Matt's post was about sight reading skills, how generally poor these skills are among jazz guitarists and finding interesting ways to develop these skills. For myself, I'm great with the top two and the bottom two strings, but not so good with the middle two strings. The reason is simple: I've played a lot of charts written out in the correct register for guitar (an octave higher than the standard lead sheet) and those charts largely make use of the top two strings for melody and the bottom to strings for naming the chord changes (e.g., root position G7 can be played in either 3E or 10A--I'll introduce more of this in future posts). The important point here is that we learn by doing. But what you do is important. Although being bored is also important to jazz creativity, playing obscure sight-reading exercises may be just a little too boring.
Matt's suggestion is brilliant. Get a copy of The Real Book, start on page 1 and sight read four songs a day. Don't worry about fingering technique, use fingerboard charts (here and here) when you get stuck, but just plow through this concentrating on reading the notes and playing the tune. Play everything as written without transcribing up an octave. Since you will know most of the tunes (if you don't, find them on YouTube and get familiar--this is part of learning the jazz book), you will also know when you hit a wrong note.
Another way to do this is to print and play four Wikifonia lead sheets (here) every day. When you are just starting, pick songs you have heard before. As you get better, (1) pick songs you don't know and (2) transpose songs into different keys, increasing the number of flats and sharps over time. Don't annotate the songs for fingerings. Just play and move on.
Matt suggests going on to comp the chord progressions as if you were accompanying a singer, being careful not to conflict with the singer's melody line (which you already know at this point). If you have the The Real Book (pretty much a necessity if you want to work with other jazz musicians), chord comping works great. The changes are quite accurate and sophisticated (in a future post, I'll provide a simple explanation for how to play any root position chord you might find in The Real Book). If you're using the Wikifonia lead sheets, you might run into some problems here since not all the chords are accurate (John Mehegan has a lesson on page 201 of the Jazz Improvisation book titled 'Sheet Music Conversion' which may be necessary for some Wikifonia lead sheets and I'll cover it in a future post, but we need a lot of jazz theory first).
Matt has a number of other great suggestions and I strongly recommend reading his blog entry on Jazz Guitar Sight Reading Skills. The other suggestion I would have is to write a lot of music, but more on that in a future post. For now, here's an example exercise:
Ex. 1 Download four versions of Sunny from Wikifonia (here). Use the "Transpose" button on the right side of the page and choose "+3 (3 flats)" for the first (key of E flat major), choose "+5 (1 flat)" for the second (key of F major), choose "-5 (1 sharp)" for the third (key of G major) and finally choose "0 (-)" for the fourth (key of C major). Play the melody for each version without annotation. Play the melody in both single-note and octaves. Play each at different positions on the fingerboard (for the E-flat key signautre, try the third and the tenth fret). Then, return to a question posed in an earlier post (here): Does Wes Montgomery make any key changes in his version of Sunny (here)?
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