Piano Video Lesson: The 3 Essential Elements of Sight-Reading

Hi, I'm Robert Estrin. You're watching LivingPianos.com. Today I want to talk about the three essential elements of sight reading. I know so many of you want to read better and you're wondering, what is the secret? Well, I'm going to tell you today what it is.

What it involves are three different skills that you must have working together in order to be successful at reading music.

Naturally, there's what you see in the score.

You have to really see what you're reading, obviously, which is why you can't be looking down at your hands while you're playing. Which leads us to the second thing. You must have a certain feeling of the keyboard.

So you're seeing the music, you're feeling the keys where they are, and the last thing is what you hear.

And all three of these work as a system.

You can't look at your hands. Maybe you can occasionally glance for a moment, but you have to keep your eyes on the score because as soon as you're not looking at the score, you're not reading anymore.

So you have to keep your fingers moving on the keys and if it sounds wrong, you must adjust by the feel. Of course, you've got black keys and white keys, so you can kind of feel where the correct keys are and make the adjustments. If it sounds wrong, go a little higher or lower. You might think that that's so imprecise, that couldn't possibly work. Well, guess what? Anybody who's a really good sight reader knows that you have to make those kind of adjustments when you're reading something that is really hard, with a lot of notes, where maybe it's something you can't read perfectly, but you're still making a stab at it. Somebody really wants to hear what their piece sounds like with an accompaniment, maybe an instrumentalist, a violinist or a clarinetist or something like that.

They want to hear it. And even if you don't play perfectly, if you get the basic idea across, so when you're playing, they don't want you to stop and, oh, I missed a note on measure 16. Can we start over there? That's not going to do it for them. It doesn't give the really satisfaction of understanding what the piece is like with the piano part. So you must keep going and feel your way listening and watching the score and recreating what you see based upon what you feel and what you hear and all of those working together as a system.

The best way to do that, by the way, is by playing with other musicians because it forces you to keep going. You have to keep going. You must keep your eyes moving. You must keep your hands and fingers moving and you must keep listening. And that is how you develop to be a good reader on the piano is by doing it. Find appropriate level of music and if you could possibly find anybody who's got some accompaniments that are not outrageously difficult and you have a half a chance of being able to play a good chunk of the notes accurately, do it for yourself and try to make this melding of skills of what you see, what you feel and what you hear and you will become a great reader over time. I promise you. If any of you have epiphanies how you become better at reading, leave them here in the comments at LivingPianos.com or YouTube. And thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin at LivingPianos.com, your online piano resource.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/the-3-essential-elements-of-sight-reading/

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