Sight reading

[classicalmusic]

Are there any good ways to improve my sight-reading? I can read easy pieces easily, but when it gets to harder ones, I have a lot of trouble!
Thanks in advance

[popdog]

This question has been asked many times before.  I suggest you do a forum search, using the function near the top of the page.  There's plenty to go through. 

Happy sight reading,

popdog.

[pianochick93]

You beat me to it, popdog.

[nia_kurniati]

I got the same problem too. But if it simple I try to see if there is a pattern (repeating form). For the bass key they usually in chord. So I think we must know chord alot.

[dan101]

Here are some tips without searching:

1) Remember that sight reading is temporary memorizing.

2) Look ahead

3) Take pieces slower to avoid rhythmic fluctuations

4) Temporary memorizing means temporary fingering

5) Scan the key and time signature, as well as any harder spots in the given work

6) A good technique makes sight reading a lot easier

Happy reading.

[nanabush]

Bach Fugues...

I'm learning a new fugue right now, and to be honest those pieces are excellent sight reading material (preferably 2 or 3 voice fugues)... Each hand has about an equal amount of notes, and about the same difficulty...

Also you'll find if you finish a set of pieces you're playing, for example an exa prep... when the exam is through, try sight reading other stuff at that level, and you'll find it relatively easier.  I only trained sight reading when I'd know I would be given a short passage to sight read for an examiner, but you'll found that just with the more pieces you play, and the constant increase in difficulty, you'll naturally become better at sight reading.

[rc]

Besides the boatloads of practical advice that can be searched up in old threads, my quick reply would be: patience.  Take your time in developing sightreading, don't try and jump too far too quickly.

[popdog]

True, it does take a long time.  I've started teaching recently which provides plenty of sight reading material. 

nanabush, I think you'd have to be a decent sight reader to have to tackle Bach fugues in the first place.  For me anyway, they would be a real workout.

I'm going for a coffee. 

popdog

[cdw]

I would suggest B. Bartòks Microcosmos. I heard that would be great to excercise your sight reading-skills. It starts very easy, unisono, and then it builds up, step by step. The last pieces are at conservatory-level
I'm planning to do it (together with my other hundreds of plans  )

good luck!

[chun]

Sight reading is not difficult. You try those simple pieces and later try harder pieces. If you are taking exams, there is this book called "Improve your sight-reading" and I think it is quite useful. there are some pieces there that are difficult and some easy.

[mike_lang]

Dandelot books!

[rc]

After talking to a lady at work about classical music for a while, she generously gave me her hymnbook when I mentioned that I had troubles with sightreading.  Such a cool thing to do!  I've been steadily going through them, and I'm starting to get more fluent with it.

I have to say what a great skill it is to develop sightreading!  They're not the most complicated pieces but it's very enjoyable to be able to sit down and play some hymns off the bat and actually have it come out as music...  To be able to play music without having to study and memorize.

[lostinidlewonder]

For the developed sight reader you should aim to improve Speed and Accuracy of your sight reading separately. Aim to use a combination of memory/sight reading when learning your music. Do Bach's Well Tempered Clavier daily and work on the key signatures you find most difficult. Also Shostakovich Prelude and Fugues are excellent for the more developed sight reader to study with.

For the beginner sight reader you have to learn to read groups at a time, memorize all the chord patterns, scale patterns, progression, arpeggio etc. Know how to find pattern and direction of pattern just by looking at a group of notes at a time. i think the most essential part for beginners is to know which part of the hard starts a group of notes. I've have kids using their Rh thumb on the starting note when they have to go down! So getting a sense for fingering is essential, how to know what fingers to use just by looking at small parts of the music. This requires that you know how to play basic building blocks on the piano and relate how this pattern in the music relates to it.

Sight reading is really no different to reading words. When you learned to read words in school you did countless repetition, you did countless pattern recognition of different combination of letters. The same applies to music you are working out how to read a group of notes at once, not sound out every single dot to get the picture.

The problem with practicing to improve your tools to read music is that most people ignore doing it in the first place! It is so much easier for weak sight readers to simply read a little then immediately memorize. This is not bad, in fact I have to admit this was me for a good 15 years of my early piano playing. You become very good at memorizing but the rate at which you can absorb new material is inefficient.

However there is a strong connection between memory work and sight reading. Memory work aims to understand groups of notes with conscious or muscular relationships, this allows us to identify which groups of notes we read on the page can be played without moving our hands unnessesarily. I think this is an essential part of sight reading, knowing how to read chunks of notes at a time and know you can play that with a particular fingering controlling the notes without moving the position of the hand.  Good sight readers know exactly when the hand has to move because the dots show the need to move the hand. Poor sight readers work on a note to note basis unable to connect the group of notes with one position of the hand.

