10 Steps to Better Sight-Reading
Jul 9th, 2007 by Vivien Tse
1. When the sight-reading piece is put in front of you, do not start right away. Take a minute or two to take notice the important parts of the piece; namely, the musical style, the key signature, time signature, the indicated tempo, clefs, dynamic markings, any other extra musical markings, any clef changes and/or key changes, and be sure you can read any hard-to-read ledger-line notes. The worst thing you would want to do is to begin playing the piece in the wrong clef in the wrong key.
2. Skim through the entire piece to look for the fastest note value. That note value will tell you the rate at which you can sight-read the piece. Don’t get caught in the trap of starting out too fast because the beginning looks easy, but then panicking when you see a much faster note value and suddenly realizing the limits of your sight-reading skills.
3. Quietly tap the rhythm of the first 2 bars to get a sense of how the rhythm is supposed to feel before you begin.
4. Once you start playing, do not stop to fix any mistakes, no matter what. Pretend you are playing with an imaginary band, or accompanying an imaginary singer. Once you stop to fix a mistake, your imaginary band will fall out of rhythm with each other because you went back a beat to fix your mistake. Likewise, do not make your imaginary singer stop in the middle of the song just because you had to go back to fix a wrong note. Turn on the metronome at the appropriate tempo (at which you can play) and pretend it is the soloist. As long as the metronome keeps ticking, you have to keep going, no matter what. Don’t worry about the mistakes; there’s a good chance that no one noticed it anyway.
5. Keep your eyes on the music. Do not look down at your hands or the keyboard. Learn to “feel” the intervals between the notes with your fingers instead of with your eyes. Only look at your hands when there is an interval beyond the farthest distance that your hand can stretch (generally, any interval beyond an octave or 9th). This is analogous to learning how to type on a computer keyboard. Imagine how slow the process would be if you had to look down at your hands for every letter that you type, and then look up at the screen to check that you typed the right word.
6. Always look one or two notes ahead. Don’t get caught surprised by giant leaps or unforeseen accidentals. A good analogy to this is walking on a sidewalk. If you kept looking exactly where your foot had landed at every exact moment, you wouldn’t be able to look ahead to notice a giant crack on the sidewalk so that you could prepare yourself to leap over it, and instead, you’d trip and fall.
7. If you come across a large chord with many notes and don’t have time to read and figure out all the notes within the chord, make a good educated guess. The same can be done with Alberti bass accompaniment.
8. Omit a few left-hand notes if you have to (but don’t omit too many!). It is also important not to omit any right hand notes, because the right hand generally holds the main melody.
9. Always observe the dynamics, fingering, and tempo changes (e.g., ritardando, accelerando)
10. If your sight-reading skills are not yet up to par, practice sight-reading at a very slow tempo. It is not a race to see who can sight-read the fastest. Use a metronome to help keep a steady tempo. Always aim for accuracy.Just like playing your songs, sight-reading also takes practice. With time and patience, you can play any piece you want in a matter of minutes. The key to good sight-reading is to be able to fool the audience to make it sound as though you have performed the piece well many times as if you know the piece inside and out.
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Thanks for the tips and advice. Hope to use this when I start practicing piano again!
Ok thanks
No problem.
I hope the advice helps.