Looking ahead when sight reading?

[nickadams]

I have heard it is good to look a little bit ahead in sight reading and try to recognize what is coming up, but whenever I try to do this my fingers stop playing the part I should be on and start playing the section I am looking ahead to! Even if it is just one measure further!

So I will be on something that I recognize to just be a partial C major scale from say C to G with a half rest at the end and since it is no longer necessary to analyze that bar any further, I think it would be a good time to look ahead. But when I look ahead, even though I know that I am supposed to play from C to G and then a half rest, my fingers start playing where I am looking ahead to!

If I'm lucky, I may play the C to G but then I have a hard time keeping track of my rest's duration while trying to read and make sense of a collection of notes further down the score.





It's like my brain is not capable of juggling so many tasks! 

[pianoplayjl]

BUMP

Don't worry, I also have a similar problem. Just keep practicing sight reading. One thing you can do is when you are about to sight read a score, look at it for a minute and scan over what things you need to notice and 'play' it with your fingers on your laps. And maybe don't look too far ahead. Maybe 2-3 notes only.

JL

[quantum]

Try to practice the technique using very simple music.  Even music that does not require that much looking ahead.  Concentrate on the technique of looking at one point in the score and reading another.  Practice slowly. 

It may also be helpful to play through repertoire you already do know using this technique.  You will already be accustomed to the finger movements, and what you can concentrate on is looking at point in the score different to that being played. 

[gsmile]

It's not "necessary" for you to read ahead in order to become a good sightreader-- but practice does make perfect. (See Quick Tips for Accurate Sightreading.)
Practicing in the dark also helps you concentrate on the sound and the feel of the keys rather than the look-- that way you can focus on the music instead of your fingers when the lights are on.

[autodidact]

I say try taking it a step at a time. First, get yourself used to playing something that you aren't looking at: read a bar (or more or less, depending on how easy or difficult it is for you), then look away and play it (but don't look directly at the keys while doing this, because that's obviously not something you can do while actually sight reading!). Read another bar (or less, whatever), look away and play it. This way you can start to get used to the memorization part of sight reading before you start to make it more difficult by trying to read more at the same time.

Only when you can relatively comfortably do this much (preferably for a full bar at a time) would I suggest starting to try to incorporate looking ahead and to begin smoothing the process into one continuous performance. You don't have to smooth it all together right away, either. You could do something like this:

1. Read the first bar of the piece.
2. Play that bar, and at the same time try to memorize like half of the next bar (or less if you have to at first, that's perfectly fine!).
3. Pause playing, and finish memorizing the next bar.
4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 until you make it all the way through the piece.

As you do this more, start trying to memorize more and more of the following bar during your playing, and with time, you will gradually be able to build up your reading-ahead speed to match your playing speed, instead of trying to force it all at once, which at the beginning can result in having to slow down your playing speed so significantly that you couldn't even play it to a metronome. (I know how frustrating that feeling is!)

Yes this is a gradual process; following this would make it take awhile before you begin to fluently sight read through anything at all, but no matter what you do it will take awhile to build this skill anyway. I hope this helps. 

[cjp_piano]

You can do it! If you keep wanting to play the measure you're looking at instead of playing the previous measure, you need to add a step:

Memorize the first measure
CLOSE YOUR EYES or LOOK AWAY while you play the first measure
Then memorize the next measure
And do the same thing

THEN once that gets pretty easy for you, try the same piece but this time look at the 2nd measure while you're playing the 1st measure.

You really aren't sight reading at this point, but you're just practicing LOOKING ahead while you play.

Use something that's really easy to start with, like 5 levels below your playing ability! =)