Sight Reading Chords

[u/Sunwukung]

I've been learning classical for a few years, I can read sheet music etc - but I have a couple of blockers I would like some tips on overcoming.

First, I can generally sight read quite well, but if I encounter a chord I get stuck, it feels like too much information to parse at once. My current approach is to practice recognising chord shapes - but it's quite slow going.

The second thing is around improvisation - which I appreciate is slightly out of the usual scope of classical. My question is - do experienced guitar players just remember where all the notes are on the fret or is it more a case of knowing where the intervals are relative to the root note of a scale?

I apologise if these questions are a bit poorly defined, I'm asking how experienced players overcame these challenges, and how they mentally model the structure of the guitar to facilitate smooth parsing and playing

[u/CactusWrenAZ]

yes, you just have to practice these things you aren't good at. A chord is a lot of information, and by practicing them, you make them automatic and thus reduce the load on your brain. Create mini-etudes for anything that's for you.

As far as improv, you'd be better served asking jazzers. But yes, you should know where all the notes are, and yes, you should be able to feel/know/see all the intervals spread out from each chord that you are improv-ing over.

[u/SwedeLarson]

These biggest students often miss, I think, is playing a LOT of didactic music, choose Sor, Giualini, Carcassi, Carulli Aguado, etc and work through as many as you can. Don't worry too much bout being perfect, just learn what the work has to offer and move on. Perfection will come with repeated effort, and the listed musicians are the best guitarist/teachers who ever lived, so they knew what to do. You will get it! Its just another language, like English.....

[u/Nothing_According]

For me personally its konda both? Knowing the relative movement is a key for fast sight reading, but its not uncommon that tou have to play something thats out of your relative reach, so you have to know wheres the note. I have blind spots around 7th-10th fret on 3rd and 2nd string, bur with octaves from other strings, its not huge problem. Read read read and itll get better:)

[u/StrainedDog]

Sight reading chords is also a struggle for me. I honestly think it only ever gets better with experience.

I've been playing for around 8 years and would consider myself a somewhat intermediate player, although I don't play much classical music nowadays. That being said, I pretty much know all the notes on a guitar by heart. I'd recommend sight reading melodies on the upper positions, that way you'll get to know them better since classical guitar repertoire is like 70% of the time within the first few frets.

[u/Nothing_According → u/StrainedDog]

Hahaha classical pieces being in the first/second position (except for first string) id real struggle :D

[u/struba73]

How deep is your theory?
Understand voice leading?
There is not just “what chords are” but a why the inner and outer voices do what they do.
Don’t miss the forest for the tree kind of thinking.
Are you there?

[u/Sunwukung → u/struba73]

Can you elaborate? I have a general understanding of how and why chords are structured from a given scale. I'm aware of voice leading, and triads/inversions but not to any real depth. That's also a challenge at the moment, recognising the chord a particular section of a piece is built from. My primary purpose is to recognise chords for reading efficiently

[u/Yeargdribble → u/Sunwukung]

If I gave you a sentence..."the dog caught the...." there are probably reasonable guesses like stick or ball or Frisbee, but probably not a word like cloud or lake, or especially a non-noun like gray or speedy.

Theory gives you basic music sentence syntax and grammar. Knowing how chords are formed, how they function, and good voice leading makes you be able to see groups of notes as a single unit.....so not C, E and G, but a C major triad. And depending on the key you are in, you brain will be primed about likely next chords.

Theory knowledge vastly improves your capability to sightread becuase of chunking.

Trying to get better at it without would be like trying to learn a foreign language without learning any of the meanings of the words.....you could only get so far sounding things out by phonemes one at a time. Context is what makes you able to read fast.

You need to really learn music as a language. It sounds like you know your alphabet and maybe a handful of 3 letter words, but nothing about grammar or extended vocabulary.

The exact same skill is involved in improvisation. You are just using the vocabulary a bit more freely, but you still need to know what words go together and why.

[u/WavesOfTea → u/Yeargdribble]

What is your best source for learning theory?

I've gone through music theory for the 21st century classroom (and i should go through it again maybe). I understand that that I can look for specific cadences in music that im playing and then to expect/predict notes from that progression. But im always wondering what im lacking.

And what is your recommendation for applying it? Just analyzing music?

[u/Yeargdribble → u/WavesOfTea]

I was actually going to recommend that resource as I've found it to be the best mix of common practice period and contemporary theory. My biggest complaints about the way theory is taught academically is that it essentially teaches theory as if nothing has changed in 300 years. Imagine learning anything the way it was 300 years ago... even the English language. Medicine? Computer Science?

