Put sheet music in front of them!

That’s the often told joke that guitar players can’t read music. There’s a number of reasons cited for this:

• guitar is ambiguous - you can play one written note on 5 different strings
• It’s all about shapes
• I’ll lose my style
• Tab is easier
• It’s too hard
• My favourite guitar hero can’t read so why should I?

Here’s why you should learn to sight read: if you’re a decent sight reader you can be given any lead sheet or fake book and play the song. This means you have a huge repertoire and can handle song requests easily. If you want a paying gig for theatre, musicals etc. it gives you a guitar playing superpower that few have. If you’re a music student you’re going to have to learn the skill anyway Learn songs way faster

In a world of AI generated music, real humans playing live music will be a prized skill

With 5 minutes a day of quality practice you can learn to sight read almost any melody in 3-6 months. To do this you will need:

• music you’ve never seen before
• music at your level of difficulty
• music in the right keys - easy at first such as C then G
• a metronome - start at easy tempos then increase
• a way to know how it should sound so you can check if you played it correctly
• to choose a 5 fret area of the fretboard. I’d suggest the open strings and frets 1-4. This eliminates the ambiguity.
• to sight read a little every day

You could scrounge around for books of sheet music in the right keys and difficulty but you’ll likely spend more time organizing than actually practicing. And you’ll likely have to spend quite a lot of money buying books as you run out of material.

I know because I tried this and it was almost impossible to make much progress because there were too many hurdles to practice sight reading consistently.

This is why I built LotsaNotes. It gives you a short snippet of music to play, the metronome counts you in and you play along. It’s very obvious if you make a mistake. You can assess yourself to track your progress. As you improve you can turn up the difficulty slowly. It’s very easy to use and free for beginners, in fact the first 5 levels of difficulty are completely free with no signup required at all.

If you’re totally new to sight reading, try setting the difficulty to level 1 which is C, D and E quarter notes. You’ll master it in a few minutes. Grab a beer or some ice cream to celebrate! Then tomorrow you can speed it up, add more bars or increase the difficulty.

Give it a whirl and feel free to comment, or suggest any improvements. I’m working hard to make this the best way to learn to read.