Sight-reading - from a string player's experience...

[gtrst]

Hi,

My first posting on the TH, thought I'd share a book and other ideas on practicing sight-reading.

I played violin growing up from around age 6 to 13, and because of this people would assume that that must be how I learned to sight-read music. But... I might have learnt how to read music through the experience, but I didn't have any need to sight-read throughout the whole of my violin playing years. Once I'd read it slow, and after a few times, I'd only skim the sheet music for cues, but not be under any pressure to sight-read. Scales, arpeggios and tonal music I was learning on the violin was easy to learn and memorize by ear, I'd memorize the task before I had enough chance to 'practice' my sight-reading.

So... after a while, I somehow ended up in a college as a guitar major. This time, I'm thinking 'yeah I know how to read treble clef' and gets thrown in ensembles where they throw poorly hand-written lead sheets in front of you all day. Oh boy. I guess I wasn't comfortable enough with guitar nor sight-reading to make it really work, I somehow tried my best to read, learn, and then play it on the guitar, and confirm by looking up onto the sheet music, then looking back down... it was a mess.

Then, I had one of my teachers give me a copy of his book, - the book has a lot of simple rhythmic reading practices with ties and subdivisions being introduced gradually. It was one heck of a boring book to go through, but as the hardest part of sight-reading for me was the time-reading, rather than pitch-reading, this book helped a lot.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29920911-factorial-rhythm-for-all-instruments

And then as I got better and better on the guitar my hands would find the notes I heard and wanted to play, more and more, opening up brain buffer for more listening, and catching what the pianist was doing etc.

And then I realized at least in the studio session world I ended up for the past several years, people tend to send you the midi guide tracks and sheet music at least a day or two beforehand - especially for guitarists - and sight-reading wasn't such a big problem except - for some very very choppy rhythm sheets or one of those sheets where the composer just played the darn thing on the MIDI keyboard and inaccurately at that, resulting in supposedly the same rhythm looking different as they repeat due to note duration being entered unevenly, or having a 16th note turn into a 32nd note and a 32nd rest etc etc...
But I always felt that if I worked on my sight-reading more, it'd free up a lot of my brain and have it do other tasks better and also write things down more readily. So the work is still to be done.

Figured I'd share my sight-reading story and also a book as a hello to the TH members. Plus I get to go post all the little things I have for sale on the marketplace!

Cheers from Los Angeles.