I'm looking for advice on improving my reading/note recognition and coordnating this with my fingers when playing pieces with quite busy parts in both hands.

Some of the pieces I'm working on currently/have worked on recently have been really difficult for me. My first instrument is clarinet so reading a single line of music is easy for me; however, when I need to play handfulls of notes in both hands I'm encountering difficulties doing this at speed, with correct timing, phrasing etc.

I'm finding I need to slow down/pause to read the notes and then sometimes figure out the fingering too. If I try to relax and let the "auto-pilot" kick in a bit I do recognise a number of the notes at sight but what I am finding is that if there's say an F# in the bass I may end up playing an F# in the right hand. Or reading the bass cleff notes as treble or the treble as bass etc. I think my brain is getting confused

In my current piece there are handfulls of chords as well as movement in both hands. It's marked "con pedale" so I'm figuring out the pedal usage too. There are lots of accidentals and enharmonic notes such as Fb, Gb etc and I think better in terms of E, F# etc I'm finding myself playin Eb where it's Enatural etc So more

There's so much to think about and coordinate I'm finding it really hard to make this flow and actually sound like music. It's a jazzy piece arranged by pam Wegewood "Laura"

In general terms I'd say I'm playing at around grade 5-6 standard.

All advice welcome.

Currently I'm breaking this piece down into a few bars at a time and working on them until they are either correct (I hope) or my brain goes Then I'm working on the next few and then doing both sections together etc.

But I feel this will end up with me memorising more than reading - a skill in itself but not then transferable to another piece.

So summary: How can I improve my eye (reading) to hands (playing) coordination???

Thankyou and hope this actually makes sense....

Sounds to me like you are doing all the right things. It takes time for skill levels to increase. You just have to be patient.

Also, when you play, from the score, a piece you have studied that is not sight reading anyway. You are relying on partial memorization - using the score for cues rather than reading it completely.

Memorizing and reading are not separate skills. Getting better at one does not make you worse at the other. But if you want to specifically improve your sight reading, one good way is to spend half an hour a day ploughing through lots of relatively easy stuff - which for you would be old grade 3-4 exam books - aiming to give a reasonably correct performance at first sight.

Absolutely.
(I have just agreed with MT - the world has slipped off it's axis a little)
It really does just take time, and particularly, with the piano, time to develop the kind of "two track" thinking required

If this is normal.....


then how to combat the feeling of uselessness .... ?

If you find the answer let me know.

The only way to improve reading is to do more of it. It is not coincidental that my own reading is more fluent when I am busy as an accompanist than when I am preparing for solo concerts.

I recently noticed a dramatic improvement in the reading of some of my pupils, all girls in their mid-teens. What they have in common is that they have been downloading piano music from the internet and learning them independently of me. Put at its most basic, they have been doing loads of reading, so they have improved this skill.

As to the feeling useless thingy, I echo sbhoa.

Ok thankyou. maybe feeling useless en masse is not as useless as on one's own

Yes. We still feel useles, hopeless, helpless and daft, but at least we don't feel it on our own.

Seriously, feeling useless is common; far more common that you might imagine. You are not useless; you just feel it sometimes. Don't forget to congratulate yourself occasionally about the things you can do.

Think about this. You are having trouble sight-reading at the piano. There are billions of people on this planet for whom your level of reading skill is unbelievable, incomprehensible. This might make you feel better, at least until the next time you lose a battle with the piano.

Not only that, but some of us billions have tried quite hard, and failed, to achieve as much as you have!

Hah - this must be common. My teacher says that for my level, my sight reading is good compared to others, but I still feel like it's an absolute pile of steaming pants!

I think by feeling useless sometimes it drives me on to do better.

I wonder if I will ever be happy wioth my playing or whether I will be constantly trying to improve...

I suppose it is just a case of trying anything and everything. In the past year I've become so interested in piano I have bought lots of other music books-particularly vocal selectios from musicals (as they are my favourite) and these usually contain lots of chords. When I first attempted them it would take me about 10 minutes to get through the page but now I seem to recognise them a lot quicker.

I did ifnd initially with my sight reading I was doing the same-playing my left hand notes in the right hand etc.. so my advice would to be just tyring anything. Compilations of piano solos etc.

Obviously you can argue that I probably know quite a lot of the music that I'm reading before hand but never the less my sight reading has improved massively.