You will also find that the more music you can play and memorise the easier it is for you to read new music. This is because you cannot help but relate the new music to what you have played before. So beginners should not aim to improve their sight reading  in leaps and bounds but quietly build repertoire.

[popdog]

I completely agree with your comments about memorisation and sight reading.  Though for me the golden question is about a book containing hundreds (even thousands?) of easy pieces which get slowly more difficult.  I just don't have enough stuff to sight read.  I have dozens of pieces from various different sources, but it doesn't take long until these become too familiar to be genuine sight reading. 

Anyone have any suggestions which fit the bill? 

thanks

[theodore]

To lostinidlewonder:

My sight reading skills are developing slowly with much reading of easy pieces. However, I come to a difficulty when the hands must travel in different directions or when larger skips have to be reached.

Is there any way to achieve a tactile familiarity with the piano keyboard and acquire the ability to strike a definite pitch while keeping my eyes on the score. ??

Any helpful hints would be appreciated...

Theodore

[lostinidlewonder]

To lostinidlewonder:

My sight reading skills are developing slowly with much reading of easy pieces. However, I come to a difficulty when the hands must travel in different directions or when larger skips have to be reached.

Is there any way to achieve a tactile familiarity with the piano keyboard and acquire the ability to strike a definite pitch while keeping my eyes on the score. ??

Any helpful hints would be appreciated...

Theodore

I just stumbled across this while looking at past posts, so excuse the lateness of reply

A lot of my students who read tricky music find it difficult to keep their eyes on the music. This is fine so long you know how to recover from it. I always highlight the need for "Controlled Pausing" while practicing the piano, whether it is sight reading or technical work. Controlled pauses are where you completely freeze your hands, do not move at all, it is as if you pressed pause on a video. Do not search for notes with finger movements, look where you have to go, measure it, then move immediately precisely as you would move if you have the piece mastered. There is a very small difference between controlled pausing and no controlled pause, you have to be very careful that you are indeed totally freezing your position, and when you unfreeze you do not allow any cheating (individual fingers positioning themselves etc) to get to your notes, you must have an immediate movement which replicates what you will do when you have the piece mastered. With repetitions you aim to reduce the amount of time you are pausing for.

The leaps in reading can also be controlled if you have a good sense of the keyboard layout. I use to teach people who first try sight reading with a blindfold. I ask them to find the black notes just by touch and tell me is it a group of 2 or 3 blacks. They often begin this journey by using their whole hand to find these black notes and take a few seconds to discover what it is. Eventually you can sense where you are at the keyboard by the note that you are playing.
    I ask students to initially understand the keyboard in 2 parts, C C# D D# E and F F# G G# A A# B (as you get better you can portion the keyboard in scalar forms). They must have a good sense as to where they are at they keyboard when they play. So without looking they should know if they play a D because they can sense the 2 black notes surrounding it, you might not have to touch the black notes but your other fingers surrounding the D that you are playing can almost sense the black notes around it, and they act as springs to the hand (as Chopin suggests). They should know they play C or F or B or E because of the black notes but also the adjacent whites cause a feel of a hole in the keyboard. This is tough stuff to describe without a piano for me.

We also notice that many leaps or intervals can be found in many pieces. For instance look at the LH leaps of a Chopin Waltz and compare it to the LH of a Joplin Ragtime. There are similarities in the distances you move and the patterns you face even though these two composers are totally different in style. Arpeggio patterns, Chords, scale, these type of patterns all exist and can be made more tricky with greater leaps on the keyboard, however we treat the leaps separately with those controlled pauses if required. Have a good sense of when your hand does not have to move, when it is playing a group of notes where you do not really have to make much change in the position of your hand. You have all the right in the world to take your time to move to a new position, but when you move to the new position make sure the group of notes that you play are played confidently and without hesitation. Control your pauses for leaps and difficult intervals, but be careful not to cheat and make individual movements of the fingers, everything should be done at once.

[birba]

I think sight-reading is basically innate though you can improve it, I guess.  I saw a method once using flash cards progected on the wall in front of the piano.  Beginning with one note, then 2, then small chords,  etc.  But when you read that Brendel says he isnt much of a sight reader, is it that important?  I sight read alright, but its part of my job.

[gothamglory]

Read every day.  End of story.

