Sight Reading

[victor_ching]

What is the best way to practise and improve sight reading? I am terrible at sight reading and would like to improve it.

Victor Ching

[instromp]

One way is find yourself a hymn book.They are very helpful when it comes to sight reading, my teacher gave me one and my sight reading has improved because before..well i think u know the answer to that, and also its a great way to make cash on the weekends playing for church

Umm another way to improve is playing Pop music.You can go to your local music and get some sheets to maybe one of your favorite's and learn it.Since Pop has easy chords and readable notes it should help your sight reading improve.

And learning your scales and chords is a great way to improve sightreading(i think so it helped me) .By always practicing them, you will become familiar with thier location on the piano and would not need to always look down when trying to play something.

That's my 2 cents,hoped i helped.

[kempff1234]

One of the best ways to improve, is to sight read as much as possible! Just keep sight reading different scores at different tempi, it has worked with me.

[kony]

tonal music - learn to recognize chords. also the shape of chords, e.g. 7th chords look distinct. that way you don't have to look at every note of the chord to play it. instant recognition of notes on staves are a must. esp. notes on ledger lines since they will be the main hindrance to a smooth playing.

atonal music - much harder, since chord recognition won't help you here. i wouldn't practice this before you get to a fairly substantial skill level with tonal music first though.

[thierry13]

A fun thing to try, is to learn something as FAR of the sheet music as you can, memorising AUTOMATICALLY, and THEN, when you have it all memorized, and done, THEN sightread it(play it with the sheets, wich you never did before). That's not the key, just a random trick. Of course, the best is to do as MUCH as you can.

[rhapsody in orange]

Like what Kony has said, recognizing a chord would be better than reading each individual note. The same goes for all other notes. Try to recognize the intervals involved rather than read every note. Try to see if there are any connections between the notes (if they're an arpeggio, a particular scale, sequences etc).
Sight-reading more would definitely help too!

[mike_lang]

I think that another important way to improve sight reading is to learn pieces by many different composers - and learn them both quickly and well.  I think it is the combination of this and practicing actual sight reading that will improve your ability the most.

best
ML

[ilikepie]

Practicing is and always will be the only way to improve sight reading.

[jre58591]

i always try to listen to music while following along in the score (when possible). ive been doing it for years and my sight-reading abilities have skyrocketed since i started doing this.

[kempff1234]

another way which you should probably stay away from is to not practice whatever you were supoose to practice for ur next music class and then lie sight read it in front of ur teacher. I've done it so many times...it does work...

[demented cow]

Apart from the obviously necessary practice of sightreading lots of different types of music (starting with simple stuff like hymns, simple pieces, etc.), the principle of breaking big problems down into smaller problems (which is a fundamental tenet of practising pieces and many other things such as sport movements) is useful. Here are some examples of what I mean:
-ONe of my biggest problems in sightreading used to be reading syncopated passages or other ryhthmically complicated passages, whereas I could sightread rhymically simple things far better, even if they had many more notes. For instance, I could play lots of Mozart passages better than I could play the exact notes of a piano transcription of a pop song, even thought the latter looks easier to most people. So I tried various things which involved isolating the rhythmic problems: e.g. clapping the rhythms of some pop song, or trying to just get a general feel for what particular rhythms sound like. E.g. if you have a dotted crotchet followed by a quaver tied to another crotchet, try to learn the pattern as a whole unit, which saves having to count half notes to get the rhythmic values right.
-If you can't read chords with more than 3 notes in them easily, then just write down lots and lots of cords in different keys on sheets of music paper and practise reading them (vary the order, so that you are not just memorising the chord sequences by hand memory).
-If you can't read very high notes, then work on them as a special problem.
Things like this helped me, and I think I gave enough examples for the general principle of isolating specific problems to be applicable to problems you might have that I haven't mentioned.
The Cow

[netzow]

Also something that helps is being forced to sight read under pressure. (at least I have found this to be true). However in the end the best way to improve sight reading (as has been mentioned) is to practice sight reading.

[loops]

Also something that helps is being forced to sight read under pressure. (at least I have found this to be true). However in the end the best way to improve sight reading (as has been mentioned) is to practice sight reading.

Sorry but I couldn't agree less! You can't sit a child with a book and expect reading to magically happen, same with a maths sum etc etc etc.  Adding pressure to a mysterious unexplained process only adds humiliation.There needs to a *process* that is pulled apart, explained and built up. And no-one explains it.
I'm reading this thread to get good pointers and...well...so far, there are none.

