It’s not easy to count at exactly the same tempo, which is why it’s imperative to use a metronome when practising sight reading. Music colleges and educators recommend that you can sight read a piece, two grades lower than the music that you are practising. You need to have a certain degree of note-reading accuracy, but as we mentioned, this is very flexible and nobody will really care if you play wrong notes as long as you can cover them well. After all, you’re already familiar with the notes, so if you play those same notes again, you aren’t truly sight reading the piece. During my teaching career, I have met two intermediate pianists who totally tricked me using this deceitful method.

Improve your sight-reading! A piece a week Piano Initial

You’ll find powerful ear training and reading exercises disguised as clever games that are fun to play while you build your skills. Getting good at sight reading takes a lot of practice, and every great sight reader was in your shoes at some point! Branching out will help make sure you can get good at playing rhythms or progressions that aren’t familiar to you.You instinctively know where to place your fingers, and in my experience, that kind of rapidity of learning is invaluable. It is a real shame to struggle with the learning of the notes and spend so much time on this initial step that you could end up losing interest at the moment when you are finally ready to work on the most interesting part, which is adding musicality and interpretation. Many people like to use one and two, to count quavers; however, I find words to be far more effective.

Improve your sight-reading! A piece a week Piano Grade 1 Improve your sight-reading! A piece a week Piano Grade 1

They memorise the scores quickly to make it easier for themselves, as they can fully dedicate their attention to the piano keys and avoid having to read the music notes. This skill makes learning new music much quicker, hence why it’s crucial to develop sight reading mastery from an early stage in your musical journey.I’ve used an analogy of playing with a singer, but what if you don’t have a singer or an instrumentalist to play with? Piano pedagogy has changed over the last 100 years or so, to the point now where actually learning the piano is very different to learning another instrument. But if you truly wish to become excellent at it, you should definitely work on this skill daily and include it to all your practice sessions.

Improve Your Sight-Reading! Piano, Level 1 (New Edition)

You’ll need to have a good grasp of the 12 musical keys and how to remember their key signatures with the circle of fifths. It actually reduces your ability to sight-read and it is extremely detrimental to your overall piano education. There’s as much free music as you can shake a stick at on there; you will never run out of music to read. The Sound at Sight series is available for most instruments, and there are different books for each grade. If you’re trying to sight read a piece of music in a key that’s unfamiliar to you, you’re likely to stumble.As we discussed, sight reading does not mean playing a piece absolutely 100% perfectly at first sight. It probably sounds like a lot to manage, but it’s not impossible — and it will help you play music more confidently and accurately, even when you aren’t sight reading. Being able to play rhythms accurately with a metronome is essential if you are going to become a competent sight reader. You have to be able to read the notes, work out what key the piece is in and it helps if you can recognise chord progressions, phrasing in music and cadence points. In addition to reading the notes quickly, you also have to be able to find the notes on your instrument.

Improve your sight-reading! Piano Grade 5 [Improve your sight Improve your sight-reading! Piano Grade 5 [Improve your sight

Music theory can help you understand how keys work, and it also makes it easier to adjust for and cover wrong notes.

There, they will have all the music you will ever be able to read in your lifetime, and you’ll be able to check out as much as you’d like. Paying more attention to the feeling of the music, and the feeling of your body playing the instrument, rather than whether or not you are playing correctly. As you improve, you can work towards counting to four beats per bar or whatever the time signature requires. This can have the effect of causing us to detach emotionally from the task, making things feel difficult and tiresome. By forcing yourself to look at the score, even if you obviously already know it thanks to the several repetitions that are necessary to learn the piece, you can already improve your sight-reading without having to do any special exercise for it.