Sight Reading and Guitar Composition
This is not an often talked about concept, but guitar sight reading can be a very beneficial thing to not just your playing in general, but also your ability to compose music on the guitar and other instruments. Everyone knows the basic advantages of sight reading as far as enabling you to read music and play with other people who can read music, but it goes much deeper than this. Sight reading can improve your overall understanding of music theory and composition in a number of ways, so if you have been putting off learning how to read music, maybe now is the time to start.
The first way that guitar sight reading can help your composing skills is by exposing you to all sorts of new music. To practice reading you must read through a variety of different exercises and compositions, and this will introduce you to a lot of new musical elements and ideas. Even the boring and simple exercises can highlight simple but important musical concepts that can benefit your understanding of melody.
Some of the stuff you need to go through when learning how to sight read may seem elementary and tedious at first, but you eventually get to the point where you are reading through real pieces of music that are challenging and engaging. This is a great way to learn how music works and what it can accomplish, and it also gives you an understanding of the way pieces need to be put together.
Not only are you introduced to more music when you are going through the process of learning sight reading, but you also open yourself up to the possibility of playing music with other people more often, which will give you even more different musical experiences. Finally, being able to sight read will probably get you more involved in the more complex styles of music that are based more on sight reading, such as classical and jazz, and this can have obviously big impacts on your musical understanding and compositional knowledge.
Besides these points, sight reading can also help you understand elements of music such as rhythm and harmony. Seeing the physical representations of musical ideas, such as a quarter note, or a certain chord, can help you understand them fully in your mind, and this will help you put ideas together later on. Sheet music and notation will help you realize the relationships between different parts of music, and this will benefit any composer.
January 22 2010 08:37 pm | Guitar Composition