I know we have had this topic before, but I'm going to the optician tomorrow and wondered if anyone had any further advice. My current plan is to go armed with the measurements for the distance from my eyes to the keyboard, and from my eyes to the music. A couple of things bother me:

- I think my distance from the piano varies a fair bit. I move my piano stool out of the way when I am not using it, so have to guess where to put it back each time (I could make a mark on the carpet, I suppose!). I also sit further away when I know I am going to pedal.

- varifocals or bifocals? I have got varifocals for ordinary reading glasses, and they are fine, but expensive. I don't know the price differential but I'm guessing bifocals are cheaper, and if I don't get the distances etc right, varifocals could be an expensive mistake.

Any thoughts?

PatC

I promoted my reading glasses into piano glasses as my sight worsened. I think it's useful to have the biggest lenses you can find - my current reading glasses are quite trendy and a bit "slotty" in style (short in height) - they're not going to be as good with the piano should they ever get promoted to that role as I'd have to keep moving my head to glance down.

Slightly off-topic, but are you sure your distance really varies that much? I'm sure I can tell by feel where I sit in relation to the piano, without needing any guidelines.

Also, I may be wrong here but my feeling is that if you're sitting too close to pedal comfortably then you're probably sitting too close to be at an optimum distance from the keyboard. You shouldn't need to move back and forwards, any more than you should need to move from side to side when playing the extreme high and low notes - again you should be far enough away to reach both comfortably.

I have a similar problem although I am short sighted (with presbyopia developing).

I have varifocals which are fine for everyday life. I can read piano music with them, enough to play say a grade 3 piece to a pupil in a lesson - which saves messing about with glasses.

However, for seriously playing a longer and more difficult piece I now have special piano glasses which are basically reading glasses for a longer than normal reading distance. I have found the clarity of vision is not affected hugely by moving a bit nearer, or a bit further away as would naturally occur when you sit down at the piano from one day to the next. I even use them for the organ which involves a greater distance than the piano. I think there's a bit of leeway in the focus really.

My optician was not at all surprised when I hove into view armed with tape measure and list of distances and was totally sympathetic to needing a bigger field of vision than is afforded by varifocals. I did try with varifocals when I first had them, but I found that I could only see a few notes with enough clarity to play. I also used old reading glasses at one stage, but I think my eyes are changing independently of each other, so one eye would be in focus when the other wasn't.

I wouldn't be without my piano glasses now - being able to see a whole page clearly once more is brilliant. Oh the joys of getting older!

I'm fine with my varifocals.
I'm happy about this as I'd really not like to have to be changing glasses for things.

Hi Pat

I am short sighted but don't actually need glasses for reading. This left me with a problem for the piano as the score was too far away for me to read but to close for me to use my glasses for my short sightness.

I spent quite a lot of time telling the optician my problem and they were very helpful. I tried to sit at the same distance and put the card up the same level as I would for playing the piano. Most opticians actually have a music card too, but just in case you may want to take your sheet music with you.

I will echo what Alicia says about the bigger the lens the better, as the first pair I got I couldn't get the full picture. I went back and got some very large lens, I think the pair of glasses as a whole frame and lens cost me £20 from Tesco opticians.

The opticians are usually very understanding and don't mind taking the time to ensure you get the right prescription.

Good luck, let us know how you get on.

ET

I wish i could get a price tag like that! My lenses cost around £250 on top of whatever the price tag is regardless of where I go and what offers are on!!

What just for a single lens? Or is it because they are varivocals? I think that they called mine "intermediatte glasses" - like you use on a computer, in fact, I now use my piano glasses for my work too.

I find varifocals/bifocals don't work too well at the piano. They assume that you look down through the lower half of the lens to get close focus and read comfortably. That is NOT the case when you are reading a musical score directly in front of you. A separate pair of glasses is best, optimized for the sort of distances that you read music at. Such a pair is also useful for DIY (joining pipes, wiring plugs, painting etc.)

