Piano Sight Reading?, Any tips for how to improve quickly? Options

[bobziekins]

I've got my grade 2 piano coming up in, ooh about 4 weeks (IMG:style_emoticons/default/sad.gif) I've been playing for 6 months, and can read music well because I play the flute too (grade 5).

I'm absolutely TERRIBLE TERRIBLE TERRIBLE at sightreading though. My teacher wasn't too worried about it at first, because I was looking at so many new pieces that I was ok at it. Now I've been looking at the same graded pieces for 3 or 4 months, and practically know them off by heart, so don't really 'read' the music. I didn't think about it, but I've pretty much forgotten most of the bass clef notes, or muddle them up with treble clef.

I can sight read on the flute (apart from a few rhythm blips (IMG:style_emoticons/default/blush.gif)) But the piano is a completely different story...

There are so many things to think about! My teacher trails off this long list of things so focus on....
"Make sure you get all the rhythms properly, they're the most important things, if you make a mistake carry on, don't look at your hands, scan the key signature beforehand, keep your fingers bent, don't go too fast, keep a steady beat, emphasise the first beat in the bar, pay attention to HOW you're supposed to play it, don't focus on the notes, but try to get as many correct as possible, keep your wrists up!"

Then she says "Oh, and don't look so worried and tense, it's only sightreading!" (IMG:style_emoticons/default/blink.gif)

She doesn't really list them like that... but it feels like it.

Then it just turns into a big mess with my brain buzzing and it all goes really really really badly. Then finally afterwards she says "You played it an octave too low! And you missed all the F sharps!"

URGHHHHHHH

[undividedself]

> I'm absolutely TERRIBLE TERRIBLE TERRIBLE at sightreading though.

I sympathise! I was terrified of sight reading during my first few grades. (I'm on Grade 7 now).


>There are so many things to think about!

>URGHHHHHHH

I think you're entirely right to feel this way(!) It's simply not possible, in my opinion, to think about sight reading whilst actually doing it. The moment you start pondering that mental checklist you'll draw attention away from where you need it to be: on the score in front of you.

The only vital thing during sight reading is to *maintain the beat*. Keep playing right the way through to the end without pausing (or rushing). Sacrifice all other considerations. They are luxuries.

It's a very different process from *practicing* a piece, where stopping and starting is frequent. You repeat little sections, trying to hit the right notes with the chosen fingering. The beat is sacrificed for the notes and the dynamics; with sight reading it is the opposite way around.

Therefore I believe that, yes, there is one thing you can do to quickly improve your sight reading: *get used to playing the wrong notes*

Revel in them! Become proud of your ability to brazen them out even if 90% of the keys you press are wrong.

This skill you can master quite quickly at home. You won't have to think about it during the exam; you'll just do it. Btw, it also applies to performing your prepared pieces, which simplifies the whole exam nicely.

The most common piece of advice I've heard people give about sight reading is to practice it frequently. It seems so logical and so reasonable, but I genuinely doubt whether practice is necessary. Once you've mastered allowing-yourself-to-play-wrong-notes you're done.

Your sight reading will continue to improve effortlessly as a byproduct of learning new pieces. Why? Because you'll start recognising new patterns of notes (like particular chords, for example). The result will be that future readings which include them get easier and easier. Your mind can take in more stuff at a glance.

Good luck!

[Solari]

I seem to be fine getting the notes but dynamics are another thing... I don't think there is much alternative but to just find lots of different material and read, read, read.

[Holz Gedeckt]

Yup, Solari, the answer is practise, practise, practise. Sight-reading, like any other skill, is one which will improve with practising.

[andante_in_c]

Three golden rules: keep going, keep a steady pulse and play in the right key. That got me through my Grade 7 piano sight reading with 17/21, even though it was in A major with lots of chords I couldn't read. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[lostchord]

Look for runs that can be played as a scale or part of a scale, and arpeggios that can be played using fingers 1,3,5 or 2,4,1 etc. And practice slowly, lots n lots. You'll get there!

