"Staff Only" - A Guide To Practical Reading

Jamie Taylor's guide to practical single-line reading on the guitar — a 1 hour 25 minute class on building real fluency with the treble staff, aimed at electric guitarists who want to read in the jazz style. Q: How do you get a guitarist to turn down? A: Give them the sheet music. We've all heard the jokes, but as Jamie shows, a functional level of reading needn't be harder for guitarists than for other instrumentalists.

Many guitar reading methods start in open position and work slowly up the neck. Jamie argues this is upside down for electric players: instead, he starts from what he calls the extended seventh position — the "business end" of the guitar — connecting what you see on the staff to one specific location first, so you build a comfort zone instead of being paralyzed by the instrument's many fingering options.

What's covered

• An order of priority for learning the fretboard, based purely on what's most practical
• The best kinds of sheet music for guitarists to seek out
• A method for rhythmic recognition drawn from classical music pedagogy
• Playing a Baroque canon at two different tempos
• Guitar pitch vs. concert pitch, and how to use the difference to your advantage
• "Quick study" — letting your wider guitar knowledge support your reading
• Techniques for sharpening pitch recognition
• A review of the existing literature, including unusual ways to use the classic texts

The class includes a 40-page PDF book referenced throughout, with captions, synchronized on-screen notation, and multiple camera angles during complete performances. If you're already reading Charlie Parker transcriptions there may not be much here for you; but if your reading is slow going, or you've always meant to learn, this material should be of real assistance.