Archive for April, 2010

Come out to see one of Austin’s finest jazz composers lead his band Times Ten. Featuring selected works by John Mills live at The Elephant Room. Times Ten features John Mills – Tenor Sax, Jake Lampe – Alto Sax, Joey Colarusso, Baritone Sax, Rich Haering – Jazz Trumpet, Eric Johnson – Lead Trumpet, Mike Mordecai – Trombone, Rob Kazenel – Drums, Russ Scanlon – Guitar, Kris Afflerbaugh – Bass, John Arndt – Piano.

Sight Reading

Direct Practice:

I have read and heard many things about improving sight reading. But to really improve at it, it must be approached like any other aspect of your playing you wish to master. You need to start slow. Trying to read something that you have no chance of playing correctly will only create frustration, and provide minimal to no gain. There are a couple of good approaches, one is to take some very easy music and try to sight read it quickly (with metronome of course!). This will get you some experience of keeping up at a fast tempo. But alternatively, you can also take difficult music and read it slowly. Just like anything else, you start with a tempo where you can play it, and speed it up gradually.

One of the most important things I can say, is when you are alone and practicing sight reading, practice as if you were performing with other musicians. This means that if you make a mistake, you can’t begin at your error, you must continue with the tempo because the rest of the musicians would continue playing and not wait for you. If you’re having trouble keeping the time you must slow the tempo down until you can. It’s only when you practice at a speed where everything feels solid that you are ready to slowly move up the tempo.

Head Games:

The other aspect of being a great reader is being mentally prepared. Any time you receive a new piece of music you have some amount of time before you play it. Quickly scan and identify the important/difficult things.
– Key signature (and key changes)
– Time signature (and time changes)
– Repeats, Jumps (Coda/DS/DC etc…)
– Difficult lines/rhythms
– Page turns (learn how to manage your pages effectively)
– Instrument/mute changes

Don’t waste your time on the notes you won’t have any trouble playing, but try to slowly finger through any fast runs as time allows, or even sing the difficult rhythms in your head slowly. You can give yourself a distinct advantage by using this crunch time when you first see a chart when others are goofing off! Like other skills you will become better and quicker at identifying the critical elements in a chart before playing the more you do it.

Jake Lampe