Hello & Question on Richman's book

[nachoba]

Hi,
Itīs my first post in the forum. Iīve been reading it a lot for past weeks and decided to join, so here goes a collective: hello.
Iīve been reading threads on sight-reading as I want to seriously improve my ability, but also ended up reading a lot on piano technique, on how to practice, and on how to concentrate.
Right now I bought Richmanīs book and I've already started. I would like to hear comments from people that actually followed Richmanīs program.
Thanks in advance and best regards

nachoba

[faulty_damper]

It's a very basic reading program that deals entirely with the technical aspects of reading.  In the book, it discourages reading actual music which I heavily disagree with.  And he says it can take 6 months to a couple of years to master his book which means for those 6 months or years, you will not be developing your musicianship skills along with the ability to read.  This is potentially devastating as it translates to being able to play notes, not make music and potentially retard musical development.

Imagine when you read aloud that you sound like a computer program.  All the consonants and vowels are there but there is zero flow.  This is the potential result of his method.

However, I did not start his program as a complete novice; I had some years of study already with primary focus of developing musicianship skills so it did not have a detrimental effect.  Richman just focused on the technical side of reading which was something I needed.  Interestingly, he also shared the same path as many pianists: developing technical and musical skills at the expense of reading skills.

I don't know how well this would work for complete novices and I discourage his reading exercises because there is no musical content.  Studying music is about making music, not just pressing keys.

[nachoba]

I guess Iīm in the same situation you were. Iīve been studing piano for a couple of years, I donīt have problems in reading slowly, but I canīt sight read. Do you think that in this case the book will be of some use?
I completely disregarded Richmanīs opinion on not reading music during the program hahah!!
thanks for your response..

[rc]

I went through it and I don't believe it was much help, for the same reason Faulty pointed out - it's not music.

Most of sightreading is in recognizing musical patterns, when you can look at the score and see the harmony rather than the notes, or recognize a sequence, anticipate a cadence.

The most useful description of sightreading I found was in Seymour Bernstein's book 'With your own two hands', it's a brief to-the-point chapter.  There aren't that many things you need to know to develop sightreading, but to patiently accumulate experience.

I've still got a long ways to go in sightreading, but I'm finding myself playing more and more off the page, where I used to memorize it and not look at the score again.

Conclusion:  if I could go back in time I would have found some easy sheet music and done that rather than Richmans book.

[faulty_damper]

My issue was the sheer boredom of reading meaningless pitches.  However, considering that the most difficult part of piano reading is the gross movements (large displacements of the hand and jumps) this is not very bad as it develops gross visual/tactile coordination which I was not good at.  However, it was unnessary to use his pitch pull-out sheet to do this exercise as I just used real music of a rather difficult nature and used it as the exercise.  I would randomly identify pitches and steadily play them; and if there were chords, I would just pick out one note of the chord to play, not the entire chord.

The immediate results were quite apparent: Much more fun as these are pieces I'd like to play, even though they made no musical sense in the randomness of my visual wanderings BUT in fact had much more meaning because I knew these random notes were real elements of music.  Try this instead of Richman's method.

Furthermore, because I was using real music, I could better see the structure of the music (because I was looking at everything), including rhythms (though I did not practice this part of sight-reading in this manner).  In only 1 short practice session, a page filled with notes which was difficult to understand and had no meaning suddenly became very meaningful and surprisingly much easier than at first thought!

Try it!  Pick up a piece that visually looks impossible and randomly pick out notes all over the page.  It's difficult to describe the feeling but in my few years of study, it's the most unique I've ever had.  You may find the same feeling.

[earl]

Actually, what Mr. Richman said was to avoid SIGHT READING while working through his course. He didn't say anything about not studying and learning pieces, which is entirely different.

He also said that there's nothing wrong with testing yourself from time to time by sight reading actual music. Just don't do a lot of it as any bad habits you have will set deeper.

I believe this is what he meant. His course is to instill good habits during sight reading. If you have any bad ones, and you continue to do them, it will lengthen the process.

I think his course is a good one. It breaks down the sight reading process into separate units that can be practiced by themselves until they become second nature. By necessity it is elementary because it has to work for beginners as well as advanced players.

Of course, if you're more advanced you can certainly customize what you're doing (like faulty) to make it more interesting. But, sometimes, you just have to slog through the boring stuff before things start working for you. That's true of anything.

I'm working through the book now, (just started a few weeks ago) and am starting to see some benefit.

Earl

[nachoba]

Earl,
Thank you very much for your comments. I think that learning sight reading needs lots of patience. That's my first conclusion.
In which Drill are you right now?
cheers