Another Sightreading Thread(because you can never have too many)

[alysosha]

Been working on sight reading now for about 3 years. I'm at the stage now where i can almost play grade 1 pieces. spent the first two years sightreading about an hour a day and the last one for just 30 minutes.

Now question that i've thought i had the answer to at different points over the years. Firstly I used to sight read anything. In fact for a while i though the harder the better as it will allow me to progress faster. I used to work very slowly nearly always looking at my hard to find the big chords and huge leaps in the music.

After about six months i wasn't too impressed with my progress so I began trying to analyse what i was doing wrong. I came to the conclusion that I should begin trying to plan the fingering before i begin and stop looking at my hands.

I spent the next six months trying to do this and again main little progress. I found that no matter how well i planed the fingering before hand once i was playing i would just forget it and grab whatever fingering i could in the moment and also that by being very strict about no looking down at my hands any moderate leaps would almost always end in a wrong note.

I spent the next year being very strict about not looking at my hands but without trying to plan fingering. I found this helped but i found that without looking at my hands i became very frustrated with leaps in the music that were as i've said almost always wrong. Once again I was still not very happy with my progress.

I began to experiment with looking down at the keyboard and found almost straight away that my reading improved. My teacher even commented at what a dramatic improvement i had made, i didn't make him aware of what i was doing. I reasoned that as even with memorised music I still need to look at the keyboard how could i hope to play at sight without ever doing the same?

so here I am 3 years later and still not very happy with my progress. I've now for the last six months being working through the easiest music i can find, looking at my hands whenever i feel i need to and never planning fingering and i seem, i think, to making some progress. Still not sure i'm really going about this in the most efficent way. What are everyones thoughts?

[sheena]

I think one very important aspect when it comes to sightreading is to have a good keyboard orientation. That is, knowing where each key is located on the keyboard without having to look down all the time. We can find the keys by touch with the help of the black keys and sometimes we also need an absolute awareness of where the key is located (in big jumps for example). To not confuse this memory it is wise to always sit at the exact same place at the piano.

It is also necessary to be able to fast recognize the pitches on the paper. Verbalizing the note names seems to be a good way of practicing this.
Sightreading gets faster if you can identify patterns in the music and be able to recognize how different types of chords and intervals look when you read them. This way you won't have to read every single note, but instead a chunk of notes at the same time. 

Always look ahead, so that when you are playing one thing you are already reading the next notes.
I think it's good to practise both very hard material and then aim for accuracy in pitch and rhythm (slowly), and very easy pieces where your aim is to keep going no matter what.

[alysosha]

How about the matter of fingering? do you plan your fingering in a advance or do you just grab what you can in the moment depending on how much you can chunk?

[sheena]

The fingering can often be decided by looking at the shape of the phrase. If there is a scale passage going up I need to make sure I don't start the first note with the fifth finger, for example, as that would be quite inefficient. I usually don't plan this in advande. It doesn't always work smoothly though, like when there is a very awkward passage for the hand. Fingering that is already written out by the editor can be helpful too.