A Great Place to Start

If you are going to become a professional musician for session work, playing in theatre bands and teaching, you are going to need to learn to read music. In fact if you just want to pick up a song book and learn a song you will at least need to read a chord chart.

This does not need to be a horrible time-consuming experience and can be learnt at any age.

I am recommending a book called Music Reading for Guitar - The Complete Method by David Oaks.

You can buy it from Amazon or a music shop for around £12, maybe even off ebay for less.

It is recommended by the ACM (Academy of Contemporary Music) tutors as well.

It starts from the very basics and goes through to reading implied harmonies and advanced pieces.

It also has loads of well known pieces so you can practise the skills you have learnt and learn a song or melody.

When starting, and depending on how much time you have, you will probably be able to do a page a day and remember to go over the basics a few times as it is very important to get these down at the start.

Have fun.