Hey everyone,
I have been studying music for eight years, just joined as a freshman playing trombone in my high school's advanced jazz band. Some of our charts have very complex rhythms, such as being in 9/8 time or switching from 5/4 to 3/4 to 4/4 back to 5/4 multiple times in one song. Some of them are in common time but are just too complicated to simply sight read as I go along. One is in cut time which is easy to count but it goes so fast that it gets confusing. When I try to focus on reading the rhythms I lose count and eventually lose my place. How can I get better at this? I appreciate any help you guys might have.

Hey Katherine.

Yay another trombone

Errrmmm. Can you not look at the music first before you play it or practice it first. If so when you practice play it slowly, repeating awkward bar so that you get the rhythm in your head. Try clapping the rhythm instead of playing it straight away. This will familiarise yourself with the rhythms.
If a rhythm is really comlicated try using a metronome to get the exact timings.

REMEMBER - SLOWLY AT FIRST, GRADUALLY SPEED IT UP

Hope this helps !!

Ben

The stsyle of jazz I teach on the organ/piano sound less complicated than that which you are playing in your group.
However, I agree with ben that repetition of a bar/bars to REALLY familiarise yourself with an awkward passage is essential. Quite often you will be hearing harmonies and melodic lines which do not readily fit in your mindset and you must take time to accept these, musically speaking.

e.g. one of my piano students is learning a complicated version of "Skylark" (Hoagy Carmichael). He just lost it half way through. Once he had "taken the piece apart", he realised what was happening and why, and is now much happier.

Secondly, why not try to practise with another member of the group, rather than by yourself. You can help each other by counting ?!

Hi Katherine

You might find it useful to read the advice given in a thread on Sightreading in the Students Forum, June 26th. I haven't yet learnt how to do links to threads, so I've copied a couple of the messages below.


QUOTE
joyjoy

I'm not sure if they do them for all instruments, but certianly, for piano, I use the 'Improve you Sight Reading' and 'Trak' books - they are great for going over complex rhythms, asking questions about the music, as well as actually playing it! Great for working alongside the normal AB sight reading book, as already mentioned.
END QUOTE


QUOTE
rmashton

I was having awful problems just recognising notes fast enough, especially when playing hands together.

The solution - play, play and play some more. Open a music book and pick 4-5 bars. Check the tempo, key, etc and then play it.

The whole key to sight-reading is not to 'theorise' it, you have to form a link between the note you see and the note you play.

I tried to read about sight-reading when in fact sight-reading is a practical exam and it is the eye to finger recognition you need to achieve.

My sight-reading is still poor, but over the course of the last 6 weeks while preparing for my exam I have made huge strides by just 'getting on with it' and going through the pain barrier to get my eyes to lead my fingers. Sometimes I can't even tell you what note I have read but my fingers have played the correct one because I recognised it visually and formed the link to my fingers.

Give it a go for a few weeks - read and play a lot of music and suddenly things will start to fall into place.
END QUOTE


You could also try doing a search on all the forums for "rhythm" and "sightreading" to see if anything else helpful has been posted in the past.

Best of luck!

Hello,

just seen this thread.
Can I add one or two remarks that might help - things I learnt from a couple of sax players/professors on a summer school.

First, I think ben_walker is absolutely right, slowly at first... very very slowly if necessary.

But to help with that, one tip was to "subdivide". In other words break down the beat, if you have to break it down to the semiquavers or more!! A bit mathematical but it works out the foundation of it all for you.

The other thing is, not just to clap the rhythm, but SING it. "If you can't sing it, how can you play it?" one of these guys said! And both these things isolate the rhythm from the mechanics of making the notes.

So - work it out
sing it/ clap it
play it as a rhythm on just one note

now, hopefully, you've got it!

When I am faced with a piece with complicated rhythms etc I tend to mark on the piece where the beats are, either by numbering the beats or putting lines in for each quaver or crotchet, depending on the piece, so I can see how everything works together... So far that method has seemed to work.

thanks for your help, everyone! so far, counting out the rhythms very slowly has helped.

i was wondering a couple more things. first, since many of the pieces we just sight read the first time we play them together, i would eventually like to be able to read rythms in a snap. is it possible to learn this just by practicing sight reading a lot? and if so, how complicated does the music have to be in order to help?

also, a random bit- how do you count 9/8 time?

You can count 9/8 as 3 dotted crotchets per bar or as 9 quavers per bar

I think this is down to just doing it. The more you do the easier it will [eventually] become.
There is some excellent advice and tips in a book by Howard Snell, former Principal Trumpet with the LSO and now a Professor at the Royal Academy.
One section he calls "A Sight Reading Crash Course for the Desperate Student" - really worth reading. A bit much to copy out on here, but if you want to pm I can try to summarise or give you details of the book - see if your library has it.

If it's rhythms you're concerned about, might sound mad but get yourself some snare drum books. As a percussionist for some ten years (and a pianist for a while before that) I find that really there are only a small number of different rhythms you're likely to come across, even in moderately complex jazz. I agree with the person who said you should (if you have the chance) sing parts before trying to play them. With practice, and with decently-printed/written music, the shape of the patterns on the page will translate into rhythmic patterns, almost without having to think about them. Also try music by e.g. Bartok, Lutoslawski...

Your question about 9/8 time indicates that perhaps you could benefit from some further study of music theory - understanding compound time (3/8, 6/8, 9/8 etc) will help you, as might thinking about how a conductor would beat some of the more irregular time signatures. For example, a fast 5/4 could be grouped 3+2 or 2+3 (and a conductor might only give two beats for either of these, a kind of irregular 2-beats-in-a-bar); a 7/8 could be 2+2+3 or 2+3+2 or 3+2+2. The only way to tell is by looking at (or sometimes, depending on the part you're looking at, hearing) the music.

Changing between time signatures: if this is happening a lot you can almost ignore the time signatures - they are usually just groupings for convenience - and just keep a steady quaver/crotchet/whatever in your head.

Finally, try not to get bogged down in the detail if it means you'll risk losing your place overall. In a first run through a piece, better to play some inaccurate rhythms than to get lost altogether!

Hope that's some kind of help! :-)

3/8 in simple not compound.

So it is. Oops.