The Sight Reading Thread

BartK I used to use the metronome during reading practice, but somehow got out of the habit. Not sure why I haven't been doing it this year. Based on your experience, I'll definitely add it back in.

Not looking down and looking ahead in the music is something that develops naturally over time so don't fret about it.

That is encouraging. Proprioception is one of my biggest challenges to keeping my eyes on the music.

Practice your scales, chords, and arpeggios until you can find the notes automatically on the keyboard without thinking about it.

Also good to know. Forgetting to apply sharps and flats from the key signature is another challenge I have. A good reason not to neglect scale, chord, arpeggio practice.

Here are some thoughts from a seasoned sight-reader.

The most important thing about sight-reading is not to see how many notes you get right, it's to see how quickly you can understand what the music is about.

Think of learning to read a language. You first learn to understand and speak your language. Before you start learning to read, you are already fluent in speaking: you can take part in conversation, listen to stories, tell stories, recite poems... When you begin learning to read, at first you're stumbling over individual letters. You get used to combinations of these letters making up words which you already know. Then you string these words together and get to the stage where you can read a whole sentence and grasp what it means. When you've got this far, you start reading stories, and if you take delight in discovering new stories, you read more and more and become a fluent reader.

For me, it's logical to learn music the same way. You start by listening and copying, you get familiar with the sounds, you learn to play simple tunes, you get the feel of certain chords and rhythms, and only then do you start learning how all this is communicated through dots on a page.

I think many adults get the idea that they should be better at reading and look for recipes to learn to sight-read fast. They need to understand that learning to sight-read takes time and goes hand in hand with learning about how music works: harmony, rhythm, structure, style... The nice thing is this: once you get to the stage where you can read music - not sight-reading at super speed, just the basics - the more you read, the more information about music theory you will assimilate without having to consciously analyse it. It's just like reading books in your language: the more you read, the more you gain an "instinctive" understanding of grammar and style, how to tell a story well, or how to tell one badly.

So for beginners:
Don't get in a sweat about sight-reading, give it time!
Just remember read music that is new to you from time to time. Slowly, not too much at once. Think of it as reading a story: you want to enjoy it, not push through relentlessly even if you're not understanding what you're reading. When you listen to a recording, see how well you can follow with the score.

And for more advanced pianists:
Read through lots of music for the pleasure of discovering it!
Take a piece you don't know and read it. Don't try to play it at speed, don't worry about stopping or going back over something, but try to get a feeling for how it should sound. What's the key? What's the mood? Do you understand the harmonies? If you come across some tricky rhythms, see if you can speak or tap them. If a passage sounds weird, play it again to see if you got the harmonies right. If a passage sounds particularly nice, play it again for the pleasure! When you feel you have a good idea of how the piece should go, you could listen to a recording and see if it comes close to your imagined version.

The more time you spend discovering music like this, the nearer you will get to what might be called "real" sight-reading: keeping time and not stopping while managing to get enough of the notes, rhythms and dynamics right so that you manage to convey the essence of the piece.

I've been chewing this over a bit. Some random thoughts ...

I'd be hesitant to answer the question "Is sight-reading important?" in any universal way. I think it depends a lot on the individual player's goals and the kind of music they are playing. For example, I'm a huge fan of classic blues and boogie piano, and very few of the old masters could read music at all much less sight-read. Heck, very little of what they were playing was written down in the first place ...

"Is sight-reading important TO ME?" Somewhat. Since I'm primarily interested in blues and adjacent genres, I'm mostly learning songs by ear, improvising, etc. I do pick up licks and tricks from sheet music, but it's not really the sort of process that requires me to sight-read in real time. Having said that, decent sight-reading skills certainly allow me to learn that material faster, if only because I don't have to sit there and hack out things note by note.

Goal-wise, I do like the idea that I might get good enough to sit in with people, play some pick-up gigs, etc. To that end, I think I'd mostly be working from fake books (which is a different kind of sight-reading, I suppose), playing by ear, and just generally having a lot of genre-specific comping and soloing techniques under my belt so that I know what to do even without sheet music. However, I can certainly imagine some situations where there might be full-on sheet music that I'd have to work from, so I do work on sight-reading a bit toward that end.

