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Sight Reading question

L

L1nk42

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Dec 23, 2013
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0
#1
Greetings all,

Recently I have decided to improve my sight reading being that it'll open a lot more doors for me in the future.

I dedicate at least 1 hour of practice a day to sight reading using a great website called sightreadingfactory.com

I am basically asking if I keep it up, when will I see the improvements? It's really difficult.

Appreciate any feedback :)

Alex
 
#2
You are always improving if you keep practicing sightreading. It may be so gradual that you are not perceiving the improvements. That's how it is with a lot of aspects of playing. Improvement comes so slowly that you can't tell you're any better, but play with a fellow musician with whom you haven't played in a while, and he'll be able to tell.

So I can't really tell you when you will "see" the improvements--just keep plugging away, keep challenging yourself, and know that you will be a better sightreader--however slightly--at the end of each practice session than you were at the beginning.
 
#3
You should start to see some improvements along the way, especially if you're working with a set of material that takes you from simple to difficult in a steady curve. I had a set of 4 books for a student once. Unfortunately I can't remember the title. It started with very simple rhythms and notes, and gradually worked up to some pretty intense stuff.
 
#6
Best thing I ever did for my sightreading was to visit the music library and check out scores to famous music (like Beethoven's 5th for example). Then I crank the music up loud on the stereo and follow along in the book WITHOUT my bass in hand. At first, I could only follow a single, simple part (like the bass or tympani) but after about 6 months of this, I found my eyes wandering over the page and reading the part for whichever instrument has the most prominent part at a given moment. Then the real "a-ha!" moment was finally being able to look ahead several measures and see important passages before they happen. That, to me, is the essential skill for sightreading... being able to see what's coming up, for example, knowing you are 4 bars from the "bridge" section, or that you need to prepare for a position shift in the next measure.
 
#8
With an hour's practice a day, your bass in hand, things will go pretty quickly, but it will take several months to be able to look at a new piece of music and read it straight away.

There are different aspects to reading, such as rhythm and pitch, which you can actually work on separately.

Use a metronome to practice your rhythm reading. Learn what different groupings sound like, especially in 8th and 16th notes.

Don't forget you can slow down any rhythm with your metronome, so that you take each quarter note in a measure and treat it as four distinct beats.

An arpeggio ... 1 3 5 7 8 will have a distinct shape when written out, as will an ascending or descending scale. Try "Bass Guitar Exercises for Dummies" It will get you playing scales and arpeggios and recognising what you have to do, the muscle memory being linked to your eyes. Your ears will tell you if you're in the right key.

Don't forget to look at the key signature, and position your hands on the E and A string accordingly.
If you start out ready to play Bb, then the patterns you see on the stave will fall under your hand; The spaces are a third away from each other, as are the lines.

Get a book of simple melodies, like Christmas Carols, Nursery Rhymes, 100 Cowboy songs, which are written in treble clef, get some music paper and transpose it into bass clef. There's nothing like actually writing notation to help you learn to read it. You also learn to read treble clef at the same time.

Get some bass tab, starting with simple grooves, and write it out as musical notation in bass clef. You know that "7" on the A string is an E, and you know it's not the lowest E, so you learn quickly where it is on the stave.

When you make up a groove of your own, write it out.

Listen to peces that you know well and can play without too much difficulty with the sheet music in front of you, and follow the bass, doing the "Boom boom boom boom boooom bum bum" thing, tapping your feet and nodding your head. Try to recreate that afterwards without the song playing, just reading, tapping and "boom booming".

There are apps for i-phone etc which are like flash card games. You see a note written out and have to tap the fret on the fret board, or variations thereof.

It's all good, and eventually you'll wonder what seemed so difficult.
 
#9
L1nk42 said:
Greetings all,

Recently I have decided to improve my sight reading being that it'll open a lot more doors for me in the future.

I dedicate at least 1 hour of practice a day to sight reading using a great website called sightreadingfactory.com

I am basically asking if I keep it up, when will I see the improvements? It's really difficult.

Appreciate any feedback :)

Alex
Click to expand...
That difficulty in itself is fundamental to learning. The progress will be gradual, but you're doing exactly what you need to be doing in order to train your brain and body for the skill of sightreading. It's like lifting weights, except instead of physical resistance, it's the mental difficulty that leads to strength of learning. You are getting better, just by the fact that you're doing it.

