The Sight Reading Progress Thread

WieWaldi · 2024-06-25T02:17:55+00:00

This is a collection of recommendations found in this forum, to have it all in one place: Books (paper / digital) WieWaldi Sight-Reading & Harmony (Comp...

BartK

Sophia When I sight read something for the first time, it sounds just like that 🙂 (Ok let's be honest here, much worse in most cases). I definitely don't add dynamics or rhythm etc.

Emphasis mine but I think this is a serious mistake that beginners make.

So, I didn't point it out in my previous response because, like Pallas, I think this should be a progress and encouragement thread, but leaving out rhythm is the wrong thing to do. Rhythm is the most important aspect. It's more important to get the rhythm right than to get the notes right. This is why I suggested clapping out the rhythm with a metronome in the other thread. Once you have the rhythm then you can add the notes, not the other way around.

Okay, I'll go back to lurking and encouraging now. 🙂

WieWaldi

BartK It's more important to get the rhythm right than to get the notes right.

Sorry, here I have to disagree (and it is hard as a total beginner to disagree with an advanced player like Bart). At least I disagree to a certain degree, because it depends:
If you are generally good at getting a rhythm into your fingers, but you always struggle to hit the right notes, then getting the notes right is the more important practice goal.
There are reasons to tell rhythm is more important, and there are reasons to tell notes are more important. I am in the notes-are-more-important camp (at least as long I count myself a beginner, who hit wrong notes too often). If you make a wrong note, so wrong that it is out of harmony (e.g. missing a sharp), even a blind person can hear it. But if you make a note too long or too short or another rhythm mistake, some people may think it was intended. They won't recognize this as a mistake so easily.
On the other hand, if you are playing in a band with other people, rhythm mistakes are truly fatal - more fatal than a wrong note here or there. But this is the mindset of intermediates and above. 😁

Sophia

I always value your wise advice Bart, please do more than lurk when you have some valuable advice to add 🥰

Pallas

I'm putting my money where my mouth is. I just plopped down and made my first sight-reading progress video. As you can see if you click, it's amazing and I'm a genius. 😜😜😜 No. I have a specific goal for posting this video: to get over the anxiety of posting a video of me slaughtering the first piece in one of the books I picked.

My goal here is not to prove that I can avoid mistakes while sight-reading an easy piece. It was to "officially" START my daily sight-reading practice, to play anything at all, see how it feels, figure out how to title the video, set an intention for this "new" practice in the description, and post a link here to start my participation. All of that is an accomplishment for me, because I'm really a perfectionist who needs to embrace the process of making mistakes and learning from them.

I would like a pat on the back for overcoming my anxiety. The easiest piece in my Kunz book was still too difficult for me to play at tempo with ok fingering. So my next video will be from my John Thompson method book instead and I'll return to Kunz later. If you clicked, please give me a hi-5!!

BartK

Pallas
🙌 and 👍

WieWaldi

Pallas Well done! You made the very first step, the most important step of all. And if you add more of those little steps every day, you will make a lot of progress within a year. You should be proud and give yourself some nice claps on the shoulder.

Keep on the sight-reading practice. Record yourself in a few days again, I am sure you will see quite some progress. The long pause in the beginning, with placing the right fingers on the right keys, do some preparation, you recorded everything 👍. I like

rogerch

@Pallas @WieWaldi I think it’s great that you are working on sight reading! As time passes you will get better at notes, rhythm, dynamics, etc.

You have taken the critical first step which is to start! Thanks for sharing and I look forward to your progress!

I think having this video record will be useful and encouraging. I’ve been working on sight reading for almost a year and I feel like I have made good progress but I have no recordings to check. You have inspired me to make some recordings, maybe monthly? I’m not sure I will be brave enough to share them but at least it will help me see my progress…

Pallas

rogerch Whether you share them or not, I'm pulling for you!

ranjit

I like the idea! I might post my own sight reading progress. I'm pretty bad at sight reading -- a year ago it was basically at zero, but now I can mostly read through very easy pieces. It's something that I really need to find a way to get up to speed quickly.

Pallas

WieWaldi This is exactly why I posted that other thread, about the "order of operations" when learning a piece. Ideally, we do it ALL at the same time, but when you're a bloody beginner and your brain can only take so much, what's the most important thing, then the next important thing, etc. I'm going back to that thread maybe tomorrow to try to make a digest for people to react to. Thanks for this conversation!

Pallas

WieWaldi I really like the comments you put into your video. How do you do do that?