[Alicia Ocean]

Grade two after six months playing is really fast. I think sightreading develops at a slower speed than that. Form scratch it would usually take over two years to get to grade two - that's time for sightreading skills to develop through playing lots and lots of pieces.

[Crotchetymum]

The only vital thing during sight reading is to *maintain the beat*. Keep playing right the way through to the end without pausing (or rushing). Sacrifice all other considerations. They are luxuries.

...
Therefore I believe that, yes, there is one thing you can do to quickly improve your sight reading: *get used to playing the wrong notes*

Revel in them! Become proud of your ability to brazen them out even if 90% of the keys you press are wrong.

I think this is great advice. Like the great Eric Morecambe, you will be playing all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

From past exam crit sheets, maintaining the rhythm is definitely the key, and if you can add some dynamics that will go down really well.

[Mad Tom]

There are no short cuts or tricks to getting good at sight reading, (or for anything other worthwhile skill for that matter). And remember that the second and subsequent times that you play a piece from the score, the less it is sight reading and the more it is practice (and a pretty poor sort of practice as well).

The first thing to get straight is that there is no such thing as "sight-reading" in general. There are different forms of sight-reading for different purposes - though of course they have much in common. In real life there are two that are frequent and especially useful for the pianist, and they are quite different skills.

First there is sight-reading an accompaniment for a singer or instrumentalist. Here the most important thing is to keep going, in tempo, no matter what wrong notes you hit along the way. Next, you aim to get the most important notes right, the bass, fragments of melody, essential parts of the harmony. But a note-perfect, nuance-perfect rendition of the text is not the aim - especially if it would lead to hesitations. To the end of producing an adequate and usable performance you can miss out notes, play parts with one hand only, use simpler harmonic figuration. Whatever it takes.

The other important form of sight-reading is the first time you work through a piece at the keyboard, with the intention of studying it for addition to your repertoire, and possibole performance. Here the aim is entirely different. The ideal is to play with total accuracy, even if that means playing very slooowly, and if it means stopping from time to time to take stock. The fewer mistakes you make in the first contact with the keyboard, the easier the piece will be to learn longer term. It helps to have given a lot of thought to the structure, phrasing, and fingering, before you ever think of touching the keyboard ... but few of us can resist the temptation to see what it really sounds like rather earlier than would be ideal.

Then there is what many people call sight-reading, but is not really sight-reading at all - that is to say - playing a piece that you have studied with the aid of the score. Here the piece is at least partly memorized, and muscular habits have been established, so you are not reading every note and instruction in the score, but merely using it to provide cues and prompts as to what comes next, perhaps reading more closely in difficult or less-practiced sections.

Finally there is sight-reading for an exam. Here you are expected, after a brief study, to give as near as possible a complete and accurate performance of a piece never seen before. This is a much less useful skill. In real life you'd almost always want to use one or other of the first two kinds of sight reading described above. It is in any case only possible with a piece that is both:

- several levels below the standard at which you can play, and
- in a style with which you are familiar

And even then, if it is a piece you want to perform, this would be unlikely to be much of a performance. Even the simplest pieces need study before you understand them well enough to reveal their musical meanings and secrets to your audience.


There are really ony four ways to improve your sight-reading:

1. Improve your musicianship, to quickly grasp the structure of a piece, its key or keys, the essential rhythms, harmonies, and modulations, the development of thematic material, what emotional effect the piece has and how it achieves it. Also to have a good idea how a pice will sound without having to actually having to sound it out on an isntrument.

2. Improve your general level of keyboard skill. Familiarisation with more and more keyboard patterns, deeper familiarity with those you already know, ability to quickly choose suitable fingerings, ability to find most notes without looking, control, precision, speed ...

3. Increase your familiarity with musical notation. So, for example, when you see the 5th leger line above the treble clef you must just know instantly that is a high B. This is the sort of thing that you can easily practice, and when you coma across a deficiency in some area you can make a special effort to overcome it (insted of stumbling over it for years, as so many choose to do).

