Customer Reviews

Reading Studies for Guitar

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I highly recommend these reading studies to my fellow guitarists who want to improve their reading skills. The studies are in all keys, positions I to VII. They do not resemble or sound like any well known melodies so it's impossible to cheat by being familar with the melody beforehand. The player must read the notes as they are written. This is not a shortcut to sightreading notes, but it helped me faster than any other book I've tried. These studies are drills that, when completed, made standard single note melody lines seem easy. And I guess that's the point.

This will be the most boring, most useful book you'll ever come across. Playing this (and its companion Advanced book for positions 8-12) each all the way through once a week for about half a year was seriously the best thing I ever did for guitar.

You'll hate doing it, but you'll never complain about not knowing how to read music in any key (F# anyone?) and you'll automatically know the fretboard inside and out, up and down.

This book is great for anyone who wants a hardcore "drill-book" for learning sight reading on guitar. Some suggestions though. Don't do the exercises mindlessly. Use the appropriate scale pattern(s), count out the rhythm beforehand and use a metronome.

The reading exercises cover the gamut of scales and key signatures. The book is very good for solidifying your finger-eye connection for notes. The weakness of this book is that nearly all the reading exercises are rhythmically simple, mainly constant streams of eight notes. It would have been a stronger book to include more complicated rhythms, with rests. The other William Leavitt book, "Melodic Rhythms for Guitar," covers some of this. But MRfG's weakness is that it's too jazz centric, written primarily with 8th notes, rather than 16th notes. Where are the 16h notes? There should be another volume of one of these books that addresses rhythms more comprehensively.

This is a great book for developing eye+finger+fretboard co-ordination...There are exercises in all keys (ouch!). The best thing is make sure you READ the intro by Leavitt, ie play the pieces without stopping - and dont play too fast - thats not the point of the book. One thing I'd like to have seen was maybe more rhythmic variations. BUT there is another book (Melodic Rhythm studies) so there you go. This is a real old-school reading book, I recommend it.

Simply put, if you want to become a competent sight reader, you need to have this book. This is the book that truly solidified my sight reading skills, and I can't recommend it enough.

The sight reading starts on page 2 or so, with a brief introduction by Leavitt. The reading sections begin in open position, then progress through positions through VII.

This is a no-nonsense book for honing your sight reading skills. Many books just concentrate on single note reading. Reading Studies For Guitar allows one to work on chord reading as well. Highly recommended.

The exercises in this book are useful, but they are lacking in a couple respects. One is that there are no variations in rhythm. Everything is in 8th or quarter notes, which is disappointing. Also, the melodies are too scalar, aside from a few arpeggios there really isn't any disjunct motion in the exercises. This doesn't make the material as challenging as it could be. I would have liked to see a few exercises in each position with random notes and intervals, so that the exercise doesn't devolve into playing scales.

This book is a good book primarily because it has so many reading exercise. The one major flaw is that the position playing leave much to be desired. For example, to read some exercises in what the author calls the "fourth position (IV)" requires wandering in and out of position playing. This can be a great exercise for adaptive reading skills, or maybe with a Berklee instructor, but for a beginner that wants to learn position playing it can lead to a lot of confusion about fingering. The result is that instead of grasping position playing, a self learner might be slow to learn if buying this book. The book would solve this problem easily if the author would have placed fingerings over the note passages that leave the stated position. The only time any indication is given is three or four notes at the beginning of an exercise. Some of the exercises are so awkward to play (unless you're an already good reader)in the cited position, that they spend most of the exercise playing in an adjoining position. This book is great if you want to develop mixed position playing. But if you buy this book thinking that when the author says "sixth position (VI)" or any position for that matter, is the proper position to play the exercise *BEST* forget it - you're on your own.

I got this book along with the Modern Method for Guitar. But it's just too difficult to figure out how to properly use it. As I become a better player and reader, I can see how the drills in this book will be good practice.

I give the book 3 stars for now and will update the review if I find in 6 months that I really can use the drills in this book.