[timland]

Try playing very easy material with the metronome going and try not to pause or stop if you miss notes. Pick a moderate speed. If you stumble alot slow the metronome down. Also play through more difficult matererial very slowly while trying not to miss any notes.  It's very important not to be looking at your hands while you do this. Only play through a piece 1 or 2 times then go to a different one that you have never played.
It can be very difficult at first if you're in the habit of looking at your hands but eventually you'll be able to play the correct notes without feeling or looking.

[netzow]

Sorry but I couldn't agree less! You can't sit a child with a book and expect reading to magically happen, same with a maths sum etc etc etc.  Adding pressure to a mysterious unexplained process only adds humiliation.There needs to a *process* that is pulled apart, explained and built up. And no-one explains it.
I'm reading this thread to get good pointers and...well...so far, there are none.

If none of these pointers are good do you have any good ones?

[loops]

If none of these pointers are good do you have any good ones?

If I had them I wouldn't be looking for tips 

What I think is needed is stuff about being able to focus your eyes on 2 staves and several measures at once
- widening the focal field . Then there is something (I'm guessing) about left/right independence.
If you read about right/left hemisphere abilities, it's clear that left and right hands are controlled by
different hemispheres. Now, when I read and then play music, it's one hand at a time and then "woven
together"..even if it's one note (or one beat of notes) for the right and one note (beat of notes) for the left and then put together, over and over, nevertheless the processes are separate...and hence too slow.
I should say I am not dyslexic, but despite having nearly photographic memory and highly trained
mathematical mind (symbol recognition, manipulation etc etc), and making all due effort, good sight reading eludes me. So, there's something cognitive I've missed, or isn't coming naturally. It could be I have some
weird neurological "twist".....

[timland]

There's a 3 volume sight reading course from Ekay Music Inc. called "Speed-Reading At The Keyboard" that's helpful. Much of it is drills to help you speed up your ability to read a measure.

Tim

[penguinlover]

This is how I try to train my students:
   I pick a piece that is fairly easy for them, a bit below their level.  I put the music in front of them, and then talk them through it.  I say, what is the first thing we look for (key signature).  Then we notice the time sig., then the form - ABA, etc.  Then we look for the roadmap, you know repeats, codas, etc.  Then, before a note is played, we look for patterns.  Recognizable scales, chords, repeated notes, repeated patterns.  Any unusual rhythmic patterns and such.  The I say, try it.  Don't stop when you make a mistake, just plow on through it.  The more you do it, the better you'll get.  These are all obvious things, but you asked.  Thought I would state the obvious.  My first response would be "Just do it."

[lostinidlewonder]

Improvement to your sight reading is done in two different ways, accuracy of reading and speed. Each one needs to be targeted seperately.

To improve speed of sight reading take these factors into account when sight reading;

1) Take out easy music, easier is realative to your skill. If Liszt Transcendentale Etudes are easy for you fantastic! But for all us lesser mortals some simpler pieces with repetitive patterns might be good.

2) Play at tempo or around about the standard pace, not slower.

3) Don't stop if you make a mistake. Your playing should sound horrible, but the idea is to keep the brain moving and eyes reading. This may be tough, we are often by habit want to correct ourselves, but we are not working the accuracy. The speed which is developed through putting ourselves in constant reading mode, even with errors in our fingers and notes struck.  So long you keep moving through the piece and play the first note starting each bar correct (so that you generate a confident beat) You may feel completely lost but that is ok. Keep a few pieces to repeat this process for a few weeks every day and unavoidably you will increase the accuracy of reading too but more importantly your speed.

4) Neglect rhythm. This is developed mainly by your internal ear, not the fingers and does not have any place in accuracy or sped of musical reading. Play all notes the same, parts where movement of notes are easier you can speed up, harder sections may be slowed down a little. The music you sight should sound nothing rhythmically to what it sounds like when played well.

5) DO NOT watch your hands. This has no place in sight reading. Unless you can look at your hands and the page at the same time, but for us without individual moving eyes, do not sight reading and look at your hands. This is very tough at first because we feel blind to what we are doing. I will discuss how to develop a touch for the keyboard later. But for now use the 2 and 3 black grouped notes as a guide and feeling for the notes in between these and the 2 coupled white notes. These are what generate the basic feel for piano. Ask a blind man how he plays the piano and you will get great insight, looking at the hands disrupts the position of the eyes in the sheet music. It will slow the speed down and increase inaccuracy. Sighting now and again the hands mayy be important for certain movements of the hand however, but should be limited as much as possible even in large leaps.

