Reading Music Notation: Notes on the 1st String

Playing From Musical Notation

Welcome to the wonderful world of “sight-reading”. Sight-reading is the act of seeing a musical note and playing it.

Exciting!!

The goal when sight-reading is to keep going. When you’re learning a piece of music, you’ll use a different process. Then you’ll want to go slow and minimize mistakes.  But when sight-reading, it’s more important to keep your eyes moving forward.

Sight-reading is a skill that will help you to learn guitar music quickly and easily, just as having good right-hand technique will help you to play pieces more fluidly.

These exercises will help you develop a strategic process for sight-reading on the classical guitar. Soon enough, you’ll be able to use this process to sight-read classical guitar sheet music and songs of your choosing.

Eventually, you’ll be able to sight-read on all of the guitar strings, in all positions. However, if you’re beginning guitar or new to sight-reading, it’s important to start slow.

In this guitar lesson, we focus on the notes on the first string, in the first position.

Notes On the First String

You will likely be tempted to stop before the end of the video.  Keep going!  If you get off, just take a deep breath, find an upcoming note, and jump back into the game.  When you push play, commit to the ~3 minutes of sight-reading practice, and finish it, regardless of how many notes you miss.

As an alternative, practice with the video for one minute, then pause it.  Practice something else.  A few minutes later, come back for another minute.  Then once more later in your practice.  This is called “interleaving”, and is wonderful for learning. Moral of the story is: if you start to lose focus, put it down for a bit, come back and watch later.

Remember: Keep going!  If you miss a note, it’s gone.  Just focus on the next one.