'm not interested in a pissing match here. What are we arguing about? Whether my session had guys who were sight reading or whether it was improper for them to be sight reading or how I conduct my recording sessions? I'm confused. Yeah I was really pissed off at the bass player for sight reading stuff that he should've looked at that wasted our time. But the other guys were incredible. They pulled it off with aplomb and real class.
It's been many, many years since I've been in a pit band, but I've done many shows as part of an orchestra for musicals.
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HR-Who was arguing about anything?
As far as what the parts are like, the three guys above have it pretty much covered.
The shows have become more rock-oriented, so the guitar parts are more prominent, and I rarely use my archtop on any of them.
I've never been 'on Broadway', but I did some work for the East Village Light Opera Co. in Manhattan, and that was a big thrill, because it was with a big orchestra.
The sound of an archtop with all acoustic instruments, and no drummer is an experience I'll never forget. Even the banjo sounded nice in this situation.
One good thing about not working on Broadway is that you can usually get away with not using all the doubles they want you to use.
The book for "Nine To Five", the Dolly Parton show, expected you to use eight different string instruments- elec. guitar, archtop, banjo, mandolin, uke, Telecaster, steel string acoustic and nylon string acoustic!
I did the whole show with my Parker, and the conductor didn't say a word, and has since called me back for many shows.
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That's really interesting, but I thought you got to charge scale for each instrument you played. So guys like Tommy Tedesco would use guitar-like turnings on all of those other instruments to collect a fatter check.
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All I know is the EVLOC was a Union gig, and I didn't get paid any more than anyone else for hauling in my banjo along with my archtop.
TT did mainly studio work, so maybe it's different with Union studio work.
A friend of mine has been doing subs for "Chicago" on Broadway, and that book requires banjo, mandolin, and uke (no guitar, and he uses all the correct tunings!), so he better be geting paid more for all that aggravation. I'll ask him when I see him next.
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That's a cool gig...A visible "pit" band.
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Many Off Broadway productions are non-union and don't abide by union guidelines re:doubling. Originally Posted by Jonzo
He both fulfilled the contract, played what the score called for and got paid per double according to scale.
I used to love those Tommy Tedesco tales of the studio.
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There are skills you need for sight reading that develop naturally when you start young and sight read all the time, but that are hard to develop when you start late, as many guitar players do. I'm a pretty mediocre sight reader (and that's sugar coating it), but I've done a fair amount of it over the years, and these are some things I wish I could go back and fix.
For one thing, you have to train your eyes to read ahead. That's pretty well known, but along with that your eyes must keep moving forward. There's no stopping for a victory lap after getting through a tough passage, and there's no doubling back to see what you messed up after a bad one (both are common traps when practicing on your own). The music doesn't stop, and neither can you. Unfortunately, keeping your gaze fixed that way is not a particularly natural thing to do, so on a dense page at a fast tempo, especially with a lot of ledger lines in the part, it can get uncomfortable and almost make you feel dizzy.
You also have to develop some very specific memory skills. If a note in a dense measure has an accidental early in the bar, you've got to remember that when it shows up later in the same bar, and then immediately forget it when it shows up in the next bar. You also need to develop instantaneous muscle memory, so that after you get through the part once or twice and identify the complicated passages, you lock them in so you don't struggle with them again at the gig, which may be days or weeks later. For jazz players, it's not uncommon to develop comfortable paths and strategies for navigating the neck while improvising. The real question is how quickly can you assimilate an unfamiliar, and perhaps uncomfortable phrase? Forget 10,000 hours. Can you do it in a couple of repetitions? Horn players do it all the time. Guitar players - not so much.
There are execution components to high-level sight reading, too. You need to look at the music (and the conductor if it's a show) so there just isn't time to look at the neck. That means that if there are big jumps between neck positions you need to be able to make them without looking - common practice on the violin, a potential train wreck on the guitar. There's also a simple fact of life - you can't expect to sight read better than you play. If you're trying to sight read uptempo bebop lines with a big band, but you don't have the chops to play or phrase at that tempo in your "regular" playing, it's unrealistic to expect a positive result on the fly.
Unfortunately, I don't know of any quick or easy way to pull all of this together other than to do it all the time with other players who are good readers.
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