"How's your reading?" Now, how do you even answer a question like that? It's not like tennis where there's rankings, or like education, where you take SATs or whatever. No one asks you how well you read in the literary sense, they just assume you can. That's also true in music...unless you're a guitarist. But once you crack the code, you get all kinds of opportunities doing shows, theatre, and recording as well as teaching opportunities. In other words, a career.

Guitarists have a couple special challenges here. For one, there has never been one single standard method for the instrument that includes reading as a day to day reality, unless you study classic guitar. And most classical guitarists don't really become strong readers either, mainly because of the second challenge, the complexity of the guitar compared to other instruments. The main reason most trained sax players are better readers than comparably trained guitarists is that sax is a simpler instrument, at least insofar as the difficulty of reading on it.

So my first, best, bit of advice is to simplify your guitar. Year One: Learn everything, all keys, all rhythms, correct picking, articulation, etc, but only in the first position. The big problem, the one that separates guitarists from the rest, are the positions, playing the same note in different places, with all the other notes rearranged every time you shift. Do all that later. If you start in first position only, you are facing the challenges of reading in the same way other instrumentalists do. Simplify the guitar, learn to read, tackle the rest of the instrument another day.

A great exercise: Take any piece of music and set a metronome to 40. SAY the name of each note every time you hear a click as well as play it. Ignore rhythms, everything is a quarter note. Ties count as one note. Observe the form and the key. Do not stop, do not correct anything. If a sheet has 62 notes on it, play it over 62 beats, and DON'T STOP. If you are not ready for note #7, let it pass and come in on note (and beat) number 8. Saying the name is more important than playing the note. When you can do this with anything, increase speed by 10 and repeat. And when you can get it up to 100, you've got something.

Year Two: Learn the upper positions with CAGED fingerings with specific keys in the appropriate positions. When you are presented with a chart, look first at key, time signature, form, and range. Range tells you where to play it. Key of Ab with the highest note being Eb above the staff? 8th position. A jazz player should focus on the keys of G, C, F, Bb, Eb, Ab and Db first, each of those in the five CAGED fingerings. That will keep you busy.

Learn rhythm. There are 8 rhythmic groupings that you see over and over again. In 8th notes they are A) 4 eighths, B) quarter-two eighths, C) eighth-quarter-eighth, D) two eighths-quarter, E) two quarters, F) dotted quarter-eighth, G) eighth-dotted quarter, and H) half note. A measure of eighth note rhythm in 4/4 time will have two of these in each measure, often connected by ties. Quarter note rhythm are the same 8 rhythms expressed with bigger note values. My point is there's a system, and it's not infinite. So learn rhythm.

Learn theory. If you see a group of notes and they form a C-7 arpeggio or you see another grouping that's a chromatic scale fragment, you should recognize them as such. Read notes in groups.

Hate to tell you this, but you need to know bass clef too. And chords. Bass clef isn't any harder then treble, it's just a realigned staff. I used to make up my own clefs to make myself read by interval. And I taught myself to read double stops and triads from accordion books. Bigger chords from big band charts and pop sheet music. Piano has chords that you can't play without leaving out notes, but you can get good at knowing what note to leave out. Just don't add something that shouldn't be there.

How long does all this take? With the right teacher, willingness to put yourself out on a limb, and maniacal drive and focus, three or four years. You won't think you're ready, but you'll always feel that way, so you may as well jump in.