6) Take groups of notes in one go, try not to read single notes, try to see 2 notes at the same time or even 4 or more.

Observe how these groups affect the hand and notice any repetition which comes up try to memorise what you did before. This will increase the speed of reading and develop your musical thinking, visualisation process and ultimately memory speed.



Increasing accuracy is very similar to improving your speed of reading but a few changes:

1) Super slow playing. Play at a pathetically slow speed, giving yourself enough time to read notes.

2) Play with 100% note accuracy. No mistakes are allowed here. Also this demands that you not look at your hands, but this rule is no as strict as speed. You should look if you feel you will play the wrong note. But if you look notice where the note(s) you should find by touch are. How ddi you get to it? How does that feel? What does that change look like on the sheet music? These questions have plenty of time to process with your super slow tempo.

3) Neglect Rhythm

4)Read in groups

5) Correct mistakes, which is logical since we are working on accuracy.

6) Try to find a super slow tempo that is constant and not changing in speed as we did in the speed training. Even if there are parts you can play fast with sight do not play them faster. Leave that for your speed training.


I would say 10 minutes sessions for speed/accuracy of reading is sufficient.You should strick to this for 2 weeks straight and then assess yourself. Neglecting one session here or there doesn't have the same impact of improvement but its of course better than totally neglecting this study in your daily piano habits.


One of the most important skill to have while sight reading is the ability to play without looking at our hands. Every time we look at our hands we take our eyes away from the sheet music, this in turn slows down our rate of reading and anticipation of what lies ahead. Why can a blind person play the piano without ever looking at the keyboard? There can be many reason, most people will say that they do see the keyboard but in a different way, so too we have to remove ourselves from only looking with our eyes and look with our mind and fingers instead.

Two Blacks: On the left side we have C#Db on the right side we have D#Eb
Three Blacks: On the left side F#Gb, the middle G#Ab and the right side A#Bb

This is fairly obvious to observe with our eyes, now you have to do the same with just the hands. How can you sense that there are 2 blacks or 3 blacks near our hand? How can we feel them beneath our fingers without having to play them?

The next pattern which is a little harder to see but still quite obvious are the adjacent white notes (that is white notes which are directly next to each other without a black note seperating them;

Two Whites: On the right base of the three black groups BCb and on the left base of the two black groups we have CB#.

Two Whites: On the right base of the two black groups EFb and on the left base of the three black groups we have FE#

(Note the two whites can also be considered as bases of the two blacks or three blacks)

Finally we are left with white notes which are between the black notes, that is the D between the two blacks, and the G, on the left side and A on the right side between the three black notes.

How does this help? We should refer each note we play with respect to the patterns described above. It might seem very long winded to see the piano like this, and it is when you first do it, but eventually it becomes quite habitual and subconscious and even while sight reading music we will start to think in our minds eye where the notes are, where our hand is at the keyboard without ever looking down. We have to make that effort not to look at our hands though, so thinking about these shapes and where notes are when we are playing is very important. A good excerises would be to play single notes, closing your eyes, and move up one octave and down with random notes, scale patterns. Move onto chords, feel the shapes, and where other notes you need to get to are before having to play them.

It is important when you correct your fingers after a mistake that you don't simply move the wrong finger into the correct postion and carry on. Correct the wrong notes, then reset the hand to play the whole group again, to feel what it should feel like when played right. Note errors do not help us to achieve muscular memory, they also do not help us to play without looking at the keyboard! So when you make these errors while sight reading make sure you start again and consciously focus your effort to hit the right note by observing the pattern in the piano, then forgetting about it once you achieve several successful repetitions.

To play without looking at hands requires that you play consistently correct to start off with. Making mistakes will cause more mistakes, and if the mistakes are random then you really have to work out the whys behind it before you can imagine to memorise a piece or even play it well.

[loops]

Thanks for the great post, lostinidlewonder

I like your idea of shaping the hand to a phrase as you read. It seems to me if you can transfer what you read
to your hands, you can get on with reading the next bit. I will definitely experiment with that. I'll read your post
again in a few months and see what other tips leap out at me.

