Steps to Becoming a Great Sight Reader
1. Input and Output 🔌
Sight Reading is often thought of as the ultimate skill in piano learning and many students of the instrument believe that if they can just master the ability to pick up a piece of piano music and play it, then they have mastered the instrument. However, although sight reading is an important and impressive skill, to some extent sight reading is better thought of as a skill of utility rather than one of musicianship.
Let me explain…
When I was 17 years old, approaching music college auditions, I was starting to learn some of the difficult piano pieces that I had always wanted to play. However, I knew at the time that my sight reading had always been a very concerning weakness of mine (I was pretty terrible!)…and so I regularly voiced this concern to my piano teacher. My piano teacher repeatedly responded with; “I don’t care how good you are at sight reading, I only care about how quickly you can learn the piece”. This one sentence that I heard over and over again switched how I thought about reading and made me realise that sight reading isn’t the end goal. Sight reading is a vehicle and a way of learning music much faster and therefore a way of becoming a better musician more quicker.
This is what led me to think more carefully about what music reading actually is and to make a clear distinction between “sight reading” and “reading”.
Sight Reading - “Read and perform (music) from sheet music, without preparation.”
Reading - “The process of looking at written symbols and understanding the meaning of them.”
While these definitions might on the face of it seem somewhat obvious and arbitrary, what becomes clear is that “sight reading” is a skill of instant recognition (“without preparation”) and it requires practice. Whereas “reading” is just an action (“the process…”) that serves the purpose of giving us information. So, to practice “sight reading” rather than “reading”…we solely need to focus on training our instant recognition apposed to training our understanding of the meaning…which is done through a much longer process of learning pieces, learning theory and repeating the music over several weeks etc.
This means that if we are trying to practice “sight reading”, then everything that we play should only be played once. This is because, by doing this, we are practicing our ability to instantly recognise the notes “without preparation”. If we play the piece for a second time to “fix mistakes” then it becomes a reading exercise where we are instead thinking about how we wanted it to sound when we played it the first time and we are trying to allow our brain to get more information from the piece of music. The job of a sight reading exercise, however, should solely be with the intention of training our ability to instantly recognise notes and patterns.
So what does “instant recognition” actually mean?
Well, sight reading is a two step process…firstly we need to instantly recognise what we are looking at (input), then secondly, we need to be able to instantly find what we want on the piano (output).
In the initial stages of learning the piano, these two skills are likely to be at a fairly similar level…but as you learn more and more pieces of music (by reading, playing by ear or any other means) you will inevitably get much more practice at outputting and finding notes on the piano. This means that for many players, the bottleneck is the first part of the process, the input…and this is why we supplement this part of the process with specific time for sight reading practice and it is also why many players find that sight reading is a weakness (like it was for me!).
When learning pieces is your only means of practicing both reading and sight reading, the first time you attempt the piece is great sight reading practice. However, after this you are no longer sight reading, you are reading, and you may not practice sight reading again until you begin a new piece of music. This means that in order to build your sight reading ability, not only should sight reading be practiced separately to regular reading (where we focus on meaning), but each sight reading piece should be read only once!
2. Pattern Recognition 🁳
It is common to think that when we are sight reading a piece of music that we are reading every single note on the page very quickly. This is in fact not the case and for some pieces of music, it is likely not even possible!
At the beginning stages of learning the piano and practicing sight reading, recognising the notes is the first skill that we should attempt to acquire. However, it can quickly become an issue for players when they feel that they can recognise individual notes fairly fast, yet they struggle to sight read and have hit a plateau. This is because once individual note recognition is no longer the bottleneck, most of sight reading is actually about pattern recognition rather than note recognition.
One of the first patterns that it is important to be familiar with are key signatures and scales. Many will be familiar with some of the key signatures and scales, however, it is important to remember that when we are trying to improve our “sight reading” ability, we are trying to improve our instant recognition of what we are seeing and our instant recognition of the notes on the piano - the two step process.
For those that have already done some piano learning, you may already be familiar with how it feels to be able to instantly recognise the key of C major on the page (for example) and how it feels for your hands to be able to instantly ignore the black notes in a piece of music that uses the key of C major. This is a feeling that we want to try and achieve with other scales and keys and there are two ways that we can do this!
Firstly, you can practice sight reading pieces that are focussed on a particular key and scale for a couple of weeks before moving onto focussing on a different scale. This will help you recognise the notes in that scale on the page. Secondly, you can practice scales regularly to familiarise your hands with how those notes feel on the piano.
The next step would be to become familiar with chords. When reading a piece of music, many of the notes will be based around particular predictable chords. This means that instead of reading each individual note, we can familiarise ourselves with which chords we expect to see within a scale and when we see the notes from these chords being used, then we can more accurately predict the notes. The chords become very clear and predictable the more you look for them, however a clear example I can give you is Mozart’s Piano Sonata in C major. When reading the first bar of this piece, a beginner would perhaps read this as 8 notes in the left hand and 3 notes in the right hand, whereas with practice this can be viewed as one idea, which is an entire bar outlining a C major chord. Viewing it this way not only frees up the brain from having to constantly think about each note, but it also allows us to continue playing the current bar while quickly scanning the next bar (which is a G7 chord followed by a C major chord again).
So, in order to become a proficient sight reader these are the three steps you can follow:
1. Work on instant recognition of notes and your ability to instantly find notes on the piano - you can do this with sight reading exercises that you only read once (try to make a mental note of your weaknesses and focus on these - e.g. notes on ledger lines or low bass clef notes).
2. Work on your instant recognition of scales and keys and your ability to instantly find these scale notes on the piano - you can do this by practicing exercises that focus on a specific key/scale at a time and practicing scales to allow your hands to instantly recognise the notes that you will be using.
3. Work on your instant recognition of chords - you can do this by analysing your sight reading exercises before you attempt them, looking for what the scale is, what chords you expect to see in that scale and what chords you think the exercise is using.
3. Frequency of Practice 🤔
It’s important to remember that stretching your sight reading ability is inherently going to feel slightly uncomfortable because you WILL make mistakes if the material is challenging enough. Each time you make a mistake or your eyes fall behind, it means that you are pushing your brain to find new patterns. If you find that a piece really feels too challenging then you can also slow it down to make sure it’s at a level that is just outside of comfortable.
In my last “Monday Music Tips” article I talked about a learning theory called “Spaced Repetition”. In this theory the idea is that initially its important to revisit a concept frequently and then over time you can space out how much the concept needs revisiting. Sight reading works in much the same way. Each time you attempt to sight read you are building a pattern recognition muscle and the more frequently you deliberately practice “sight reading” independent of your regular “reading” of pieces, the stronger the muscle gets. It’s also important to realise that you don’t need to be perfect and making mistakes is a sign that you are improving!
Matthew Cawood
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