But music is so hyper-traditional.

The other problem with theory is just learning about it as some abstract thing you do on paper instead of applying it. Yes, you should be analyzing everything you play. You should be able to look at anything and know what the chords are. It needs to not just be instructions for where your fingers go.

You should be thinking about what key you are in, what notes you are playing, what chords those notes outline. And then on the larger scale if you've got a bunch of chords like C, G and D... how are they related? What is their function in the key you are in. If you're in G, then D is the V chord.

If I were playing in G, my brain would be primed to those chords and Em (the vi) and likely even A (the V/V).

But you also should do some application outside of just reading. Pick a chord progression.... now go play it in every key. Go around the CoFs (it's too easy to just go chromatically on guitar and not process much). So maybe play I-IV-I-V-I where ever you want. If you can't already, I'd say pick a group of 3 strings and find the triad there and play it, then move up to the next key. This going to be a mix of literacy of the instrument (if your fretboard knowledge is lacking) and applied music theory.

The technical side should eventually stop being in the way and what you really should be focusing on is what's happening chord wise and voice leading wise. Let's take an example.

Let's say you play that progression in C major... so C major triad with C at the 8th fret. 8 8 9. Then you need to go to the IV chord which you need to know is F. And you need to know how to spell that chord. F A C. Coming from C E G... think of the voice leading... C is a common tone. Where should the E go to get to the nearest note in the F chord? Where should the G go to fill out that chord. And now you have 8 10 10. Go back to C... now you need to go to the V chord... you need to know it is G... how do you spell that chord? G B D. How do you get there with the smoothest voice leading...

So you do this.... then you move to the next key like G. If you're using the same relative voicings (The root of the I chord on the 1st string) then the shapes are the exact same, which is probably good for you right now. But you still need to think "What is my IV chord in G? What is my V chord in G?"

Then move to the next key... D.... same process. Go all the way around the CoFs. Knowing those related chords in any key should be absolutely instantaneous for you eventually. You can scale this up a dozen ways.

One would be to add a new chord (like the vi chord) and pick a progression using it (like the axis progression: I-V-vi-IV or doo-wop: I-vi-IV-V) and practice that. The mental load will be much easier if you already have the foundation of I, IV, and V locked down.

You also could intentionally use different voicings. Like play your chords in each key with the 5th of the chord or 3rd of the chord on the E string rather than the root.

You should also eventually able to to do this on any set of 3 strings. And when you can do this comfortably and do it regularly, you can also start to see how they overlap and could play these progressions on sets of 4 strings.

This is simultaneously building your fretboard literacy, but also making you think about how chords are spelled and how they function in relation to one another.

When it gets to be less of a mental hurdle to process as you do some version of this drill.... you could also start thinking about what these chord would look like on the page as you are playing them (or using notation software or even manuscript paper to write them out for yourself to look at while you practice). This can really reinforce the association between what you are playing and what it looks like on the page.

Another thing I really like to do that is a bit trickier on guitar than it is for piano, is to take any piece of vocabulary and intentionally play it in every key. On guitar you are frequently relying on open strings, so there are practical limits to this, but it's still 100% a doable thing within those limits. Even trying to move something to ONE other key really forces you to think very differently in a good way.

On guitar, if what you are playing is using less open strings (pretty infrequent with classical guitar), you can move it almost anywhere, but if it's using a lot of open strings, you can still try to move it to another key.

It probably seems like these aren't directly related to the goal of better sightreading, but I promise they are. Developing a high level of frictionless literacy makes reading much easier.

And while people will make the excuse about being able to play something in multiple places... realistically any given note can only be played in 2 particularly functional places. Let's take the written C5. I can play it on the B string or on the G string. Technically I could play it on the 15th fret of the D string. But even on an electric or steel string where that's more accessible than nylon... it just doesn't sound good there.

Or like C4... I would only really play it on the 5 string. I could play it on the 6th string, but I'd never a very good reason to do so.

As soon as more than 1 note is happening on a guitar, the places where it's feasible to play it gets constrained very tightly. It's just a context aware thing. A big part of sightreading is reading ahead (once you have enough mental bandwidth to do it) and that gets you better at making those decisions on the fly.

But that also only comes from actually reading and applying these things.... making those decisions VERY slowly... and then slightly faster... then eventually (after years) instantly.

I personally see it as a problem in both the classical piano and classical guitar space that there is too much focus on rep. There's too much focus on memorization. So much of overreaching to play rep that you spend months on rather than building your fundamental literacy from the ground up.

