Sight reading resources that should work

So as anyone who has glanced at this blog is aware, I suck at sight reading.  I didn't start learning to read while playing as most beginning classical guitarists do, instead I was much more comfortable memorizing and playing from memory.  Fine, this has worked out OK in the most part, except for just a few drawbacks, including (but not limited to)

- not knowing where I am if my GT points at the music,
- getting notes wrong and not realizing it,
- ignoring dynamics and tempo markings,
- having way too much work to do in orchestra ( admittedly I actually do read the music as I'm playing in orchestra providing I've figured out where to play it in advance and committed that to memory).

So I've been on a mission to improve.  All the advice says to do a little bit each day.  Fine.  I bought some excellent books designed to practice reading and worked through them.  However being old and slow, I found that I wasn't improving noticeably, and further the books got too hard, too fast for me.  I needed something where I could progress at my own pace with lots of repetition.

We are undoubtedly blessed with a wealth of free and paid resources on the web, however which ones are worth pursuing?  The first really useful resource (mostly because I can set it at a level that is just a bit more than comfortable and repeat endless examples) is sightreadingfactory.com.  It's reasonably priced and has a huge variety of options for customization, including # of measures, position, notes, key sig, accidentals, leaps, rhythm difficulty, syncopation, disappearing measures, etc.   The big thing (apart from the endless examples) that makes this worth the subscription money is that it plays the examples along with you so you have real time feedback on how close you are to what's actually written.  So I'm still doing C major in 1st 5th and 7th... but planning on adding G soon 😉  Another site that I haven't tried (because it is MUCH more expensive) is sightreadingmastery.com  Keep me posted if you try it and find it is super-helpful!

One limitation of the 'factory' is that it is all single line music.  This is all very well, but in my experience guitar music has enough intervals, chords, and partial chords to completely throw me off even when I'm happily managing to read the single notes.   So while searching for a site that would help with learning to translate groups of dots on the page to shapes on the fretboard without having to laboriously figure out each note, I came across  fundamental-changes site:  written by Rob Thorpe.  It's actually the 5th in a series to learn sight reading from scratch with lots of examples - in fact I probably need to go back to the prior pages before getting into full chords.  It also has a lot of recommended books that support and expand upon the examples on the site.

Want some real music to practice on?  There's an almost limitless supply on Delcamp of course, however they're indexed by composer and not graded, so you may have to hunt around for pieces that are the appropriate level.  However if you sign up on Delcamp.net  and post a couple of times, you get access to lots of graded pieces to practice on (right at the bottom of the rather confusing table of menus),  so you can pick the difficulty that works for you.

Now all I have to do is follow through on my own best intentions and keep at it!