Disparit between Technique and Sight Reading (advice needed)

[hanrhee]

Hi all,

I just joined this community and am really grateful for all the stuff in this website.
I'm a late beginner and have played piano for about 2 years.
Probably the biggest challenge for me is sightreading.

I can play some pieces at level 3~6 and they don't feel that hard to play but honestly
I  have trouble sightreading new stuff at level 2. Although not much fun, I decided to play a lot of elementary stuff in Czerny exericses from the beginning (probably around  level 1 at the beginning).
I really want to improve my reading and will do whatever it takes. What are logical steps to follow to correctly develop sight reading progressively?
I also want to hear your success stories - how you started off as a poor sight read er and really became good at it. Thank you for your time and looking forward to hear the stories and comments.

[rc]

Well I can tell you how I went from not being able to sightread at all to being able to sightread easy pieces, for what it's worth

First step was a quicker note recognition:  this dot = this note = this key on the piano, until I became very familiar with every note on the page.  Basic stuff, but sometimes I would get a C mixed up with an A, or have to think a moment what was on a ledger line.

Next was getting more comfortable to play without watching my hands, there's no way to sightread well if we're looking up and down all the time.

For quite a while I was reading very slowly, one beat at a time.  Read notes, play them, read the next notes play them.  It was hard to create any sort of flow like this.  Impossible actually, but maybe it was a necessary stage for me to go through to ingrain that page -> keyboard recognition.

Another piece of the puzzle was to view harmonies at a glace.  To help develop this I would look at simple pieces (a hymnbook is great) and identify the harmonies they used before trying to play it.  This helped me familiarize how the chords looked on the page and over time I came to recognize common chords at a glace (this next bar starts on A7 then goes to a G here).  That was a big help.

Also looking through a piece before playing helped me to identify rhythms quicker, I would try and hear the different rhythms in my head before starting.

Eventually like this I came to recognize notes, harmonies and rhythms much faster, I could take in more information which helped me read a bit ahead and create flow.  I could take in bigger chunks at a time, instead of note-by-note I could take in maybe 2 beats or a bar at a time.

It was a slow process for me, very frustrating at first but as I started to get it I was more able to enjoy it, so now I just read a little every day and try to enjoy the process.