[avguste]

The more you do sight reading, the better you get.
Personally I spent training for 10 years in sight reading. What I mean by training is that when I was a student at the Conservatory in Bordeaux, I had sight reading lessons about once or twice per week. And during the lessons, the teacher would put any music in front of me and I would have to play it from beginning to end as accurately as possible.
I hated it, but at the end it made me a better pianist and a better performer

[100003704]

Sight reading involves building up your confidence and never stopping. Playing with others will force you to continue to the end. Nobdy cares whether a couple of notes are lost.
For the more advanced I recommend the Art of Fugue on 4 lines. Good luck

Nicholas

[wise0404]

listen to  the sheet music with midi 10 times.
concentrate on the music.
 ;Dthen sight read.

[tea cup]

I can tell you from experience that sight reading can only be learned from sight reading. I actually learned without trying to learn. I just found pieces I like, sight read the parts I could, and then moved to another piece. An easier way might be to find a few grade one pieces, and sight read them. If you can sight read them at a moderate tempo, move on to grade two pieces. Do not spend to long on one piece though. Don't sight read one piece over and over, because even though you are not memorizing it, the notes become familiar, and it becomes easier to read and play at the same time. This is not sight reading though! Sight reading should be the ability to read and perform a piece without any previous practice. Make sure you are always sight reading a new piece, and eventually you will be able to sight read many things!

The andante from Mozart's K. 545 is good beginner piece for sight reading (more towards intermediates, maybe). Good luck! Ü

[simonjp90]

Have you tried ... practising. ?!

[nanabush]

Yea the best way is by repetition.  Try finding piece you ENJOY listening to that may pose a challenge to you.  See how much you can learn in a short period of time. 

When I started high school, I was beginning my Grade 9 RCM piano, but I had just discovered all of the amazing music by all the great composers, and was finding loads of sheet music online, printing it, trying a page or two, then trying something else.  I can say that I had at one point or another a page or two of every chopin/liszt/rachmaninoff etude floating around (I was also 14 or 15, so I did pretty wacky stuff).  I go back to my Grade 9 stuff a few months into high school, and found reading that stuff so much easier!  I remember I did the Bach C minor prelude and fugue for my Baroque Piece, and I was pretty much sight reading the prelude hands together when my teacher handed it to me.

I found that the sight reading books with miscellaneous excerpts are OK, but you get really unmotivated if it seems too tough and you have no clue what it sounds like.

I had tons of fun trying out the 2nd hungarian rhapsody (I got pretty damn far into the Friska and thought I did pretty well considering it was a solo effort without my teacher, and I was Grade 9 level), the Revolutionary Etude, Black Key Etude, Macdowell Witch's Dance, Waldstein 1st movement, Prokofiev Toccata.  Sitting for about 20-30 minutes and figuring out 2-3 pages of a piece above my level definitely is what made my sight reading improve a HUGE amount.


I still defend my previous post a year or two ago about Bach Fugues.  I would like to see someone sight read one of the ones with an awkward Key Signature (C# major, D# minor) effectively.  If you can honestly take one of those on the spot, play the notes with correct fingerings (Bb minor Bk1 comes to mind), then that is impressive in my view.

[dbmusic]

Try a new series called How to Blitz Sightreading currently available as books 1 and 2 with 3 on the drawing board. It is published by A & S Coates Pty Ltd - address PO Box 1510 Maroubra NSW Australia. Web address is www.blitzbooks.com.au It's working really with with all my students. Love the way it identifies the skills required to develop fluency in reading  and then as they're introduced, builds on them sequentially. Even advanced students benefit from these books as so often sight reading is 'taught' in an ad hoc fashion [if at all] and rarely practiced!!!

[goatmeal]

try microcosmos or sight reading practice for the piano by hannah smith

[jbmorel78]

Sight reading ability is based on a few things:

-How much you can take in visually (this is a factor of how comfortable you are in reading music, and also how much music you have seen)
-How well your technique responds to what you see (this has a lot to do with familiarity with idiomatic gestures of various composers)
-How well your ear can anticipate the flow of the music (this also has to do with familiarity with various composers, musical intuition, and so forth)

The more I reconsider this in teaching, the more I realize that sight reading is often taught as an end in itself, which it is not.  When performing from memory, we do not think about the fact of performing from memory, but about the music - the same holds true for sight reading.  My point is better illustrated by the following anecdote:

While I was a student, I was reading, informally, the second Schumann violin sonata with a pianist friend who played in the treble of the piano.  Afterward, I suggested the idea of playing some Schubert fourhands together, to which he replied "Sure, I love to practice sight-reading whenever I can!"  Of course, the object is not to practice sight-reading, but to spend time with Mr. Schubert, and to learn more about him.  The point of this is that sight-reading is a means, not an end.

