Reading Challenge #2 (watch out for the rests!)

Happy February & Black History Month! As I write this email, New York City is getting a ton of snow ❄️It's a day like this, that I am quite grateful to have a warm home. I'm also excited that this is my 10th newsletter. If you want to see the past contents, you can always go to my blog page.

Today, I'm sharing my "Reading Challenge #2!" 🥳 (You can download the PDF via the link)

Learning that people enjoyed the “Polyrhythm Reading Challenge”, I made another open instrumentation rhythm challenge that contains 4 levels. This one is focused on our ability to recognize and play music with many rests.

I wrote this challenge in two ways: 1) with melodic material 2) rhythm only, so that one can choose to just work on the rhythm or both notes and rhythm. ⭐️💫

This challenge will train your ability to:

• Sightread rhythms and/ or notes

• Read various length rests

• Play rhythms accurately in quarter notes, 8th notes, triples, and 16th notes division

How to Practice:

• I recommend that you sightread this the first time you try playing so that you can test your sight-reading ability

• Always put on a metronome and incrementally speed up when you feel comfortable

• Record yourself to double-check your accuracy

• To make it more challenging, you can reduce the metronome “tick” - for example, silence the beat 2 and 4, so that you only hear the “tick” every half note. Similarly, you can silence beat 2, 3, and 4, so that you only hear the downbeat every bar to test your time.

As always, please feel free to contact me with any comments, requests, or questions by replying to this email. It’s my goal to make this newsletter as useful to you as possible!

Here is a little inspiration for today ⭐️

“It’s not where you come from, it’s where you are going that counts.”

- Ella Fitzgerald

Have a wonderful week & Happy Practicing!