Music Video Lesson: 5 Ways to Develop Your Sight-Reading

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, Robert Estrin here with 5 ways to develop your sight reading.

You ever watch somebody who is a good sight reader and they take a piece of music they've never seen before and they play it and it almost sounds like a performance and you think, man I wish I could do that.

Just being able to get the feel of pieces of music that you may want to study or to be able to play in groups, there's countless reasons why sight reading is a joy if you can do it.

I remember in high school I was a pretty advanced player but my sight reading was on such an elementary level it was unbelievable. I have a video about that in the description that you can read about my journey and my aha moment with sight reading. But today I'm going to give you practical tips that you can use to develop your sight reading.

The number one is choose pieces that are on your reading level. I know it's tempting, you see a piece of music, you've heard a piece of music, you want to play it so badly so you try to read through it and it's such a struggle that it's discouraging. More than that you can't really get a feel for the piece because you're stopping and starting so many times except the level that you are on so that you can read pieces on that level. If you read enough of them you will gain from the experience and little by little you will grow and be able to read more complex scores.

The next one is so important and that is to play slowly enough because you know what, you want to hear the piece the way it goes and maybe the beginning isn't that hard you figured oh I'll take it at a comfortable tempo but then you're slowing down, speeding up, stopping here and you really don't get a feel for the piece but if you play slowly enough it's much more valuable even though it might seem frustrating at first you'll gain much more from the experience.

Another one is a really important tip and I don't know how many of you people are like I was memorizing all my pieces so I was either memorizing a piece and then when it came to sight reading I just couldn't do it. Well an answer to that is to have some pieces that are reading pieces. Maybe they're pieces you can't really sight read most of it or some of it, you can read parts of it but other parts are a struggle. Well you take those pieces and you work on the parts you can't read going through practicing hands separately, going little phrases at a time, getting those sections so that you can read through them until the next section that you can't read through and you make it a reading piece that you never memorize, you always read it but you use the score and you gain the confidence to be able to play the piece with the music. This is incredibly important if you ever want to play chamber music because you're not going to memorize every single thing that you go on to read.

Another one I also have a video on which will be in the description and this is key for being able to read music is looking at groups of notes.

You don't just look at note by note by note any more than when you're reading English you're looking at letter by letter by letter. Of course you're looking at words, it's the same thing with music. You don't look at each individual note you look at chords and clusters of notes and you grasp the meaning of the notes, you understand the essential structure instead of just painstakingly looking at each note you try to recognize patterns and intervals so you can grab groups of notes.

Finally the most important tip of all and this was my epiphany with reading is play with other musicians.

This is the way you truly learn to become a good sight reader. Why? When you're playing by yourself when you miss something it's only natural you're going to stop and make the corrections. You're programmed to do that in your practice and it's almost impossible to keep going when you're missing notes but when you're playing with somebody else you have no choice but to keep going. So you learn to make that connection among the three aspects of what you see, what you hear and what you feel. Once again I have a video on that subject I bet you that was coming so go to the description for more tips on developing your sight reading and if you have any others that aren't covered here please leave them in the comments for other people. I know this is such an important subject for people and we want to all be better readers and anything that helps is welcome here at LivingPianos.com your online piano resource. Thanks so much for joining me.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/5-ways-to-develop-your-sight-reading/

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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