Sight Reading for Guitar Players: Level 1

Hey! This is Chris Buono and welcome to Sight Reading for Guitar Players: Level 1. This is the course you've been looking for to finally get your reading skills developed. I've spent decades teaching people how to play and, for some, a big part of their process was learning to read. Through years of observing what works and does not work I developed approaches that REALLY work. Together with TrueFire we've transformed my methods into an interactive video package I feel confident will help you get off to the right start.

Learning to sight read is a rite of passage for all musicians. Whether you play with local bands and want more gigs, your goal is session work or you simply want to expand songs you can play on your own - it's one of the most rewarding skills you can develop as a guitar player. To become a good sight reader, you have to learn to play the music, NOT the paper.

I hear it all the time from students: They get frustrated by traditional & academic reading methods. As a result, all too often players quit before they make any real progress. Sight Reading for Guitar Players is designed to inspire you from the ground up. In this level, we'll read through a series of 15 lesson sets with over 30 sight reading practice sessions. Each lesson set starts with a “pre-read” where visual animations highlight key components in the sheet music before we dig into a pair of practice sessions. We'll then sight read a chart along with a simple acoustic accompaniment. Completing each set is a session where we read down a second chart with a full-blown band track. After I take you through the key components of basic sight reading I will get you reading down blues, rock and funk melodies. All of the practice sessions are played over jam tracks – never a metronome.

I'll kick off the course with a quick primer on the basics of music notation and then we'll dig into the first section where you'll learn to read B, C & D and the “Big Three” of rhythmic values: Whole notes, half notes and quarter notes. In the second section we'll add E, F & G while introducing whole, half and quarter note rests. The third section completes an octave with two more notes - G & A - while you learn about dots, ties & repeat signs. The fourth and final section challenges your developing skills with three extended style-specific charts consisting of a 12-bar blues, 32-bars of pure rock ‘n roll and finally 32 bars of the funk.

Throughout the lessons I will pass along key tips and insight to help you become a proficient sight reader. Each of the practice sessions come with sheet music and you'll have the jam tracks to work with on your own. You can loop or slow down the videos to work with the lessons at your own pace. Everything is notated in Guitar Pro and PDF. What's more, you'll get all of the jam tracks featuring my good friend and monster bass player Steve Jenkins to work with on your own.

Ready?! Let's do it to it!