Recognizing Leaps while Reading

The advancing sight reader begins to register leaps, acting upon them quickly to avoid stumbling. By comparing the distance between two notes on the staff, the distance of the leap can be estimated.

This exercise is a bit more challenging. Don’t worry about the timing of it. Play it slowly. The point is not to play a piece of music, but to practice the recognition of leaps, or jumps from one melody note to another.

Leaping in the key of C

This exercise is aimed at helping you practice recognizing leaps in C. Each measure includes movements of either a second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh or octave. Hopefully you can see from this example that each type of leap is visually consistent on the staff and you can eventually learn to recognize them in your sight-reading.

Leaping in the key of F

This exercise is exactly the same, but in the key of F.

The result is that eventually you will learn to recognize a leap and play it more or less immediately. A leap of a sixth is six lines or spaces away from the first note. (E to C is a sixth). And once you’ve got that, there are really only two types of sixths you’ll encounter in music. they’ll usually be major sixths or minor sixths. Simplifies things, doesn’t it?

As the creator of Hub Guitar, Grey has compiled hundreds of guitar lessons, written several books, and filmed hundreds of video lessons. He teaches private lessons in his Boston studio, as well as via video chat through TakeLessons.