Guitar Chart Sight Reading
For any guitar players looking to collaborate and play on as many gigs as possible, a crucial skill will be sight reading guitar charts, such as chord charts or jazz tune charts. There are a few articles I have found that can help with these sight reading skills and Im going to talk about them here.
The first one is a page on how to sight read guitar chords. This is a very good article because reading chords is one of the hardest things to do on the guitar. It makes a good point about how the human eye and brain have a hard time getting through all the information they are given in a big guitar chord. Reading multiple notes in the same vertical line is no easy task, and to do it on the fly can be basically impossible sometimes.
The key, as the article says, is to memorize what different chords look like in notation so that you only have one unit to recognize and apply. If you can see a group of notes and know that its a first inversion major chord, then all you have to do is play that shape on whatever root note its on. This can be a major step in learning how to read a guitar chart well.
The second page is all about the importance of guitar sight reading. This goes over the motivation and benefits of learning how to sight read notation and chord charts, and there are many benefits. Sight reading will improve you as an overall musician, not just a guitar player, and many people ignore it to the detriment of their general understanding of music.
As I mentioned in the beginning, being able to sight read a guitar chart will allow you to take advantage of every possibility as a guitar player, and you never want to limit yourself.
November 02 2009 09:54 am | Guitar Charts