The Sight Reading Thread

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.

@"MRC »#p6676
QUOTE «  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. » END QUOTE

THIS !!!

I learned how to read music at the same time I learned how to read (a, b, c …). As a result, sight reading is very much second nature to me and I will forever be grateful to my parents for my childhood piano lessons even though my dad was just beginning his career at the time with a new house, wife and kids so finances were really tight and $5 a week for lessons weighed heavily on the family budget.

I would just have two comments to add to many of the points already raised in this thread.

First I feel the point made by MRC is spot on with the analogy to language. If I paraphrase further his writing to the music world, at first one is reading individual notes and this turns into recognizing chords (let’s see a D, then an F# and an A …. hey that’s D major on fundamental - without even having to stop and analyze it). The cognitive pattern recognition later evolves to a higher level where one now pretty well automatically sees a series of chord related notes (whether together or in sequence one after the other - arpeggiated) and then to a chord progression structure (think sentences in grammar). So, by now in one glimpse you acquire the ability to have a pretty good idea of a few bars of music at a time. At this point, you only need to focus on the irregularities i.e. notes that stick out like a sore thumb in the otherwise regular chord pattern. For example, if an F Maj 7 also has a G written in there, your concentration is on that one irregularity as the rest is already known territory.
So there is a big difference on having your attention drawn to a whole bunch of discrete notes as opposed to only focusing on the irregularities. Knowing your scales and chords on the tip of your fingers is obviously pretty well required at this stage. At least that is how it works for me.

My second point is that I wonder if people have realistic expectations as to what constitutes the definition of sight reading. There are obviously many levels to this skillset. I get the sense that for many wanting to take any piece of written music score and sight reading it right away with perfect rendition at the keyboard is a little bit like the proverbial pie in the sky (sorry to burst your bubble). I would suggest that this would depend on the difficulty level of the score with respect to your current level of playing and reading skills. If the score is below your level, even if only a little bit, then you would likely be quite successful (but not necessarily perfect depending) and in any case it would only take just a few passes at most to have the piece under your fingers. (you may need to figure out best fingering to use in some passages for instance, or maybe there are some large jumps you need to tame, etc).

Thanks Pallas and everyone else for the very useful information! I have been a lifelong avid reader of both fiction and nonfiction, so I'm quite happy to add music reading to that skillset... gradually

WieWaldi you could look up the RCM complete syllabus online
https://rcmusic-kentico-cdn.s3.amazonaws.com/rcm/media/main/about%20us/rcm%20publishing/piano-syllabus-2022-edition.pdf

Then check some of the pieces at each level on IMSLP to get a bit of an idea of the difficulty level of the RCM rep books

I'm using a couple of books in addition to the easiest repertoire I can find for sight reading: Paul Harris's "Improve Your Sight-Reading!" and Keith Snell/Diane Hidy's "Sight Reading" (Kjos).

Nowadays I'm going through easy pieces by various well known composers through imslp. I figure it would double as musical education.

Pallas Yep, go in chronological order and you start to see how the music evolved over the years too.

I second that! Really really grateful for all the help and encouragement. I'm learning a lot as well! Most of all patience

For me sight-reading is relatively important. I have been playing piano for about 12 years and continuously work on it. In terms of my sight-reading or playing progress, I do not notice any difference from week-to-week or even month-to-month, but when I compare what and how I played a year ago versus today, then I do notice a difference. In general, my progress over the years was sort of steady, there was not a large jump or so.

Besides keyboard playing, when I learn a new piece on my bass guitar, I also make it a point to learn from the actual written bass notes, not the fret numbers on the bass tab.

One iPad app that helps me is "Note Trainer". This app has various options, I typically select random notes in the C2-C6 range in random keys and with accidentals. I do like 320 notes per day, 10 sessions at 32 notes each. Below is how that app looks like. I use the app in conjunction with a Bluetooth MIDI transmitter plugged into my keyboard.

I realize this is not really sight-reading, because these random notes are not in any context. But still, those exercises have helped me address my following weaknesses:

a) Recognize from the sheet music which note it is
b) Find that note on the keyboard
c) Remember the key in which the song is played
d) Recognize accidentals
e) And do a) through d) fast enough so that it does not hold back my playing.

All the best,
MandM

WieWaldi There is also a series of complementary books - Improve Your Sight-Reading! A Piece a Week, by the same author (Paul Harris). The books are also graded from Grade 1 to Grade 8, and available for Kindle and as print books. I think they are a great addition to the original learning series.

Gooseberry Thanks you, added links to big list.

I found there are often 3 versions (like here):

• kindle (cheapest)
• Paperback
• Sheet Music (by far most expensive)

Does anybody what separates the sheet music from the paperback version?