RSS Feeds: The Benefits of Guitar Sight Reading
Guitar sight reading is often ignored by many guitar players. Though the more popular styles of music do not require sight reading to learn how to play them, there are many benefits to your musicianship that can be gained from learning how to sight read on guitar.
The first main benefit of guitar sight reading is that you will be learning the position of the notes on the guitar fretboard. This is essential if you want to get beyond the basics of playing guitar and want to apply music theory to the instrument correctly. Not only are you learning the notes of the guitar fretboard though, you are learning them by feel, without looking at the fretboard. This is how you want to learn all of the notes, because if you have to look at the fretboard while playing you wont be able to sight read or improvise over written chord changes effectively.
The other obvious benefit of guitar sight reading is learning music theory by recognizing the notated forms or rhythm, chords, and melody. Knowing what these musical concepts look like on paper will help you understand them in practice. Especially with rhythm, knowing the symbols and being able to read them will help you greatly in internalizing rhythmic motives and phrases. Plus when you can actually read and write music you will be able to communicate better with other musicians.
This fact alone can get you more teaching and performing gigs than if you did not know how to sight read music on guitar. If you are going to be serious about the instrument, you want to give yourself comfort with all areas of playing. Knowing how to sigh read on guitar is crucial to that end.
Another lesser known benefit of sight reading is that it will teach you to feel your way around the fretboard. We mentioned this already, but it really is important that you not rely on sight to get to where you need to go. When you are sight reading you have to be looking at the page to know what notes are coming next. This means that you must know by feel where the notes are that you need to hit. So sight reading is a great way to get used to this. You want to take this aspect you learn while sight reading and apply it to all aspects of your playing. Your ear and your feel are all that should guide you around the guitar fretboard.
Guitar sight reading is forgotten by the mainstream instructional courses of guitar, but there are many beneficial side effects of learning how to sight read on guitar beyond just being able to read music occasionally.
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