The importance of sight reading and how to speed up the learning process

[leemond2008]

ok so I have had my second/first proper lesson with my teacher, she has said that she is impressed with my technique (apart from one or two little things that we sort out later) and she is surprised at how well I can play the few things I have been learning considering that I have only been playing for a few months.

I get the feeling that she thinks I am being slowed right down by my reading of music though, I am pretty much memorising the music one note at a time rather than actually reading it, I can read it but I have to work at it and its a pretty slow process.

What are the best ways to learn to sight read? I've tried the apps on my phone and things like that but as soon as I get in front of my keyboard I constantly switch back to 'ok theres the C then that is a B, then that is a.........F and thats a.....C then an........E'

I want to get to the level where I can go 'well thats C-B-F-C-E' I know it comes with practice but I just seem to have a mental block when I am actually playing.

It's frustrating because it really slows me down and I feel like once I have got that to an acceptable level then I will start pushing on with other things quite quickly

[j_menz]

Start with very simple pieces.

Don't think in terms of note names. That will slow you down and ultimately fail completely at more advanced material. Think in terms of "This is that key", or "this is two keys up, then three keys down". Think also in terms of fingers - index then middle then thumb, say. Don't just think on each note, think on the relationship between a note and the next one (or other notes in a chord).

It takes time, and it takes practice. At the keyboard. The app will only teach you note and chord names. To read fluently you need to think in terms of putting it into action.

[anamnesis]

See this reddit post I did awhile back, as well as the comments.

https://www.reddit.com/r/piano/comments/2dzpux/for_those_struggling_to_sightread_or_just/

That's only the start though.  Your rhythm, mental state, and ability to group large amounts of musical information is actually more important. 

[grooveon]

Try exploring intervals on the keyboard. That helped me a lot. Remember that the grand staff is symmetrical from middle C, it matches the symmetry found on the keyboard.

Here's the traditional beginning exercise, put both thumbs on middle C.

Now notice that your middle fingers are both a third away from middle C. Now, look at the grand staff, each of those middle finger notes also land on the first lines up and down from middle C.

Now notice your pinky fingers, they are both a fifth away from middle C right? They also happen to land on the 2nd lines up / down from middle C. They also happen to be the same notes as the Clefs (G Clef and F Clef).

If you play your fingers on the 2nd and 4th intervals from middle C, you'll be playing the spaces.

Now notice, from your pinkies, it's only a short distance to the next C / octave. If you look at the Grand Staff, notice, that the next C / octave is 2 spaces up / down from the fifth (G Clef / F Clef).

And just keep going from there. Get a good book on intervals, it can help you work out more stuff from there. And ask your teacher about reading intervalically.

In the end though, you need to practice all that, and the only way to do it is to read and play a lot of music. Personally, I just went with the Piano Maestro iPad app, it's still challenging to learn but it really sped up the process of learning a lot.

[michael_c]

Good advice above: explore intervals and look at the relationships between notes.

Here's something to try: When you see a note on the staff, instead of saying "that's a C" see if you can create a direct connection between the position on the staff and the corresponding key of the piano. To help form this connection, you can do this:

- With your left hand, hold down the five notes that fall on the lines of the bass clef: GBDFA. If your hand isn't big enough to reach all five notes, leave out the thumb note (A) but imagine you are holding it down!
- With your right hand, hold down the five notes that fall on the lines of the treble clef: EGBDF. If you cannot reach all five, leave out the thumb note (E).
- Look at those ten notes on the keyboard. Imagine ten vertical lines going through them, in two groups of five. That's the grand piano staff, rotated through 90°. If you look at the staff on the page and rotate it clockwise 90° in your mind, you can map it onto the keys.

Finally, give it time. When you first learnt the language that you can now read and write, you started by hearing sounds, then repeating them and understanding them better and better until you could speak fluently. Then you started to learn the alphabet. You probably learnt to read letter by letter, before you got used to seeing a small group of letters as a word, and then a sequence of words as a phrase. Learning to read music is just like learning to read a language: it's a hard slog at first, but once things start to come together you may experience quite sudden improvements.