sight-reading questions and thoughts

[cwjalex]

For me, to be able to sight read on a professional level is the holy grail of piano playing.  I would sacrifice a considerable amount of technical ability to be able to achieve this skill.  I have been playing the piano for about a year and though I am able to play pieces that are several years beyond my experience, my ability to sight read is exactly what you would expect from someone who has been playing a year, perhaps even worse.  I have a lot of questions and thoughts about sight reading that I would like people to respond to.  

1) what theoretical information would be beneficial in sight reading better?

-I have an extremely elementary knowledge of theory which is to say everything I know I could explain to someone else in about 15 minutes.  When I am identifying notes on sheet music I have virtually no additional theoretical knowledge that would aid me in reading quicker and more accurately.  What theoretical knowledge would create more informational connections in my brain so that i would have multiple ways of identifying notes, a phrase, or general structure?  What immediately comes to mind is scales and chords but what specifically?  I don't want to learn obscure things that will only help me in extremely rare situations.  What would give me the most "bang for my buck" as far as learning theory.

2)I'm thinking recognizing intervals will give me another connection in which I can learn to sight read better.  Are there specific exercises or other ways in better improving my ability to recognize intervals?  

3) Synchronizing the recognition of a note on paper to the location of the note on the piano.

-I have just recently reached the point where i can instantly identify the note on paper but how do I connect that to instantly locating the corresponding note on the piano?  what exercises, ideas, or ways of thinking might improve this?  
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After recently watching a Valentina Lisitsa video in which she is practicing it occurred to me that I don't put a lot of thought into the way that I actually practice.  These next questions specifically involve the way I practice.
  
4)how fast should i play?

-Should i play slow enough that i don't hit a wrong note or should i try to force my brain to recognize it quicker which will result in hitting more wrong notes?

5)should i actively seek out pieces in many different keys?

-I notice that I unintentionally choose a lot of pieces that are in 1 of 3 keys and have Bb, Ab, and/or Eb (yeah i know I should know the name of the keys *sad face*)and find myself reading at a much slower rate when I play a piece in a key that is different to what I am used to.

6) what do you think about when I'm not at a piano looking at sheet music and trying to visualize a piano and where my fingers would go as I am reading the notes?

7)When I am playing I tend to play a few to several measures and then go back to the beginning.  What sometimes happens is that I will play 3/4 of the piece many many times before I ever even encounter the end.  How damaging is this behavior?  Should I go from beginning to end without stopping regularly?


TL:DR?  help me sight read better

[awesom_o]

For me, to be able to sight read on a professional level is the holy grail of piano playing.  I would sacrifice a considerable amount of technical ability to be able to achieve this skill.  

You don't get good at sight reading by sacrificing technical ability.  The more technical ability you have, the better at sight reading you are.

Without extensive knowledge of music theory, you will not be a good sight reader. Once you have studied the rudiments of theory, you need to master advanced harmony and counterpoint ASAP!

You ask many questions, and I have to go and teach now. There are no short cuts in piano-playing. To be really good takes many years of intensive study.

How well do you know the major and minor scales? You need to be able to play all of them with your eyes closed, in formula pattern, without making mistakes. Once you can do the regular formula patterns in this manner, you must master the formula patterns with the hands separated by a 3rd and a 6th.

[cwjalex]

i was just trying to illustrate how much more important being able to sight read well is to me than being a technical virtuoso. anyways, i had a sinking suspicion that i should master scales and theory in order to improve at a satisfactory rate.  that makes me a sad panda but if it's what i have to do then so be it. 

[awesom_o]

Scales and theory should make you a happy panda. Not a sad one. 

A good sight reader is a technical virtuoso, and a technical virtuoso is a good sight reader.

[cwjalex]

Scales and theory should make you a happy panda. Not a sad one.  

A good sight reader is a technical virtuoso, and a technical virtuoso is a good sight reader.

you remind me of my mom who used to proudly serve a tofu burger on a gluten free bun toasted with margarine for dinner.  i don't care how good it is for me it ain't makin me happy.  

i think a technical virtuoso could be a terrible sight reader.  i can imagine a blind person having extraordinary technical skill that doesn't have any sight let alone the ability to sight-read.  

[awesom_o]

you remind me of my mom who used to proudly serve a tofu burger on a gluten free bun toasted with margarine for dinner.  i don't care how good it is for me it ain't makin me happy.  

 

Interesting idea about the blind virtuoso. I know of one or two well-known classical pianists without vision, but most  of the great blind keyboard artists are/were improvisers!

Have you seen this fellow? I'm not sure if he's totally blind, but he certainly is amazing!

Anyway, unless you're Ray Charles or Art Tatum, sight-reading and technical skill are best friends for life!  

[goldentone]

Scales and theory should make you a happy panda. Not a sad one. 

A good sight reader is a technical virtuoso, and a technical virtuoso is a good sight reader.

There you go again!

[cwjalex]

since I started this thread I have put a lot of effort in trying to improve my sight reading.  i noticed that although I could immediately identify a note I couldn't always immediately identify which octave the note was located.  I came up with an exercise that I have been doing that has been helping a lot. 

i have started to mentally focus on all the notes from two ledger lines below the bass cleff and the two ledger lines above the treble cleff.  These notes span four octaves and include five different C's.    What I have been doing is I imagine a piece of sheet music and I mentally place a random note somewhere within these four octaves and then try to locate the corresponding note on an actual piano.  I don't simply try to identify what note it is, but I try to mentally visualize within these 4 octaves the specific location of that note.  I have found this exercise to be extremely helpful and have already noticed improvements in my sight reading.  I also like that I can do this exercise anytime of the day and don't need a piano to do it.  now that i think about it it is really just sight reading without a piano or sheet music.  it's pretty much doing the same thing as sight reading but it all takes place in my head. 

also, changing the way i look at the bass and treble cleff has helped.  instead of looking at them as two different cleffs I look at both cleff's as just 1 big clef that is just separated by one line.  the reason i am going into such detail about all this stuff is that i'm hoping that some part of it may help another beginner that is also struggling with sight reading.

