The point is that you, sir, have made yourself a self-appointed authority, per this website ("what would happen to this forum if ..."). This is not your forum or your website!I, sir, am an empiricist by philosophy, who will, with one rare exception, not participate in your diatribe.For those adults out there who have sight reading problems as it relates to learning the notes for a desired repertoire, please contact me, outside this post. And, I will be glad to offer anything that might help.
I agree with everything you write, except it is not multi-tasking. Playing an instrument is a singular, linear task.
It's that "simple", yes. Maybe it's time for a sticky post about this subject?Ultimately, it's multi-tasking with the following components: 1) Good decoding skills (you can develop those on the sofa, including the counting part). Pattern recognition is crucial, so you don't have to process all elements deliberately.2) Perfect independence of the hands and an ability to move without the brain interfering, a.k.a. "technique";3) An excellent feel for the topography of your instrument (also part of "technique"), so you can use your eyes for reading only.
I agree with that but think you need to add 4), retrieval from the memory banks.I think a hugely underestimated part of sight reading involves retrieval of thoroughly learned patterns in the style of the music you're playing. For this reason, practicing sight reading a large amount of new material does not always help overall sightreading, though it may improve the 3 elements you mentioned above. Improving 4) requires actually learning pieces (or fragments) very very well, which does not happen when you just read through new material. And unfortunately it does not transfer easily between styles or genres of music.
You are definitely right. This is excellent for working memory. Since I went through "Liszt's Technical Exercises" (all his tricks are in there in all keys), I can sightread the works that use that type of formulas much better, but something that is not in my "vocabulary" (modern composers, Jazz transcriptions, for example) still causes inconvenience sometimes, even after extensive analysis. For Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, etc. I have found lots of Czerny and Clementi to be very useful as sightreading material, not to train the fingers, but to develop a feel for the formulas, the idiom they use. To make it really useful, though, one should transpose it all into other keys at random.
Not to disagree, but the object is not to learn every possible key/note combination of a particular pattern or figure, but rather to learn a generalised version of it, into which an actual array of notes fits, and which encompasses some variation on the figure itself. Once you have done that, drilling further examples is no longer necessary.
Nice tips! And about the techniques, what techniques we need to develop to help us sight read? About the counting, i had hard time to count and play together. When i lost my count, i'm also lost my concentration to read. Any tips for that?
About the counting, i had hard time to count and play together. When i lost my count, i'm also lost my concentration to read. Any tips for that?
Try counting music you aren't playing. And also try tapping along to it. The idea is not to develop a mere internal metronome, but to "get rhythm". Then you can play the beat, not just count the beat and play along with the count.
Crucial is, I think, WORKING MEMORY of retrievable patters, the element timothy42b added. Actually, you read ahead and temporarily "memorize" what you saw, and then execute, but you have to keep reading ahead, so the body has to act independently from the mind. The more you recognize and are able to execute on auto-pilot, the more likely you are to go through the experience successfully.
And all end with rhythm practicing again... I wish i have a teacher to teach me about rhythm Okay, i'm now, will try to find a some easy music sheets, try to count (and to memorize) the rhythm.. Is this kind of practicing effective to improve my rhythm? Or there is another way that more effective?
I can only say what i did. This does not mean that that is exactly what you have to do. All skills I acquired were acquired through non-standard training, because I was never what you call a child prodigy. Rather a "struggler". What works for others never works for me.
Take your very first entry level music book and see if you can practice sight reading that. Whatever you do, dont feel bad, sight reading is a skill that some do well and some dont. The only reason I ever practice sight reading is because it helps me learn pieces quicker when I PRACTICE them. PRACTICE sight reading, you can get better at it
To OP: if you want to sight read really fast, learn to write music. Nothing increases your ability read notes faster than if you understand them from the composer's point of view - why they write melodic or harmonic passages in the way, what their intent was, and perhaps why they made the musical decisions while writing. Most composers don't intentionally write their music so that it's difficult to sightread (note that this is different than being difficult to play). So instead of viewing music as a textbook or some kind of exercise, view it as what it is - a work of art. If you understand a piece artistically, sightreading becomes much easier.
Topic: Sight Reading tips please :( 