I'm sick and tired of not being able to buy new music that I hear or would like to learn because my sightreading is so bad. I can't pick up new music as it would take me forever to learn it so then the enjoyment would be taking out of it.
I can never keep going when I make mistakes, I find it difficult to look ahead and my sense of rhythm is not great, does this mean I will never be able to be a good sightreader?
Plus I want to be a Secondary School music teacher, how am I ever going to be able to do this if I can't sightread accompaniments or play for concerts.
It's really starting to bother me now because I'm involved in nothing at college, partly because there's nothing for pianists and if on the rare occasion I do ever get asked to play I'm too scared that I would embarrass the people who I'm playing for if I can't learn an accompaniment fast enough or play mistakes.
I used to be so inspired by my teacher in school who could pick up any piece of music and just play it straight away, it was my biggest inspiration for learning the piano and it was the one thing I always wanted to be good at but it's never happened.
I have hymm books, the Paul Harris books...
Please can someone advice me what to do because my confidence is starting to go down hill again and I don't want to be like I was a couple of years ago, and I really really want to be able to buy pieces and ENJOY playing them?
My appologies for this post being somewhat of a rant, but I feel in a slight bad mood after practising all day and not feeling any achievment.
Thanks PSL

You sound like a short break would be a good idea. I don't believe for one second that you are as bad as you think you are right now. Why not play some really easy stuff that you enjoy for a while?

I'm not the world's fastest note learner even though I don't have any difficulty understanding the notes on the page.
I don't think it's particularly unusual for it to take longer to learn things as you move on. The pieces become more complicated and there's much more to learn. You often include longer pieces too.
Have you asked your teacher to help you with practice strategies? Knowing how to approach things can help a lot. Can you identify what some of the problems with reading are? You say it's sight reading but I don't think learning something from the score needs what I'd call particularly advanced sight reading skills as you'd be taking small sections at a time and working on them carefully.
When you say your sense of rhythm is not good do you mean that you have problems reading unfamiliar rhythms or is it that you can't hear/feel the pulse when playing and/or listening?
I need plenty of time for accompanying too. It can help if you've a friend who plays another instrument who will be patient while you learn the skills you want.
I don't think that all secondary music teachers are brilliant piano sight readers so that in itself is not a major problem.

There are many different skills in piano playing. I have provided piano accompaniments for several music teachers for whom piano was neither their first, nor often their second, instrument. On the other hand, I can't improvise for toffee, nor can I, without music, simply plonk down appropriate chords to accompany a song. Some of the music teachers I have known have had this latter ability, which is arguably of more use to them in the classroom. When they need all the notes, in the right order, with dynamics etc they call upon appropriately-qualified pupils or staff.

I have a similar problem with sightreading on the piano. I can sightread most stuff on the clarinet, and have been sightreading grade 7 pieces this week on the sax even though I only started the instrument in July, I've been playing the piano for nearly 10 years now and though I'm working on grade 8 I can't really sightread anything above grade 4-5 standard (and even that's not very good). There are two other pianists in my year at school of about the same standard and they can both sightread grade 6-7 pieces very well. I have recently accepted that I'm no great pianist compared with how I play clarinet and sax, but feel that as I want a career in music, piano will be useful for accompanying, but if I can't sightread this will be a problem. Do I just need more practise at sightreading?

I'm not sure there's a shortcut to this. The more practice you can get, the better. Rhythm and pulse are more important than accuracy of the notes, as has been discussed on many a thread, as is keeping going despite mistakes.

If you're providing the music for the class to sing along, you'd be surprised by how few notes are actually required to keep the thing moving. Obviously, if you have a concert or competition, then bring in the ones who can put everything in place for you, if you still can't.

But do put in the practice and furthermore, try as best you can to discipline yourself i.e. go through a similar process to that required for the sightreading part of the exam, otherwise you won't really put yourself under the type of pressure that you're hoping eventually to manage.

I've always struggled sight reading, so now that I'm coming back to playing seriously again, I've decided to tackle it head on.

I started with an easy book of stuff for my level (probably grade 2/3 ish - 63 easy melodic studies for flute for those who know it) and I did grave VII when I last played seriously.

Like you, my main issue has been the sense of rhythm, so I decided to split things up a bit - tried sight clapping the rhythm of the piece, starting by counting aloud (partly influenced by having to rest my hand as well, but it's been useful even when I can actually play the instrument). By removing the note reading/co-ordination part of the equation, I realised that I COULD read the rhythm, the issue was thinking quickly enough to have all the information make it from my eyes to my fingers.

Another suggestion from my teacher is to sing (aloud if alone, or mentally if you can) just trying to get the general direction of the piece in your head (if you can't sing the pitches exactly, don't worry - the instrumental things will always be tough on the voice).

I've also found that by playing with a metronome a bit more often (probably one piece per practice session, even if it's only a bit with a tricky rhythm where I want to check I'm not miscounting), I find it easier to maintain a steady pulse in my head when the metronome isn't on. The metronome (set much slower than I had been playing the piece) also helped me sort out the rhythm (and work out the exact point I was losing the rhythm (a trill that I dived out of as I felt the trill stall, rather than at the end of the written note))

It's probably not directly helpful, but I'd just like to point out that one of the music teachers at my school isn't a first study pianist, she's a clarinettist with the "basic" piano skills, if she needs something sight-read "well" she gets the other teacher or an advanced pupil to do it-don't worry too much about it, just keep on with your practice, I imagine you have plenty of time to get it "up to scratch", you'll get there

Get a book of dead simple (but good) arrangements of songs that are liked by children (of all ages up to 80+!. I am thinking of something like the (sadly out of print) Apuskiduski and the even better (FORTUNATELY STILL AVAILABLE) Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay (£12 on Amazon) song album from the 1980's.

