The songs listed below have been written specifically to enable guitarists to begin sight reading and to learn easy chord progressions. These are no musical masterpieces, but do provide the beginner with graded pieces from which to practice their reading skills.
Most are simple melodies and chord progressions , which can be played in the first position. As the melodies alone won't sound too good by themselves, it is best if you can record the chord changes first, then practice sight reading the melodies over the backing tape. They actually work best if a teacher or friend play the chords while the student plays the melody. Then it is a good idea to swap parts so that the student gets to play the chord changes and grasps the idea of accompanying another instrument or voice.
It is very important to stress that the idea is to sight read the pieces, not to memorise them. Just start from the beginning and work through the whole piece. The process is the same as when we learn to read words, we don't try to memorise a page of text before reading it. Simply look at the note, recognise its name and where it is played, play the note and move on to the next one. Once you are comfortable with the notes then concentrate on the correct timing. When the song has been learnt move on to the next one and so on. One must remember it takes time to read music well, so don't be too impatient to move on to the more complex pieces.
If you can't read the piece from top to bottom after a few tries, you are moving too fast. Go back to a simpler piece and work up to the more interesting ones. By not knowing any of these pieces, students can't just play from memory they must really read the piece in front of them. I hope you find them enjoyable and a useful learning tool.
Songs In PDF Format
The following songs are in Adobe Acrobat PDF format and require the Acrobat Reader which you can download for FREE HERE.
If you don't want to view these online just right click to download, then open with Acrobat Reader.
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