I've really struggled, and am still struggling over sightreading (as opposed to reading).
My problem is disorientation.
I've taken to putting a scarf over the keys between my hands and my eyes, the scarf is
held up somehow so as not to get in my way, and that has helped. If you can't see
you don't bother looking. Looking around is disorienting so that's one source of problem gone.
Loking at different staves is disorienting. I can actually sightread one stave at a time pretty well.
That's why I'm interested in taking in both at once, not moving eyes up and down.

I also realised I had several "keyboards", the actual one, the one in my head, and one
under each hand. I've managed to get all the keyboards matched up better.

It's very, very slowly improving. But in my last lesson I managed my end of a simple duet that
I really struggled on a few months ago (long enough ago to have forgotten it), my teacher was
seeing if my sightreading had improved in the meantime, and it had. So I can heart from that.

[talleyrand]

Hello lostinidlewonder

Thank you for such a tremendously detailed and informative post. Have to say there's one area where I'd disagree, and that's with the rhythm. Speaking strictly from personal experience I'd say a strong and driving rhythm  is the one factor above all that's a prerequisite for fluent sight-reading--that's why this elusive skill is so often developed "under pressure" by playing along with other musicians.

[penguinlover]

I love the detail in that post.  I say just do it, and you guys tell exactly how to do it.  Sure gave me something to think about.  Guess it was just put in words what I do when I sightread.  Thanks

[mcgillcomposer]

These are all very good replies and perhaps I can add something that has worked for me. It is a great suggestion to read music of all styles...in addition I think it is very beneficial to work on music ABOVE your skill level. I remember when I was starting out (3 or 4 years into playing the piano) I started working on Tchaikovsky's 1st concerto. It was hell, but when I finally got through it I found that I could read things at sight never possible before. It also made the concerto easier to learn a few years ago when I seriously undertook it as a project.

best of luck!

- Andrew

[lostinidlewonder]

Speaking strictly from personal experience I'd say a strong and driving rhythm  is the one factor above all that's a prerequisite for fluent sight-reading--that's why this elusive skill is so often developed "under pressure" by playing along with other musicians.\

When I start to study rhythm with students I take it away from sight reading improvements (i.e: Accuracy and speed). Reading rhythms requires that you can absorb a group of notes at the same time and understand how this group of notes is pronounced rhythmically (to me it is like how many syllables  are in a word, that feeling of beat to the word).  A lot of people try to count rhythms but that can be extremely inefficient, you should be able to look at a group of notes and play it rhythmically by using past experience of what the piece actually sounds like.

If you are having to read rhythms you are reading too slow, that is my point. You should only need the notes and your memory of what the piece sounds like should guide how you play the notes rhythmically.

Of course for those who try to play a piece they never heard you can hit a brick wall, however I try to tell students that you should be able to use past experience to fill in the gaps and learn pieces you have never heard. The real point is that you should not try to improve your rhythmical reading until you basically have the ability to transfer the dots to hand position/fingering on the keyboard. Basic undotted rhythms should be of course well known, that is a given you must know these, but the more complicated rhythms that you encounter shouldn't be considered unless you are at that standard, you cannot learn much from a classical viewpoint if you are reading complicated rhtyhms (unless you study "jazz" piano which is all rhythm based).

Sight reading challenges so many people simply because they do not practice it. I assure you, the more you read the better you get, it is the same when you learnt to read in primary school. We learn by constant repetition and LISTENING to what words sound like. Same with studying reading music. You must read music and AT THE SAME TIME be listening to the piece being played, whether that is the sound from a CD player, someone playing, or the sound in your own head. I tell al my students that it is vital that they listen to piano music and read the sheet music simultaneously, it is just invaluable experience to our reading ability, but something many students neglect. Through "listening and reading" at the same time we learn to understand how rhythms can be written and what they sound like as a whole group instead of individually which can confuse if you try to disect rhythms and try to understand them in that inefficient way.

Of course this is all general talk, I cannot be specific because I do not know what particular misundertsanding of rhythms each individual person might have. We would have to take out some music sit together at the keyboard and look at some examples to find that out.

[sevencircles]

I improved my sightreading by playing midifiles in Noteworthy composer.

I saw what songs I could play by ear looked like on the page and that helped a lot.

[loops]

To all those posters/readers who think if you're bad at sightreading it's *only* because you don't practice,
and all you have to do is "just do it", etc etc etc
have alook at the post by pianowolfi
in https://www.pianostreet.com/smf/index.php/topic,21769.msg240566.html#msg240566
the last paragraph.