You'll probably find that your sight reading is easily good enough for a sing-song with a class of 13 year olds,

The more music that you play, the easier sight reading will get. I promise you this... when I was your age (I think- based on what you said about being "at college"), my sight reading / accompaniment wasn't great. But several years later now that I've played a lot more music (most of it not on piano), my sight reading is better even if my piano technique is awful. Now I know what I ought to be playing but my hands just won't move in the right way..

It's a really long hard slog sometimes to get enough pieces and experience under your belt. But I know that once you do, you'll see it getting easier.

I've done my share of accompanying (I used to be able to accompany horn players on piano because I was a horn player and knew all the repertoire) and the secret I stumbled upon was to learn how to fake. If I wasn't technically up to it, I would skip notes in big chords, drop a few running notes from inner voices, and so on. So actually I found that knowledge of harmony was more important than technical ability.

Listening also helps- it's a bit like learning a language, you've got to read and hear it a lot and eventually you will be able to "think" in it. I only speak two languages but I notice that the mental process of learning a language was similar to learning music.

Take heart and I hope tomorrow will be a better day for you.

Hi, I am yet another candidate for the poor sight reading club.

I posted a thread a while back which was not such a moan about my sight reading but it kind of turned into one as time went on. It also has another link in the thread which makes an interesting read.

I practice sight reading every day with very little progression. It can be very depressing at times but if I dont do it, I really never will be able to, whereas if I persevere no matter what little process I make, eventually I'll at least reach a reasonable standard. However saying that I am not planing on teaching or accompanying.

Dont give up hope

sight reading thread

I think my problem with reading is not looking far enough ahead, I tend to stay on the same note, instead of already finding where my hands are going and looking at the next note, like reading ahead.
With my rhythm it's the timing I find difficult, I tend to cut notes short or make them longer like demisemiquavers, I just can't seem to get the right timing with them, and to be perfectly honest I think it's because I don't count, whereas if I'm working on a piece, not sightreading something, if I count out loud then, I can get the piece in time and learn where I'm making mistakes, but if I'm sightreading I have so many things to take in, like the key, notes, rhythm, dynamics, keyboard geography. How does it all come together?

Thank you everybody for your replies, just seemed to have a little fall in confidence today. I appreciate all the advice

Especially about the rhythm and pulse being the most important thing in any piece. Though it does help to get the key fixed in your head too - sometimes I've been so fixated on the rhythm that I've started playing and then realised I've forgotten the key!

Practice over months really does make a lot of difference. Make sure you do at least 15 minutes a day - the longer you do, the quicker you will improve - and look at the difference in 6 months time. Get hold of any music you can and sightread it - there are lots of grade 6 level anthologies around. Then see where your biggest problems were, and why. Try out these bits, play the whole thing again and see how much better it is. After a while trying this on different pieces, you'll get used to predicting where the problems are likely to be; this is incredibly useful for exams, as you only have 30 seconds to home in on these, but it's also useful generally when you meet a new piece.

Just playing different pieces gets your eye used to picking out familiar chords or runs, so that instead of reading note by note you are looking at groups of notes (a bit like learning to read, and making the important jump to recognising words rather than letters). So make sure you try pieces by various composers from different eras in order to build up your stock of groups, and don't leave a piece entirely until you've mastered any difficult bits - it all adds to your technical ability.

Most Western music, whether classical or pop, is based on a fixed set of rules. Once I had studied enough harmony, heard enough western music, and played enough of it, I was able to make use of patterns to cut short some of the mental work. A somewhat glib example- that's why I found it useful to learn scales and arpeggios because those are common building blocks of Western music. Once I learnt to recognise what certain cadences looked like i knew what it should sound like. Ditto for key and rhythm- they are just different sorts of patterns.

That's how it all comes together for me. For Western music anyway. If you asked me to sight-read Chinese / Indian / Eskimo / any other musical genre that I don't know, I'd be all messed up.

good luck!

I am another candidate for the - apparently numerous - club.
It takes time, a lot of it and patience ... infinite patience. I am told it does happen in the long run but my 'long run' hasn't come yet ...
However ... I echo the final comment: don't give up hope !!! After all, isn't this what life is all about?

I can read rhythms fairly easily, its the notes I have a problem with. I can even work out what the piece is supposed to sound like and sing it in my head, I just have a problem with getting the right notes out of the piano.

Your sig says working on Grade 8 piano.
Can I suggest Pacelbel's Fugues on the Magnificat (http://www.free-scores.com/free-sheet-music.php?ordrepar=&compositeur=Johann-Pachelbel&instru=&start=60) as things that are relatively straightword and should encourage counting and looking at patterns.
Plus they have the advantage of being 'proper' music, by which I mean although you might use them as sight reading practice would be perfectly acceptable in a performance. (OK, theoretically they are really organ pieces, but they're manuals only)