[kevin69]

The recent threads on sight reading have tended to concentrate on sight reading notes.

What about sight reading rhythm?
I sometimes find that if i play a piece for the first time, then compare with a few youtube  performances, that my rhythm is wrong in places. I also find that a wrong rhythm is harder to hear than a wrong note.

For rhythm, rather than notes, i don't find slowing down especially helpful, and sometimes its detrimental.

Any advice?

[m1469]

Any advice?

Break your concept down to the most common rhythms you would encounter in music and practice those in whatever context you feel is most efficient for you.

[kevin69]

Break your concept down to the most common rhythms you would encounter in music and practice those in whatever context you feel is most efficient for you.

This is my problem: every piece of music i start has important rhythmic differences, so i don't see any common rhythm.

[cwjalex]

do specific note values trip u up?  you could just try taking them really slow and count out the largest common denominator note value

[dima_76557]

The recent threads on sight reading have tended to concentrate on sight reading notes.

What about sight reading rhythm?
I sometimes find that if i play a piece for the first time, then compare with a few youtube  performances, that my rhythm is wrong in places. I also find that a wrong rhythm is harder to hear than a wrong note.

For rhythm, rather than notes, i don't find slowing down especially helpful, and sometimes its detrimental.

Any advice?

Teach yourself to recognize and execute rhythm patterns automatically. Try one or more of the online rhythm trainers, for example this one:
https://www.therhythmtrainer.com/
P.S.: While playing, count aloud and confidently.

[m1469]

https://www.therhythmtrainer.com/

Cool, thanks!  I'm going to share this with my students!  (and I'm doing it for fun right now  )

P.S.: While playing, count aloud and confidently.

eewwwwww ...  

[kevin69]

do specific note values trip u up?  you could just try taking them really slow and count out the largest common denominator note value

I've tried this and it wasn't particularly successful, because when i went really slowly i seemd to lose a sense of how the rhythm should sound at full speed. Staccato rhythms tend to trip me up
: for example the Circus March by Fucik. Reading from the sheet i couldn't get a sense of the rhythm at all, but as soon as i heard one version played on youtube, it all made sense.

[nystul]

I think it is necessary to build up some foundation of understanding with rhythm.  I think that if someone is always mimicking teacher or Youtube, and trying to play rhythms by feel, there can be a big gap in understanding that displays as inability to sightread. The same as how youngsters can learn pitches by ear and fool their teachers into thinking they can actually read the notes, until they are asked to sightread something.

When I first started learning to read music, it started with pieces that have only quarter notes, half notes, whole notes.  Only in 4/4 time to start with.  And I would learn to clap and count: counting 1, 2, 3, 4 and clapping where the note should be played.  A whole note would last the entire 4 counts, a half note would last 2 counts, but each quarter note lasts only 1 count.  So there are a few patterns in 4/4 combining half note with 2 quarter notes.  You have half note on count 1, quarter notes on 3 and 4.  You have quarter note on 1, half note on 2, quarter note on 4.  You have quarter note on 1 and 2, half note on 3.  At some point I learned to read the equivalent rests, and added in the concept of dotted notes with the dotted half note, and did some pieces in 3/4 time.  All of that came before seeing an eighth note.

So this is really basic stuff, but I think that is where it all starts.  The smaller notes have the same relationships with each other as the bigger notes.  The pattern eighth note followed by 2 sixteenth notes is the same relationship as half note followed by 2 quarter notes, except you are now subdividing the beat in 4 parts instead of having a rhythm that lasts 4 beats.  So once you get to those rhythms, you need a way of counting that subdivides the beat also.  When you've successfully executed a certain rhythmic pattern enough times, you can play it securely without having to count it out.

When you are really confident in the rhythms, you start to realize the literal rhythms aren't always exactly desirable and you can make certain notes in the pattern a bit longer or shorter according to feel after all.  But I think to sightread rhythms, you need to understand and be comfortable with the literal note values and how they relate, so that you can deal with some less common rhythms that you run into.

[outin]

I think developing the ability to read rhythms correctly needs specific kind of exercises.

At work we have a little music theory study group of 3 people and we all seem to have different issues with reading notation. One of us has played another instrument and plays with a group (not classical) and has a good memory. So she can play the pieces they play quite correctly by ear after she has heard them. But when we started she had little understanding about the relationships of note values or how the rhythms are built and could not count the measures in quite simple music, even though her reading of notes was quite fluently otherwise. The other person wasn't used to counting either and her rhythms were all over the place when playing (after 3 years of piano lessons).

So what we did was go through all kinds of scores WRITING down how the counts should go. This we did once a week for the first few weeks. We also did clapping and counting exercises, but I think it was even more helpful to actually analyze the scores. They really didn't like it, but I insisted that we do not go further in theory until they can count correctly. So now they can, even though I don't think they still do unless someone tells them to 

I don't really like counting aloud while playing pieces either, but I do enjoy cracking rhythmic problems using different methods, counting being one of them.