The Sight Reading Thread

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.

BicBic 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!

I have really enjoyed the standards book. Dan Coates has several other “Giant Book of” titles and I’m planning to pick another one when I’m done with the standards.

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.

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.

WieWaldi I got this book: Sight-Reading & Harmony (Complete Edition)
It contains about 160 one-liners in different keys (from 3 flats over plain C up to 3 sharps). Each one-liner is printed in 5 different difficulty levels on one page. All the one-liners are chorales - with a German title (no lyrics, haha).

I tried to do it, but I gave up when I was confronted with keys I couldn't play. I said to myself: If I get to a piece with a new key, I practice the scale in this key, before. And then things got boring

In the publicity for the book you mentioned, I see this: "The four-part chorales of J.S. Bach are regarded by most educators as the “ultimate litmus test” in music reading and sight-reading." I don't agree. If you spend a lot of time playing through chorales, you're going to get very good at - - - playing chorales. That's fine if you adore chorales, they never bore you and you don't want to play anything else. But if you want to get good at reading other styles, you need to practice reading those styles.

I also looked at the sample page. Each example is only half a chorale! No wonder you got bored. It's as if you were given a book of 4-line poems, but each one was cut off after the second line, so you never got to the end of a poem.

If you want to get better at sight-reading without boring yourself to death, you need to read complete pieces. Pieces that tell stories. All sorts of stories: short ones, long ones, sad ones, happy ones...

You already posted a list of compilations. There are some good ideas there: I'd have a look at the Classics to Moderns series. Apart from that, just look for piano music anywhere you can find it: in secondhand shops, in libraries, on the internet... Discovering stuff yourself is fun!

If a piece doesn't look ridiculously hard to you, put it on the piano and try to play the first few bars. Just the first phrase. Can you see where that phrase ends? Even if you play it very slowly, even if you make mistakes, can you work out how it ought to sound? If you thinks you've sussed out that phrase, great: it doesn't matter for the moment if you can't play it up to speed. Go on to the next phrase, do the same thing and slowly you will see and hear the story of the piece unfold.