How to improve musical reading skills?

[NecroPolo]

Re: How to improve musical reading skills?

Keep on reading.

[devastone]

Re: How to improve musical reading skills?

https://www.amazon.com/Modern-Method-Guitar-DVD-ROM-Berklee/dp/0876390696/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1510513609&sr=8-3&keywords=a+modern+method+for+guitar

https://www.amazon.com/Modern-Method-Guitar-2/dp/0876390165/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1510513609&sr=8-5&keywords=a+modern+method+for+guitar

[Chickenwings]

Re: How to improve musical reading skills?

Read the notes aloud. Read all of them aloud. It bypasses the muscle memory part of your brain and increases the speed that you recognise and process the information on the paper. It will slow you down and annoy the hell out of you in the short term, but this is about long term gains. Keep at it. Do it every day.
Count aloud. Look at the time signature and count out loud all the way through. Count the eighth notes as one and two and etc, sixteenths as one-e-and-a two-e-and-a etc and triplets and one and a two and a etc. Again, you'll hate doing it initially but again, think about the long game.
Dont do this stuff in your head. and think that your are getting the same benefit. You gotta say it out loud. Do not cut corners on this. Read every day. Read from guitar methods, read from the real book, read from any source you can. Don't worry that you are playing much slower, sloppily and worse than you normally play. It is not about learning how to play a piece. It is about developing your reading skills. Process is more important than outcome.
The otrher massive benefit of reading both the notes and the timing aloud is that it forces you to keep your eyes on the music and not buried in the fretboard which has flow on benefits of learning to play more by feel and ear as well as being able to keep your head up to communicate with other musicians, or engage with your audience for those times when you are not reading. Reading is only a tool of course and watching most musos reading does not make for a good performance, but having excellent reading skills will free you up in so many ways that allow you to express your creativity.
Over the long term your reading will become much faster and automatic, which in turn means that you can either sight read fluently of use your skills to learn and memorize tunes in much less time.
Avoid tabs. It is a dead end.
Doing all this reading and counting aloud will slow you down immensely and frustrate the hell out of you for a while. The reason is because you are isolating and working on your weak points. There is nothing more effective for your reading though, so if you are resilient and persistent, the results will follow the process.
Best of luck.