Sight Reading Mastery: The Basics
For most guitarists, reading music is like deciphering an unknown language. Reading music happens one note at a time, with little to no meaning attached. This course will help you unlock the language of music, showing you how to see the ‘words and sentences’ of music. You’ll be given tools that help you fluently read pitch and rhythm on the guitar.
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Chapter 1
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Lesson 1: Rapid Recall
Breaking large tasks down into small bite-sized pieces can really help you digest and absorb information.
There is a lot to digest in this course, but with just a 15 minute commitment each day for 1 week, you can start to supercharge your sight reading.
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Lesson 2: Think less and read faster
Reading individual notes and developing your recall is a great first step in reading music - well done!
The next step is to see how notes connect with each other. This is super important because it helps you predict or anticipate, giving you a sense of where the music is going next.
For today, spend 15 minutes studying the motion of the music you're reading - how does one note connect to the next?
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Lesson 3: A deeper relationship with music
Now that you've had a general look at the motion of music, it's time to dive a bit deeper. Music is made up of intervals, which is the distance from one note to another.
Becoming fluent with intervals will help develop your reading, but even more it will give you a deeper understanding of the relationship between notes.
Eventually, you can reach a point where you can predict specifically what note is likely to come next and why.
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Lesson 4: Your map and compass for guitar
It's time to supercharge your reading on guitar by using this simple process.
Write in the position and fingerings for every note in your score.
This is how you want to think when reading any score. If you don't know what position you're in and what position you're going to, you'll be lost!
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Lesson 5: Streamline your reading and technique
Streamline both your reading and technical efficiency using this one method:
Look for notes that are either close or held down.
While it sounds simple, doing this in a meticulous way can save you lots of time and brainpower!
It's also something you can always do when sight reading- a mode of seeing music that you want to try and inhabit at all times when reading.
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Lesson 6: Revolutionize your rhythm reading
Rhythms can be formed into groups - this is the secret to reading them quickly and effectively! Once you start to group rhythms, you learn that there aren't that many groups used in music. In fact, within one piece you'll often find just a handful (or less) of rhythms being used.
How much easier will reading rhythms be when you start to see the groups?!
More than you can imagine.
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Lesson 7: Say goodbye to subdividing rhythms
When you're sight reading a piece, there just isn't time for subdividing every beat. And when you do subdivide every beat, what tends to happen?
It can confuse you even more!
So today we'll look at how you can start internalizing rhythm without subdividing.
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Demonstration #1: Simple Time Rhythms
Watch and/or follow along with this demonstration of the simple time rhythms
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Demonstration #2: Compound Time Rhythms
Watch and/or follow along with this demonstration of the compound time rhythms
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