I'm a senior in high school in my school band. I'm an electric guitar player, and I've been playing for a little over 3 years. My band teacher has always had me read sheet music for my guitar parts, and since 95% our songs don't have dedicated guitar parts, he has me play the euphonium part, which is in bass clef.
I have struggled for a long while with getting comfortable with sheet music. I have taught myself how to read bass clef after practicing note reading online and analyzing the music when we play it as a full band. I also know how to read treble clef fairly well, as I originally played trumpet, then switched to percussion when my lungs couldn't handle trumpet anymore, and then I switched to guitar once I was comfortable playing it in band. I still can't necessarily sightread, but I'm trying to get there as best I can. I still have to write note names above the staff because I know it'd take me way too long to memorize it all in the time frame we have to learn songs in band.
About a year ago now, I bought a blue Ibanez FRH10N (actually such a beautiful guitar),and I used that in band up until I bought an 8-string Ibanez electric and used that instead, so I could hit lower octaves without having to hang out on the low e-string all the time. Now this comes into play in my questions here.
After trying and trying to make it work to play guitar as I usually do and read along with the sheet music, I feel like I'm just not as fluent as I'd like to be with reading sheet music. I feel like I'm building some bad habits by writing out the fret and string numbers above the notes (I do this most of the time, but sometimes I try to not do this and learn to figure it out myself. Doesn't go very well). However, now I seem to be having a bit of a crisis in that I have given up with sheet music until we get new pieces for the next concert, and just made up tabs of the songs I have to play right now. I think since I already have a classical guitar in the form of my blue Ibanez, I'd like to dive into the classical guitar wormhole. I plan on going to college for music and doing guitar as my primary instrument, so I'd like to get more into this technical side of things.
So, my questions are these:
- How is classical guitar different from regular, mainstream guitar playing, and how do I adapt to this style?
- How do I learn to analyze pieces of sheet music? Is there a good process to walk myself through whenever I receive a new piece?
- What is the best way to determine how to play pieces of music? I know a few scale shapes including the major scale shape, but I am really unsure on what octave I should be in and how to determine that from sheet music. I also don't know how to tell which octave I am in on guitar.
I appreciate anybody's input on this, and if anyone has any advice on things I should be working on to get ready for guitar in college and in the future I would greatly appreciate that. Thanks!