As far as what I actually do to practice sight-reading, I used the Improve Your Sight-Reading books by Faber back when I was doing more traditional / classical piano. These days, I have a bunch of genre piano books (mostly the Hal Leonard Keyboard Style Series) and work from them, starting by sight-reading through the various exercises and tunes before I start learning them more seriously. Those fit my goals well, since they have the kind of piano parts that I'm likely to play (e.g., RH chords and LH bass) in the relevant contexts.

So, yeah. My thoughts about that.

WieWaldi btw: Can anyone start a list with good material for sight-reading training?

These are the books I've been sight reading from:

Easy Classics to Moderns
More Easy Classics to Moderns
The Giant Book of Intermediate Classical Piano Music
The Giant Book of Standards Sheet Music: Easy Piano

There are some pieces in "The Giant Book of Intermediate Classical Piano Music" that are also in the "Easy Classics to Moderns" books. That didn't bother me, I just played them again

Within each book the pieces vary in difficulty quite a bit, which makes it interesting. I'll sight read an easy piece one day and think "Great, I'm getting much better at this!". The next day, hard piece, and I think "Hmm, maybe not so good?".

rogerch thank you for sharing these, I’ve been thinking I should expand my sight reading sources beyond just classical and this standards book looks like it could be a good one for me! As well as fun to play!

Pallas

I also have no 17, and new classics to moderns.

Some sightreading/reading suggestions:

Essential Keyboard Repertoire, Vols. 1-4, published by Alfred.

These are classical pieces, Baroque to Modern, and are graded, with Vol. 1 being easiest and Vol. 4 the hardest. The series goes beyond Vol. 4, but I don't have those and can't say how useful they would be.

rogerch Easy Classics to Moderns

Nice! It just so happens that I ordered that book yesterday. I really look forward to it now

Pallas I have Easy Classics to Moderns 17 and I'm really looking forward to the day that this is sight-reading practice for me too! (Just keep swimming, just keep swimming...)

You will get there!

I found the difficulty of the pieces in the Easy Classic to Modern to be all over the map. Many of them were challenging for me to sight read while others were much easier. You may be able to find some pieces in there to sight read now, or much sooner in your journey than the complete book. It’s tricky though, at least for me: it’s not immediately obvious to me which pieces will be easy by just looking at the scores.

That's good to know! I found that Library of Easy Piano Classics and Library of Easy Piano Classics 2 are all over the place as well, difficulty wise. In fact I find the pieces in part 2 a little less hard, overall.

For now though I put both books on the backburner because I don't want to stretch myself too thin by adding even more to Alfred and the blues course. I get my sight reading exercise by going back to older pieces. The same will probably happen with the Easy Classics to Moderns but eh, a girl needs a collection to admire and dream about playing someday

rogerch I found the difficulty of the pieces in the Easy Classic to Modern to be all over the map. Many of them were challenging for me to sight read while others were much easier.

I had the same experience, so I'm saving the book for sight reading when I'm a better player. "An Introduction to Classics to Moderns" was a much better fit for me at the time and I finished it a few years ago. Masterworks Classics are also good, as each book is a single grade. Supplementary repertoire books from various method book series, covering different genres such as pop and jazz and 2 or 3 levels below current technical ability are also good.

Do you think sight reading is important? Why or why not?

Yes, even though I'm terrible at it. I learn quickly with audio recordings of tonal music (I usually have a piece memorized by the time that I can actually play the notes correctly), but what am I going to do if I have to play a piece that's seldom-recorded or is completely new?

Although, thinking about it, I think the actual skill that I desire the most currently is the skill of "put your hands where your mind wants them to be". Speaking off the cuff, we get input streams (visual from sight reading, audio from listening to people we're playing with, etc.), process them, and then transform that into an output in our hands. While I do want to improve the throughput of the visual input stream from sight reading, that last step is more of my current bottleneck. As an example, I sometimes do impromptu transcriptions of orchestral pieces on the piano for fun based on what I hear, but even though I can hear it in my head and decide how I want to play it, my hands don't always end up in the right places.