Incidentally a grand piano is better than an upright - you can set the music much further away so as to focus more comfortably.

And with price of specs being what it is, it could work out cheaper to buy a grand!

For both lenses together.
I have varifocals but also need the thinner lenses. Even with the thinner ones unless I have a titanium frame the left one forces the screw. This usually means several trips to get it tightened before they listen to what i tell them from the beginning and apply lock tight. Also have photochromic coating as my eyes are sensitive to the light.

I'm fairly highly myopic (- 7.5, and -8.0 Dioptres), and have started needing glasses for presbyopia over the last year.....and have been a bit caught out, albeit more for close reading, I think: I have always habitually held books far more closely to my eyes than average, no doubt because I already had prescriptions of about -1.5 and -3.0 at first diagnosis. Since each dioptre of correction means that you can only see half as far as someone with the next number down in their prescription, that's fairly significant. I opted for varifocals so that I could have a smooth transition between the corrections I need, but didn't let my optician know (because I didn't think about it) how closely I hold text to read it. Because I have a high prescription, the effect of my lenses is to make print very much smaller to read than it really is, so holding small print further away is not an option - I have to take my glasses off to read or to look at small things close to. It also gives me problems with some aspects of reading music - the varifocals only focus in a relatively narrow strip down the centres of my lenses, so I need to place my head accurately relative to the music, so as to be absolutely square on, and that means if I'm playing duets, I have to shove my partner out of the way for one page of the two....or guess a bit. Most notes are okay, it's the accidentals, and particularly sharps and naturals, which give me problems - that and ledger lines . However, although I could have got some of this corrected for if I'd known to inform the optician, I don't think that I'd really be any better off with bifocals. And having been visually impaired for a very very long time now, the idea of having lots of bespoke pairs of glasses absolutely appals me - after all, I'm not in the habit of losing specs, because they live on my nose all the time . I'm utterly helpless without them, too...I think the best you can do is talk it over in detail with the optician, and see if they have some advice:it's just too individual a choice to make, and at least they'll know your prescription and are better placed to have an idea of what might suit.

I do this. My piano glasses are always my previous reading glasses.

And I use the same "intermediate glasses" for the computer screen - I'm wearing them now.

I think my eyes must be similar to yours, Susie, as I could have written this post myself. I don't find having two pairs of glasses a problem at all - just have to remember to take the piano glasses with me when I'm playing at church!

I've tried both varifocals and bifocals, and couldn't get on with either of them. At the moment my normal glasses are OK for piano music because at G1 standard, there aren't many notes and they're well spaced out. But in the transition between G4-G5 clarinet, I've found it increasingly difficult to read the music, even though I've got a pair of glasses specially for the purpose. The fact that there are usually a lot more notes strung together means that I can't distinguish them easily. It's all very well at the opticians when you're looking at a static page, but it's a different matter when your eyes are moving rapidly across the page. I'm not sure if this is the problem you have with playing above G3, Susie, but I'm wondering if anyone else has a similar problem and how you've solved it...

This was my thought too, if you work out exactly where you need to be to pedal and move comfortably that should be consistant everytime you play. Therefore when you go to the ops today a fixed lens piano glass should be fine - go in, armed with tape measure and a piece of your current music and they should be able to go from there.

Good luck

Thank you everyone for your thoughts so far. I can't report back yet though, as the optician has decided to "tweak" my contact lenses first, and once they are sorted, to deal with the reading and piano glasses (I will wear them over my contacts). So my tape measure wasn't really called into play today.

Optician didn't seem too fazed, but initially assumed I would be taking out my contacts before wearing either my reading glasses or piano glasses, so we were talking at cross-purposes for a while. Anyway, cheered myself up with a nice chilly glass of Sancerre in Corney & Barrows afterwards (a bit disappointed it wasn't all sorted out today).. Will keep you posted.

PatC