Sight Reading Guitar (how to read notes from music sheets): Here’s how acquiring this skill will help you and how to go about acquiring this skill.
Introduction to Sight Reading Guitar
Learning to Sight-Read on the Guitar may seem like a challenging think initially but its something worth pursuing, as it will help you play some great music that has been written or adapted for guitar, besides allowing you to play with other musicians.
The basics of learning to play the guitar are same as any other musical instruments. You begin with learning to play all the notes of the guitar, you learn a few major/minor scales, learn a few chords and you are on your way to start playing some easy guitar songs.
But once you’re past the beginner stage, and if you seriously want to improve your skills on the guitar, you must consider improving your sight reading skills.
Advantages of Sight Reading
Though there are many guitarists who play well even without being able to read notes, being able to sight read has its own advantages.
There is a lot of great music that is written or adapted specifically for the guitar. If you are able to sight read, you will be able to learn these songs and increase your repertoire.
How about collaborating with other musicians? If you can sight-read you will be able to communicate and work with musicians who play other instruments.
It will also give you the confidence to appear for some useful exams which could help you in the future, in case you decide to take up a music teaching job. It will open up more avenues for you.
Is Sight-Reading on Guitar Difficult?
This is one concern that several students have, but again it is a debatable topic. Most guitar enthusiasts try comparing sight-reading on guitar with other instruments like the Piano and feel that sight-reading on guitar is more difficult than other instruments.
Their argument is that unlike other instruments like piano where you go in a liner manner – that is either up or down while playing notes, in case of playing guitar you can go side-to-side on the guitar in addition to going up and down. Because of the way the strings are set up on a guitar, there are multiple ways to play the exact same note, which makes it a bit difficult to sight-read on the guitar.
Guitar Tabs
Because of the challenges faced by many wannabe guitarists to sight-read guitar, an alternate form of notation known as “guitar tabs” was developed to solve the complications of the guitar fretboard. This method of reading guitar notes is also quite popular among the guitar playing fraternity.
Summary
Though we did speak about some challenges of sightreading on guitar, sight-reading does have several advantages and is still a worthwhile endeavor. It is also not as difficult at is made out to be my many; on a piano you have to sight-read for 2 hands at the same time, but then several students are able to do it with practice. So same applies to guitar as well. With regular practice your guitar sight reading will become much better and you can easily read from several Music Sheets.
KeytarHQ editorial team includes musicians who write and review products for pianists, keyboardists, guitarists & other musicians. KeytarHQ is the best online resource for information on keyboards, pianos, synths, keytars, guitars and music gear for musicians of all abilities, ages and interests.
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