4. Practice. Practice all three kinds of reading, slow and careful for works you intend to study in depth, sketchy but effective for sight-read accompaniments, and several grades below your current standard for as complete and accurate a performance as possible.

[Edit: Sorry about all the typos]

[JoMook]

Genius Mad Tom, genius. Everything you've said clarifies a lot for me.

As with regards to the OP, I'm about to do grade 3 piano and I have to FORCE myself to look past the current bar line otherwise I find that I pause at the end of each and every bar ...seems my brain can only cope with a few things it hasn't done before and then wants a rest (IMG:style_emoticons/default/sleep.gif) or it sees that line and thinks it's hit a brick wall.

You get 30 secs in exam to look/have a go before you to do it for "real", use it ALL. It should help you at least be able to locate the notes you need to play. Do you have the sight-reading examples book? I pick some in a random order and play them twice, the second time is always better than the first.

Hope it goes well (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[maledictis]

First there is sight-reading an accompaniment for a singer or instrumentalist. Here the most important thing is to keep going, in tempo, no matter what wrong notes you hit along the way. Next, you aim to get the most important notes right, the bass, fragments of melody, essential parts of the harmony. But a note-perfect, nuance-perfect rendition of the text is not the aim - especially if it would lead to hesitations. To the end of producing an adequate and usable performance you can miss out notes, play parts with one hand only, use simpler harmonic figuration. Whatever it takes.

Can I take credit for that bit? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/rolleyes.gif) (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

[Mad Tom]

First there is sight-reading an accompaniment for a singer or instrumentalist. Here the most important thing is to keep going, in tempo, no matter what wrong notes you hit along the way. Next, you aim to get the most important notes right, the bass, fragments of melody, essential parts of the harmony. But a note-perfect, nuance-perfect rendition of the text is not the aim - especially if it would lead to hesitations. To the end of producing an adequate and usable performance you can miss out notes, play parts with one hand only, use simpler harmonic figuration. Whatever it takes.

Can I take credit for that bit? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/rolleyes.gif) (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

Well ... I am willing to share credit. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) I already knew this was legitimate (even unavoidable) for sight-read accompaniments. What you pointed out to me is that it is also legitimate in an accompaniment that you have practiced when there just isn't enough time to learn to play it (at least not realiably) exactly as written.

[maledictis]

First there is sight-reading an accompaniment for a singer or instrumentalist. Here the most important thing is to keep going, in tempo, no matter what wrong notes you hit along the way. Next, you aim to get the most important notes right, the bass, fragments of melody, essential parts of the harmony. But a note-perfect, nuance-perfect rendition of the text is not the aim - especially if it would lead to hesitations. To the end of producing an adequate and usable performance you can miss out notes, play parts with one hand only, use simpler harmonic figuration. Whatever it takes.

Can I take credit for that bit? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/rolleyes.gif) (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

Well ... I am willing to share credit. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) I already knew this was legitimate (even unavoidable) for sight-read accompaniments. What you pointed out to me is that it is also legitimate in an accompaniment that you have practiced when there just isn't enough time to learn to play it (at least not realiably) exactly as written.

And it is also legimate to earn most of one's living behaving as such...
I'll take a tiny little bit of shared credit then for showing you how to be a cowboy (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

[undividedself]

Therefore I believe that, yes, there is one thing you can do to quickly improve your sight reading: *get used to playing the wrong notes*

Revel in them! Become proud of your ability to brazen them out even if 90% of the keys you press are wrong.

I think this is great advice. Like the great Eric Morecambe, you will be playing all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

Thank you, Crotchetymum!

I'd like to add that if I see a very difficult rhythmic phrase coming up I literally just improvise a rhythm which seems similar to what is written, all without skipping a beat. It's fun! And, who knows, maybe I was lucky and played it correctly.

You know you've arrived in sight reading land when you have the courage to end a piece on a botched ff chord without changing it (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

[maggiemay]

you haven't been reading 'the Perfect Wrong Note' have you?
(IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)