I do think you need a procedure for sightreading, if you don't already have one. Look at the piece, notice the key and any key changes. Notice the time signature and any time changes. Notice tricky parts and imagine them in your head before you start playing. Do this every time, instead of just starting at the beginning of every piece. This will give your brain a framework in which your playing will occur.

Keep up the good work.
 
#10
Sight reading gets rusty if we do not do it each day. Question. How much of your playing is from standard notation. Reason I asked, I'm in two bands and my director has yet to hand me anything besides fake chord sheet music. OK, that out of the way.......

I take the fake chord I'm given and then I like to see the bass clef in standard notation, so I can tell if there will be places for me to add fills, runs, etc.

My point -- for those of us that seldom play from standard notation, being able to read it sure helps me construct my bass lines.
 
#11
Howlin' Hanson said:
This. I must admit that reading ledger notes is the hardest part for me.
Click to expand...
That’s where I struggle the most as well. I don’t see why they can’t use treble clef for the higher notes. I know the ledger lines basically mimic the treble clef, but it would be more obvious if there was a double staff like on a piano sheet.

Maybe it’s just because I learnt to read on Piano.
 
#12
Reading notated music, is just like reading notated words. Most people can sight read text fairly easily, but that’s come from years of repetition.
You start by sounding out simple words.
Then you read sentences, but occasionally have to stop and sound out a complex words.
Before you know it (about 3-4years, based on my kids reading progress) you are reading fluently with very little thought to the actual words, and more to the comprehension and nuance of the prose.
 
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#13
Based on L1nk42's experience, I subscribed to sightreadingfactory.com. What a great site! Like most of this forum, I'm a big fan of Ed Friedland Bass Method (Parts 1,2, and 3) and I was looking for more exercises. What these exercises lack in musicality, they gain in sheer variation and control of the inputs (tempo, key, time signature, level of difficulty). Another benefit is it's a great way to practice fretless bass intonation. Reading the notes forces you to adjust intonation by ear. Ultimately, playing fretless by ear is the best way to play in tune, whether you have lines or no lines. Practicing this thirty minutes a day adds structure to my practice time and is bound to improve my sight reading. I had been mostly transcribing songs, but it's easy to rely on familiarity with the song rather than actually reading the notes. Anyway, thanks L1nk42.
 
#15
I have taught sight-reading, sight-singing, and dictation for many years at 10 different schools and colleges. IME, assuming 1 to 2 hours a day of practice, the biggest obstacle to students when working to improve reading is having materials that are too hard, not graduated finely enough, and not plentiful enough. The next biggest obstacle is rhythm itself.

If you can read basic rhythm well with a metronome, I'd then switch to learning to name a stream of equal value notes with the metronome to push your eye faster. Yes, good readers know how to move their eyes no matter what. Poor readers get stuck, skip beats, etc. If you want practice with rhythmic reading, there is a great iphone app called readrhythm I use to stay sharp.

The French method I learned late in the game at Mannes College of Music in New York has separate skill areas: note naming/clef reading, rhythmic-reading/non-pitched note naming (parlando solfege), and also finely graduated pitched singing of contrived music with accompaniments. Kicked my behind for a while, but I finally conquered it by tons of practice and using a metronome to push myself from very slow to fast. It is a long process. New neural connections take time to build. It is not mere knowledge, it is real musical skill.
 
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#16
From a previous Thread on the DB side:

Don Kasper said:
A good resource for practicing "rhythmic reading", is the book "Modern Reading Text in 4/4" by Louis Bellson. This book is a great way to begin to recognize and internalize written rhythms - it is best used "away from your instrument", ("singing" is my preferred method), as a way to isolate the rhythmic component of written music. It contains NO Melodies, only Rhythmic patterns on one note!
It is a good example of isolating an area of study by limiting, (and thus focusing), your attention - in this case, on just the rhythm, (not the "notes"), of written music.

Invalid Link Removed

Finally, a former Music Theory teacher of mine, (Allan Sapp), once described Rhythm as "The Clasping of Time"...
Thanks.
Click to expand...
don kasper
 

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