Does HS sight reading practice have any value, in your experience?

[nanocyte]

Hello everyone,

One of my main goals is to be able to play and sight read at the piano without looking at the keyboard, but I'm finding that this is extremely difficult while playing with both hands at the same time. I realize that part of this is simply that I need to learn more music to have a greater sense of the keyboard, but I've been wondering if it might be worthwhile to dedicate a significant amount of time to sight reading one hand at a time.

I've found that I can sight read beginner to low intermediate pieces at tempo with one hand at a time with relative ease, and that I can generally find my way around the keys, even with leaps (at least within an octave or so) without looking at the keyboard, or by using peripheral vision. The problem is that when I put my hands together, my reading is about five times slower than what I would be able to do with hands separate, and that's for music that is well within my technical capabilities. With hands together, I lose deal of awareness of where my hands are, and even what the notes are to some degree.

I've been working with several beginning to intermediate repertoire anthologies as well as Mikrokosmos for sight reading practice, and while sight reading with both hands is becoming easier, I'm wondering if perhaps I might benefit more at this point from spending a lot of time with HS sight reading and seeing if the skills carry over.

Anyway, does anyone think this would be beneficial, or would I just be wasting my time? Obviously, HT sight reading requires its own practice, and I don't intend for this to replace that, but I wonder if HS practice would actually facilitate HT practice to the point that I would be justified spending time on that rather than just HT sight reading practice alone.

Thanks!

[arctic_mama]

I think it does, yes.  For me, drilling on notes to get near-instant recognition of them is what speeds up my sight reading, along with lots of practice.  To that end, just getting familiar with reading and translating those notes to finger movements, quickly, will indeed better your sight reading.  HT sight-reading is a more difficult bear and it takes its' own practice, but any reading/playing work you do will improve your sight reading and HA/single line reading is a good place to begin, IMO.