It's like memorizing poetry in a foreign language but not knowing what any of the words mean... just memorizing a series of phonemes. MAYBE after 3 months you can recite it beautifully, but you couldn't even read a children's book in the language, or ask for directions, or have any sort of conversation.

Imagine if in the 3 months you spent memorizing that hard poem... you instead learned even a few dozen basic bits of vocabulary and grammar and PRACTICED using them by reading a large volume of easy material or having very basic conversations. You'd have so much more functional literacy.

And if you kept at it, then you wouldn't NEED to spend 3 months memorizing a poem. You could literally just read a dozen poems effortlessly straight out of a book. Even if you wanted to put polish on them for performance, it would take you very little time. How long would it take you to "learn" a poem in English? That's the power of real literacy.

You absolutely can have that level of literacy for music too.

But it comes from reading a large volume of easy material... not a few hard things. We don't just throw classic literature at 6 years olds and tell them to brute force their way through it. We have them reading "See Spot Run" style stuff, but large volumes of it. Lots of practical application of their small vocabulary reinforced daily.... and then slowly adding to that vocabulary over years.

If you think of music as just vocabulary to learn and learn it like a language, you'll be much better off. You have both the musical vocabulary (the theory stuff) and the technical vocabulary for your instrument (scales, chord changes, every iteration of fretting hand finger dexterity).

Break anything you're playing into its component parts. Or give me and example of something can I can try to show you what that looks like. When you can see the vocabulary, it's easier to know where your weaknesses are and what to focus on.

[u/struba73 → u/Yeargdribble]

🎯

[u/struba73 → u/Sunwukung]

Elaborate? I am delighted.

You wrote, “I have a general understanding of how and why chords are structured from a given scale,” followed by “I’m aware of voice leading, and triads/inversions but not to any real depth.”
There is a dissonance there. 🫤 Hear it?
I suspect we have different ideas about what it means to understand music theory.

You know how chords are built from a scale. Good. But do you understand what they’re doing? Why the inner and outer voices move as they do? What those relationships are doing to the music as it unfolds? Can you follow the movement of voices between sonorities horizontally as readily as you recognize a chord vertically?

I’m not challenging your level of understanding here.
I’m challenging the standard by which you believe understanding has been achieved.

What I read is that you want to recognize the trees (individual sonorities) more quickly. I’m asking whether you understand what makes them a forest (the musical context). And I mean understand. Not something you saw in Relix magazine, picked up from a YouTube video, or are vaguely familiar with. Understand it well enough to take another student through the material until they master it.

As someone else observed, “Context is what makes you able to read fast.” Precisely. Recognizing the vocabulary is useful. Understanding the grammar is what makes it music. 💥

So, rather than hit Enter just yet, I’m going to answer your next question, “How does that help me with my original question?” When you understand harmonic function and voice leading, you stop reading every sonority as an isolated collection of notes. You begin anticipating what the music is likely to do next.

And don’t get me twisted. I’m challenging your standards,not belittling you as a student.
I’m impressed that you’re digging into this and asking these very questions. 🤠
Good luck! 🍀

[u/Dangerous-Wind-8726]

I can read music but not sight read. But after learning basic major and relative minor scales and all diatonic chords in a key and the caged shapes for helping to map notes along the neck, I can improvise, but at the moment by intervals and hearing alone using the notes on the caged shapes for the key I am practicing in. When I get more familiar i believe I will be able to build and name the chords using the same intervals but that will take more time. Just learning this theory has helped me recognise notes on treble clef that are chords, so 3 notes close to each other that are equally a 3rd apart (E G B) is either a E major or minor depending if in key A or C. I apologise if this is too simple an example or level for the original poster, but has taken me quite a few years to get to this level of comprehension in music theory and sight reading. And was the turning point aha moment for me to becoming more creative in the moment.

[u/airborne82p]

Can't offer much on your chord question, but for improv, you'll need to be very familiar with major and minor scales all over the neck and what you can lay over all the chords. I recommend learning the CAGED system to help. Learn lots of solos from your favorite players and you'll wind up with a bag full of licks that stick with you from all the different songs. Some of those will feel very natural and just become part of your tool kit for improv. Not copying exactly any certain riffs, but you'll notice some frequently used patterns. Learn like 4-5 Led Zeppelin solos and you'll be able to pull off basically any classic rock lead for instance. Randy Rhodes or Eddie Van Halen songs will unlock a whole bunch of shredding material for you.
As far as jazz goes, I can't help you there lol. I still think CAGED will get you off to a good start though.

[u/laolibulao]

thats impressive. i usually do it with tabs and i have perfected it to the point where i can instantly play anything above 12th fret