Sight reading

[shosho04]

Any tips about improving sight reading ?

[brogers70]

There are different ways to be bad at sight reading. For me, I had no problem with notation or rhythm, even in the most remote keys, but I was lousy at the "touch typing" aspect of sight reading, knowing where the keys are without looking. To fix that, I started 30 minutes a day of reading things so simple that I could find the notes without looking, for example, the first exercises in here...

https://imslp.org/wiki/Sight_Reading_Exercises%2C_Op.45_(Sartorio%2C_Arnoldo)

When that got easy enough I switched to things like Music For Millions in the beginner level, they have a couple of volumes of easy things. I try to play those without looking at the keys and at a tempo slow enough that I do not need to stop. Eventually I moved on to harder things and went through bunches of Scarlatti sonatas, then all the Mozart and Haydn Sonatas, Bach Suites and Partitas, etc. For the harder things, I play slowly enough that I do not need to stop, but I do let myself look at my hands for bigger jumps and that sort of thing. It's fun. It just takes time to improve. You might improve faster if you did it for an hour a day, but it all depends on how much total time you have to practice every day. You still want to have time to work on your repertoire and all the rest.

[lelle]

I highly recommend those exercises as well. And just read a little bit every day. Pick things that you can read at a decent fluency to progress faster. That might be very simple pieces at first. But just keep reading stuff every day.

[transitional]

I don't have anything specific, but one thing I've gotta say ...

Find your sight reading level (you have this level as well apart from your playing level). Then there should be tons of pieces at this "sight reading level," just keep doing lots of sight reading and it should improve with time.

At my "sight reading level" I like doing the Clementi Sonatinas and Mozart Sonatas

[perfect_pitch]

I also couple the Schafer with some good ol' Bartok Mikrokosmos.