Tips for Better Sight-Reading Practice
1. Take the Pressure Off 🤯
Sight reading is the ability to instantly read and play a piece of music that you haven’t seen before. It is a difficult skill to master and it can be a very frustrating one to learn. However, this is often because players put a lot of pressure on what is required for building the skill and zero focus on actually practicing it!
Sight reading is fundamentally a game of saturation. The more music you sight read, the better you get at sight reading music. This means it doesn’t really matter what you got wrong, you just need to keep moving on. Often players will become frustrated at making a mistake and attempt to go back and play it again correctly, however for the purposes of sight reading…this is pretty much a waste of time. The reason for this is because when you go back to play the piece of music again, you are no longer sight reading it. You are learning it and this is a different mental process!
So try not to think too hard about it and don’t give yourself a hard time for how well (or not well) that you sight read a piece of music. Just keep moving on, putting in the reps and building up the time that you have spent reading notes.
2. Play Easy 😌
When sight reading, it is actually the mistakes that you make that will help you become a better sight reader. This is because when you make a mistake, you are giving your brain the chance to recognise it and remember it for next time. That can be some notes on the stave that you find tougher to recognise, a specific rhythm that’s tough to play, or a chord shape that you haven’t seen enough times yet. It becomes much more difficult to parse these mistakes if everything you are playing is a mistake (although you will still improve).
For this reason, I suggest playing pieces of music that are far easier than pieces of music that you might invest more time into learning. The best sight reading material will be pieces of music that you can sight read with 70-90% accuracy. If you are able to get most of it correct, then you won’t hate sitting down and reading through it…but you are still giving your brain the opportunity to learn from the 10-30% of mistakes that you make.
3. It’s A Game of Consistency 𝄆 𝄇
When we are trying to learn a piece of music that we want to master, it is usually in our best interest to be efficient, use the best methods and learn it as fast as we are capable. However, the skill of sight reading is a very different beast because sight reading is entirely dependent on the number of hours and the amount of notes you have read over time.
Having said this, there is one variable that we can manipulate to help improve faster and that is our ability to focus!
Over the course of a practice session our focus will start to run out. This means that sight reading is often best done earlier in a practice session so that you have the most focus available. It’s also much better to practice little and often, so that you are always practicing when you are able to focus. The last 10 minutes of an hour long sight reading session is far less valuable than if that hour of practice was split up as 6 focussed 10 minute sessions over 6 days. For most people, it’s also not very practical or sustainable to practice sight reading random pieces of music for long periods.
4. There’s No Replacement for Doing the Thing 🫵
There are many apps that can help you recognise notes on a stave or learn the different symbols and rhythms in music. I’ve created many videos that also do this! At the very beginning of learning music, these are very important things to learn.
However, once you know what these symbols mean, ultimately there is no replacement for actually sitting down and sight reading. This is because there are actually a number of processes involved in sight reading, first you have to improve your recognition of the symbol. Then you need to understand what it means in context (do you play it quietly? Is it staccato? Is it in the melody or a note from the chord?). Then finally you need to translate that information to the instrument, which involves getting your fingers to do the right thing!
The problem with trying to improve sight reading using apps, is that they tend to only focus on one of these processes, ”can you instantly recognise the symbol?”. Yet this doesn’t mean you can apply the context or get your fingers to the notes on the instrument. So, the best method to improve your sight reading is…by sight reading.
5. Lean into Weakness 💪
Throughout learning music it can be easy to stick to what you know and shy away from that which feels uncomfortable. However, for sight reading (as I have previously mentioned) it is in fact the mistakes and the challenges that improve your ability. For this reason, I would suggest leaning into those weaknesses and seeking out music that deliberately focusses on your sore spots.
For example, let’s say you are better at reading treble clef than reading bass clef on the piano. Then, perhaps find pieces of music that are more bass clef orientated. Let’s say you have trouble reading 16th notes (semiquavers), then seek out pieces of music that use a lot of 16th notes!
It is rare in the practice of sight reading that you will know exactly what you need to work on, because you never know what you might come across. But when there is a pattern forming…then that is an opportunity to lean into your weakness and resolve the problem now in service of all of your future sight reading!
6. Mess Around and Have Fun! 🥳
A lot of the tips I’ve mentioned so far are how to approach sight reading to get the most out of it. Having said this, I think its important to remember the very first thing I mentioned:
“…try not to think too hard about it and don’t give yourself a hard time for how well (or not well) that you sight read a piece of music.”
Sight reading really is a game of how many new notes you have read and how much time you have spent doing it. This means that while it is ideal to learn things of the right level for you and practicing little and often etc…it is much more important to make it sustainable and to just keep reading notes.
So, I would recommend having fun with it and using the skill to read lots of songs and pieces that you want to have a go at. If you hear a song that you like the sound of, find the sheet music and give it a bash. At the end of the day, that’s why we learn to sight read in the first place!
Matthew Cawood
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