We do not begin by being able to read complex score at tempo, perfectly, at one glance.  We begin with curiosity.  Choose a composer whom you would like to get to know better, and find some of his works.  Decide which ones you might be able read, albeit in a slower tempo, and go to the piano.  If you play a wrong note, it is no big deal, and you ought to keep going, but if you play many, perhaps the tempo you have chosen is too fast.  Remember, the object is to get to know the piece, not to "get through it."

For me, the most enjoyable way to read new things is with a partner - either in fourhands, or with violin, voice, bassoon...  If you are habitually stopping to read the notes, it might be best this way, to insure that you keep moving.

Please, if you have any further questions, I look forward to continuing this conversation, as it is something to which I have given a great deal of thought.

Best wishes,
Jean-Baptiste Morel

[pianoladywong]

The skill of sight-reading is an on-going learning process. If you are having trouble with harder pieces, begin sight-reading those pieces. Remember that when you are practicing sight-reading, you should consider not perfecting the piece or practicing over and over again. Once you start trying to perfect a piece of music or playing it consecutively, you are no longer sight-reading it. Also, remember to look at the key, accidentals and look ahead when you read. I would suggest sight-reading a piece once regardless how well or badly you did, you should then move on to another piece and come back to it the next day.

Here are more tips:
Piano Sight Reading Tip #1- Eyes are always a step ahead of hands

When your hands are playing the first beat of a measure, the eyes are already glancing at the second beat of the same measure.

Piano Sight Reading Tip #2 - Keeping a steady tempo
It is important to keep counting a steady tempo even if you miss a few notes here and there. It you are not used to counting rhythm out loud, you can start practicing by clapping. Watch for the smallest values of the piece. If the piece has eighth notes, then count 1& 2 & etc. Keep the tempo really slow in the beginning.

Watch for keys - Always start a piece by knowing the key signatures. Check for the beginning and the last note/chord. They are usually the same chord. The chord of the last note will tell you what key it is. Once you know the key you can anticipate the black keys (sharps or flats of the key).

 
Interval Observation

- Once you master the first three steps, this last step is crucial for precise note playing. Remember there are five lines and four spaces in any sheet music. Notes are written within lines and  spaces.
Tips:

A. The distance between two notes are called interval. For example: C to D is a 2nd; C to E is a third; C to F is a fourth. 

B. When you have two notes that are on different lines, their interval are either 3rd, 5th, 7th, or 9th.
If the lines are next to each other, (from line 1 to line 2, from line 2 to line 3, etc), the interval is a third.
If the notes are skipping one lines (from line 1 to line 3, from line 2 to line 4, etc), the interval is a fifth.

C. When you have two notes that are on different spaces, their interval are also 3rd, 5th, 7th, etc.
This is because they are skipping a line note. If the space are next to each other (from space 1 to space 2, from space 2 to space 3), the interval is a 3rd. If the notes are skipping one space (from space 1 to space 3, from space 2 to space 4), the
interval is a fifth.

D. When you have two notes where one is a space note and the other one is a line note or vice versa, then the interval is 2nd, 4th, 6th, 8th.

E. When you have two notes where one note is a space note (1st space) and the other note is a line note right above the space note (2nd line), then it is a 2nd.
When you have two notes where one note is a space note (1st space), and the other note is a line note (3rd line, skip the 2nd line), it is a 4th.

Print out the following interval exercise, and determine if you can tell the interval within 2 second.
Develop the habit of reading sheet music by reading interval.

Keep eyes on the music. Use your peripheral vision to your fingers. Your fingers can learn to find their notes without your eyes. A good typist can type well without looking at the keyboard. A good pianist can read the music without looking at the piano keys.

5. If you combine the above steps and start paying attentions to interval of any sheet music you come across, I can almost guarantee your sight reading skills will improve within a short period of time.

[chris_goslow]

Here are some tips without searching:

1) Remember that sight reading is temporary memorizing.

2) Look ahead

3) Take pieces slower to avoid rhythmic fluctuations

4) Temporary memorizing means temporary fingering

5) Scan the key and time signature, as well as any harder spots in the given work

6) A good technique makes sight reading a lot easier

Happy reading.

This is the first time I've heard of sight-reading as temporary memorizing.  Interesting.