WieWaldi

Pallas I use VideoPad. It is not the most professional tool, but it is fairly cheap and quite easy to learn. I would say, it is very intuitive.
If you are more interested in this, you should start a dedicated video editing thread. There are lots of different opinions and many other tools that work as well. Maybe some are even total for free?

ranjit

Agreed. I find that the important thing is to be at least somewhat "musical". For instance, you might speed up or slow down while still feeling the musical line. Or you might stop and collect your thoughts if it's going out of control.

That said, Bart had a really good experience sight reading with the metronome. So it might work as well. It depends on where you are and how you do it. For me, it felt like I was working a typewriter when I tried it a year ago, and just didn't work somehow because I felt disengaged from the language of the music.

Pallas

WieWaldi Thank you! Just a name drop did the trick!

Sophia

I use DaVinci Resolve, which has a pretty robust editing feature. I recently experimented a little with captions and other effects, but obviously I don't have the talent and patience for it that WieWaldi has 🙂 But if you're still looking for something, then I can highly recommend it as well.

Pallas

Sophia I have another thread over here (https://forum.pianotell.com/d/902-please-help-me-refine-my-recording-setup/16) so I don't derail this one. Thank you!

Stub

I think one needs to try for both the notes and the rhythm when practicing sightreading. Notes and rhythm are the foundation stones of music. The other markings in a score may be from the composer or they may be editorial, but the notes and the rhythm are from the composer. I made the mistake of making rhythm the poor cousin of the notes, and had to spend a long time fixing that bad habit.

MRC

Rhythm or notes: what is more important?

I'll answer this question first from the point of view of a professional sight-reader. If you're accompanying an opera rehearsal, or playing chamber music, both are equally important. If you play the right rhythms, but the wrong melody and harmonies, the piece will be unrecognisable. Ditto if the melody is correct, but the rhythm is random.

But that's not all. Let's say you have a passage marked pp, vivace and all in staccato. If you play every single note right, with the correct rhythms, but you play ff, lento and with lots of pedal, it will be a disaster.

So, in order to be a good pro sight-reader, do you need to get everything exactly right straightaway? No! You scan the music, get a good idea of how it should sound, and concentrate on the essentials. You may leave out a load of notes, or get some details of the rhythm wrong, but you produce something recognisable, you stay together with your colleagues and you make music.

That's the goal to aim for in advanced sight-reading, but if you're near the beginning of your sight-reading journey, it will be too much for you to try to assimilate everything at once. Quite possibly your brain will freeze up, and you will achieve nothing.

What should you do? Work on each element separately first:

If you want to work on rhythm, just clap or tap the rhythms.
If you want to work on harmony, find a piece with a lot of chords and enjoy the progression of one chord to the next. To hell with the rhythm!
If your left hand is weak in sight-reading, read just the left hand part. You can also find simple pieces for left hand alone, for example here.
And so on...

Give it time. As you become more fluent in each element, it will become easier to put them together.

Finally, a big bravo for anybody who has the courage to record their sight-reading and post it for all to see and hear. You have my undying admiration!

ranjit

MRC This is a wonderful answer, and gives me the confidence to practice in this way myself. It immediately leads to a number of possibilities to come up with targeted practice strategies to optimize practice. It also points out why various answers in the thread, for instance mine and Bart's, aren't discordant with each other. Thank you.

Sophia

Thanks so much for that @MRC - it makes perfect sense to me. I think most who posted here are still at the "how do I spell that note again?" stage. I know I am 😁 It's simply impossible to get everything right at first glance... but it's getting less horribly difficult all the time so I guess there is hope for us still 😅

candela

I think it is also important to recognize the purpose for practicing sight-reading, which could be very different depending on the situation. For someone that is already somewhat accomplished and play together with others it is obviously of utmost importance to be able to listen and follow the timing. It is also important to know what can be simplified and skipped in a first read-through if the complexity is too high to nail it all prima vista. It's also necessary to always keep track of where in the sheet music the rest of the musicians are in case you flub totally and have to skip some beats or a measure or two before getting back in.

But the way I understand this thread, the sight-reading practice here is of a different nature and purpose. It's primarily in order to learn to read at all or more fluently, not in order to be able to eg accompany soloists in the near future without seeing the sheet music in advance. For someone who is very new to reading and doesn't yet have immediate recognition of all notes on the staffs including ledger lines it makes total sense to me to practice this specifically. If you are able to read a passage perfectly with all dynamics, expressive markings etc on your first try I'd say the material is too easy to be of real value to learn to read better. We generally learn best when appropriately challenged, so if someone can read/clap rhythms fine on their own but struggle to recognize notes, chord and arpeggio shapes and to figure out fingerings on the fly, I think it would be good at that stage to focus the practice on the aspects that cause struggle, even if it means not being able to keep in time when it gets tricky. But you need to be clear with yourself why you are practicing reading.

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