Sight reading - material?

[steve jones]

Hey all,

Im thinking of doing my ABRSM grades in piano and theory. But my musicial skills are kind of a mish mash! I studied classical music as a kid (guitar) doing a few grades, then went to contempary guitar, then did a degree in music technology, THEN decided to learn piano.

Im confident that I can learn grade 8 repertoire on the piano, and Im also confident that I can do the grade 8 theory at next opportunity. However, I know for a cast iron fact that my sight reading is barely about grade 3 level. It will be the main hurdle I suspect.

I have all the 'ABRSM Specimen Sight Reading' books on order, and Im going to use them hopefully to gauge the level at which I'll be expected to perform AND as some practice material.

But the thing is, surely you need to be doing this alot to get better, right? If I wanted to spend 15-30 mins practicing sight reading each day, then Id need atleast one or two new pieces to work with. Over a six month period, thats hundreds of new pieces!

My question is, where do you find suitable practice material? And how to do you know its of an appropriate level before you look at it?

Perhaps there are compilations available with loads of short pieces in, all around a certain level? You know, like 'Easy Romantic Pieces Vol 154', lol.

Many thanks!

SJ

[minstrel]

Just pull out the books from a couple grades below and start playing them.

The popular pieces books have lots of pieces that should be sight-readable as well..

[steve jones]

Minstrel,

Tell me, how I was looking at some of the Specimen pieces very briefly... they appear to be about grade 4 (ish) level for the grade 8 exam. Would that be about accurate in your opinion?

SJ

[rc]

I'm in a similar boat, various gaps in my overall skill, and sightreading is a glaring weakness...

I found a large stack of sheet music magazines from the 70's and 80's that my grandmother owned, literally called Sheet Music magazine, geared towards beginner early students, with a wide variety of styles.  I don't know if it's still around.  I also found various collections (pop hits of the 70's, christmas tunes).  Scour around, surely somebody in your family or relatives of friends will have old sheet music sitting around somewhere collecting dust.  There must be boatloads of the stuff sitting in attics and basements everywhere!

[korsol]

sry that I am this noob, but what exactly is Sight reading  and how do you do it? is it like reading sheets without playin?

[Bob]

Sight reading means playing through a piece without ever having looked at it before.  Playing the music "at sight" or at "first sight."  No practice.

[berrt]

sry that I am this noob, but what exactly is Sight reading  and how do you do it? is it like reading sheets without playin?

it is somehow a misnomer - should better be "sight playing": means to play a piece you don't know from a score you never saw before.

B.

[theodore]

I am looking for some drills or a method where I can learn to play specific keys without actually looking at the piano keyboard. Or more specifically I would like to learn how to play left hand leaps without looking and with a good degree of accuracy. 

Does anyone have any tips as to how this can be accomplished? It would be great for sight reading new music.

Ted

[timland]

Over the years I've collected about 500 Etude magazines that I use for sight reading. Each has 10 - 20 graded pieces plus many interesting articles.  You can pick them up cheap on Ebay or in antique stores.

[lostinidlewonder]

How did we learn to read words? We started when we learnt the alphabet then we started to work out how two letters can produce one sound and so on. Reading music is absolutely no different. The problem people who cannot sight read have is very simple; they have not practiced reading enough and do not know how to read groups of notes at a time. I am not going to describe how to read groups of notes at a time one can learn that from any good lesson book or your own investigation into pattern observation from sheets to keys.

With music we can most definately replace reading with memory (because playing from memory sounds a lot better that from sight in ALL cases), however this leaves us with a very slow progress. The simple solution is to READ MORE, even if you think you cannot sight read, just put the sheets up infront of you and start playing without stopping. This sounds simple but I assure you will not want to do this every day, but you must force yourself to do it.

Most people cannot sight read because they do not practice it, sight reading is extremely boring so I doubt many people would enjoy doing it. It is also can be mentally very taxing. What is very important is to know what you can sight read easily and what starts to become difficult. It is the same process we take when learning to read "big" words, most people learn to do it without even realising that they learnt it. But that is beacuse they did it every day for years and years and you are exposed and more importantly forced to read words every day. With music however we are not really forced into sight reading, but we just have to make it as inescapable as the alphabet around you.

I think learning to read groups of notes at a time is important because this connects to us being able to hear the music while you are reading it without playing. (if you read individual notes you cannot hear the overall sounds of a piece and also note that we do not actualy read every single position of each dot we use theory [the way in which a group of notes can be generally formed] to fill in the gaps) How can one do that without hearing a performance of the piece to start off with? Well first of all not many of us have to play music we have never heard before (and that is a cruel practice in my opinion for any teacher to impose on their students), we will always have at least one "listening" of a piece before we play it more often than not. This listening exposure is I think essential to aid our ability to read/study music and. We should only use the notes to tell us where the fingers go, the sound is within out heads. When we have no concept of the sound we need to produce then we are quite lost when we read.

So all you need to do to improve sight reading is

1) Sight read ANYTHING but know what is EASY and HARD to sight read for YOU and know where the turning point from easy to difficult exactly is. From this we can measure our improvement.

2) Practice listening to music and following it with the sheets in front of you.

3) Sight read every day.

Of course there are specific procedures you can undertake to improve your ability to read groups of notes at a time, but that is a different discussion.