sight reading

Hi! I'm from Peru and I've being studying piano for 6 years. However, my sigth reading has always being poor. I searched the web for things that could help me improve it and I found lists of books. Since I live in Peru, I can´t get them. If anyone could suggest me what can I do to improve my sight reading, I would be very grateful. Greetings

My best advice is to just keep doing it. Play from books a couple of levels below your skill, look at the time sig, key sig and scan for any problem spots before you start to play. A regular poster in this group, Chuan C. Chang (cc88m) has written a guide with a lot of good info, including a section on sight reading
http://members.aol.com/chang8825/sreading.htm

Hope this helps. LEC

The first thing you must do is to understand what the problem is. There are two requirements to sight reading. The first is the purely technical requirement that you must be able to read the printed music and understand what notes, chords, etc., are indicated. If you've been playing 6 years, this should not be the problem except for times when notes are above or below the staff. Then you may have to calculate what the exact note is. But generally you should know what notes to play. The second requirement is to be able to strike the correct keys. And here is where the problem is. Without even knowing you, I assume that after reading the music, you look down to play the keys. But do you understand that having to look up and down from music to keyboard over and over is an extremely inefficient process? Imagine if I were to ask you to go out and start running, but the requirement is that you must also look down to see where your feet were being placed. Not an easy proposition, but this is exactly what you are doing by looking up and down.

The secret is that you should never look down at the keyboard. Then you can concentrate strictly on the printed music. You won't lose your place on the music and you won't lose the time and efficiency of having to look and down continuously. This absolutely is the answer to the problem. So, why can't you do this? Because you've never trained yourself to know the keyboard well enough to do it. The solution to your problem, therefore, becomes very simple. Starting this moment, never look down at the keyboard. This means that you must practice slowly enough to not hit wrong notes. It means that you will have to practice the same passage many times until you can play without looking. You will find that even passages you think you know well you will have difficulty playing without looking.

At first, this will seem difficult or impossible. But it isn't. It is a learned skill, and a necessary skill if you will ever play more advanced pieces. You simply cannot play fast passages or large jumps, by having to look at the keyboard all the time. This doesn't mean that you are never allowed to glance down. But consider the fact that blind pianists never look at the keys and they do just fine. If they can do it, so can you. You simply must believe in yourself, do not get discouraged, and persevere.

Good Luck Daniel G. Emilio

Hello,

I agree and disagree with Mr. Emilio. Yes it is important when trying to improve your sightreading skills not to look at the keyboard. But what you don't want to do is to practice the same piece again and again. After one repetition you are no longer reading the piece, but memorizing it. The best strategy for learning to read well is: l. Don't go back and play the same thing a second time, but continue moving onward. The best idea here is to get a large mass of music, hopefully of progressive difficulty, and start at the beginning. You don't want to play a piece a second time. NOT AT ALL. 2. Don't look down.

You want to train a coordination between your sight and the movement of your fingers. And this is the standard way to do that. Do not worry about mistakes. Chose a level of music that is within your grasp. This may mean, if you're a fresh beginner, just taking the treble or bass clef parts of easy music, to begin with. Try to maintain a steady tempo and forget about mistakes. You want to cover as much textual ground as possible. If, each day, you spend some time reading through this large corpus of printed scores, never looking down and never going over the same piece a second time, working on pieces at are easy enough for you to handle without too many mistakes and then going onward to ever increasingly more difficult scores, you will become a facile sight reader. If you go back over the same piece again and again then you're not learning to sight read, but to memorize, which is entirely different.

I hope this helps David Sudnow

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I agree with the above. I do think however that the 'within your grasp' is the main issue. If somebody is trying to sightread something that they can't play they will fail. To put it differently, you can't sightread what you can't read. Because of that I think that for a beginner to intermediate player to spend time practicing sightreading is a waste of time.

You miss the point entirely . The practice I recommend is not intended to improve sight reading - but better sight reading is a byproduct of this practice. I sense that you have played for several years and can do a pretty decent job on something like Beethoven Pathetique 1st movement, but in truth you play with mistakes throughout. This is because you do not 'practice' but only play for enjoyment. You fool yourself into believing you are practicing. You work over a hard spot for a while and then move on. But those hard spots just never go away. And you could legitimately be doing this for several hours a day and never see any true improvement.

And mistakes during practice do matter - they matter immensely. 'Practice does not make perfect - practice makes permanent.' When you practice with mistakes, the mistakes become permanent. When you allow a mistake to get by once, then the mistake is easier to make the second time and so forth. By practicing with mistakes, you reinforce those mistakes. You cannot allow yourself to play through mistakes. The best practice is to work with short segments, but play slowly enough to make sure that you play perfectly each time. If you simply cannot play the passage hands together, then work it out hands separate. (If you cannot play the passage hands separate perfectly, then the piece is too difficult for you at this time.) Work those small segments, especially the difficult ones, slowly for 10-20 times, and then move to a new small segment. By doing this and not looking at the keyboard, you will gradually improve your 'knowledge' of the keyboard (i.e., knowing where the keys are instinctively without having to look), and this will make you play more accurately. The byproduct is that when you always practice this way, your accuracy improves even when sight reading. The goal is not sight reading - the goal is overall accuracy and magically your sight reading improves.

It is important to practice not looking at your hands. One way to do this is to get into the habit of keeping your fingers on the keys as much as possible. This is called 'feeling the keys'. Even after a big jump, you can usually still feel the keys by getting their ahead of time, feeling it and then playing. Even when not sight reading, feeling the keys is important for accuracy and eliminating mistakes, so it is a good skill to cultivate that will be useful all the time. C. C. Chang; more on piano practice at

I do?

The original question on this thread was about sight reading. The subject of the thread is 'sight reading'.

job on something like Beethoven

Uh, no. I don't play that piece.

You gather all that from my little post? Amazing.

Whose goal?

To put it differently, you can't sightread what

I agree. Sight-reading can't be really practised. But it does get better as you go learn more pieces, as you learn to recognise certain combinations of notes, intervals etc that you have seen earlier in stuff that you've done before.

Dear david, I would also add that if he really learns scales and some theory, he will find the sight reading at speed much easier. Sort of like an advanced version of the Sudnow method! best penny

Here's the problem, and I don't really mean to be super critical. But many beginning students post here to try to learn to play better. When you post in response to a technical question, students must rely on the fact that you are experienced enough to give sound advice. I now sense that you are in the beginner category because the Pathetique is an intermediate level piece that virtually every emerging student learns early on. If you don't play this piece, you are still at beginner level. Good sight reading is not a goal that should be specifically practiced, but rather it is the result of having learned the fundamentals - such as learning music theory and learning and applying good practice methods. Sight reading improves as a direct result of an improved command of the fundamentals.

If a student is serious about improving his playing beyond the mediocre, then he must get serious about applying proper practice methods - this is where it's all at.