This site is a repository for the free sightreading sheets that Jeff Olson has been handing out at every monthly meeting of the Boulder Guitar Society since October, 2023. The idea of the handouts is to provide some fun, friendly, long-term, continuing encouragement for members to develop their sightreading skills, and the idea of this repository is the same on a wider scale.

All of the site's content, including the text, music and graphics, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License making it freely available for copying, redistribution, modification and reuse, even commercial resale, with the main proviso that each such usage provide proper attribution to this source and author (Monthly Fretboard Exercises by J. J. Olson).

Each printed handout is a single sheet. The front page has the music to be sightread and begins with a whimsical fretboard graphic echoing the theme of that month's music. The music consists of simple melodies presented as one or more "exercises" without any identification of its origins. The idea is that you sightread the score and try to name that tune by listening. The real identities are listed on the back page, typically with a story and entertaining links to wikipedia and youtube examples, all for the love of the music.

These are called "fretboard exercises" because they all come from a series of forthcoming books Jeff plans to publish on IMSLP: (1) Beginning Fretboard Exercises (2) Diatonic Fretboard Exercises (3) Chromatic Fretboard Exercises. These books contain thousands of such exercises that Jeff has arranged, beginning in 2016, from public domain sources. Rather than teaching general sightreading techniques, like lookahead and rhythm reading, these books provide a learnable system for knowing where to place your finger on the fretboard when you see a note in music notation. They emphasize playing the same exercise in various fixed positions on the neck, and each exercise indicates the difficulty, on a scale from 0 to 9 with 0 being easiest, of playing it in each of those positions (that's what the Roman numerals and grades indicate at the start of each exercise).

In addition to a PDF for each handout this site has a web page for each handout that captures the email announcement as it appears in the BGS monthly newletter. The web page, just like the email announcement, has a link to the PDF. These announcements are like movie trailers; they introduce the handout, giving the theme of the month without revealing the identities of the pieces. Just some hints to get people interested. But you have to get the PDF in order to see any music.

To navigate this site, if you know the month and year of a particular handout you can directly access its announcement page or its PDF using the name format "MonYYYY" where "Mon" is the abbreviated month name and YYYY is the year. For example, the August 2024 announcement is at Aug2024.html and its PDF is at Aug2024.pdf. Once you get to some handout's announcement page, you can click to the next or previous month using the light-gray arrows on either side of the top line. If you're looking for a particular topic, you can do an in-page search of the Complete List, which links to every handout. And if you want to see what music pieces have been used in these handouts and where, consult the Music Index.