Hello.

How does one get beyond reading note by note? I can recognize notes on the grand staff well but when I play a piece or sight read I tend to follow every note even if I recognize that there is a scale, chord, or a pattern. It's like I don't know what to do with my eyes when I see these things. Even more troublesome is when there isn't a pattern, mabye just a bunch of random intervals, I can't seem to be able to put these into my short term memory and look ahead at all.

Just looking for ideas on how to get past reading note by note. Ways to practice and the like. Thanks.

Go slower. Really. Play as slow as necessary in order to see the patterns and the flow rather than just the notes.

It will probably be painfully slow, but speed is what is causing the problem...your brain cannot grasp all the information at speed, so that is the factor you can change.

ps...speeding while practicing and while playing is a universal problem. I have never had a student who had to be encouraged to practice, and play, faster.

I agree with slow practice here. I also think part of the problem is your concept that there may be a bunch of "random intervals". I doubt that this is true, and the way to move beyond this view is to get better at listening: learn to associate intervals on the page with sounds in your ears; learn to hear a sequence of intervals as a harmonic progression. Check yourself by playing these passages back in your head and keep practicing until you can hear what you see.

I agree with slowing it down. I thought I was going pretty slow but I will slow it down even further.

packa, my lack of knowledge of harmony is sort of what I implied by that phrase. Basically if a note isn't part of a scale, chord, etc, then I can't figure out whether it's part of the underlying harmony or not while I am reading the music.

I'm not sure you have to bring a huge formal knowledge of harmony to the party (although it never hurts). I've always thought you can just learn to hear and feel the difference between many intervals and the way progressions move, sing, build tension, resolve, etc. Most folks can feel the resolution of an "amen" cadence at the end of a hymn without knowing the formal names for the chords.

On the other hand, I'm not sure how to make progress if you just see the printed music as a bunch of notes without underlying patterns. I think you do need enough knowledge to look at the page and recognize the melody, secondary melodies or voices, and harmonic accompaniment, and you should be able to play the parts or layers of the piece individually to fix the sounds in your ear.

One advantage of systematic study via a method or with a teacher is that, as you move through increasingly complicated pieces, you are not only building physical technique, you are building familiarity with more complicated notation and how to see (and hear) the patterns there.

bp-

A couple of suggestions I've seen the teachers make over in the teachers forum:

- read from the bottom up.
- keep your eyes moving forward with the pulse. Think of the kids videos where you sing along with the bouncing dot.

A suggestion that I have is to learn to speed read. There are a lot of tricks from the speed reading class I took in high school that really help when reading music.
- Again, keeping a stead flow going.
- When speed reading, you learn to increase your focus from letter by letter to whole words, multiple words, even an entire line at a single glance.
- The above is useful because it allows you to learn to take in more of the notes at one time.

And the best suggestion I can make is to play lots and lots of music. The person who learns 5 pieces at a time and gets them up to an ok level will reinforce his music reading skills much more than someone who learns one piece a measure at a time.

Rich

Hi pb - I agree with taking it slow and learning the notes correctly right away.

Another suggestion is to listen to someone else play this piece in it's entirety. I almost always do this before and during tackling a new piece. I listen to the notes and patterns and let it sink into my brain.

Also, don't be too hard on yourself. It will come in time. It truly is difficult to learn to read music and then translate what you read to your fingers.

AK

I find it useful not to read the names of the notes: do not say out loud or think the name of the note. Instead try to go from the note on the staff to the keyboard directly. Something that helps is to try to read by intervals as much as possible: for example, two notes in consecutive staff spaces, or lines, form a third and that translates to skipping one note in whichever tonality you are working in, etc. Soon you can identify common "words": third, third, fourth, (a chord/arpeggio in root position); third, fourth, third (a chord/arpeggio in first inversion); etc.

Good luck,
ocd

One thing that I don't think has been mentioned yet:
(EDIT: ocd did just say something very similar, and I wasn't paying good enough attention. I could almost just change my post to a "me too"."


Experienced readers do not read one note at a time and then go back to see if those notes make a chord or a scale, the same way as you are not reading my post one letter at a time and then seeing if those letters spell a word. You expect it's going to make a word, and you can even predict what word will come next - at least you can when you're getting the point of what's being said. A good music reader does the same thing - he reads the musical patterns (scales, chords and whatever else) as the units.

Quick, without looking - How many letter b's did I put in the above paragraph? Answer - who cares? The individual letters by themselves don't matter. Same with single notes in music.

Here's a very rough and unrealistic example: Get a sheet of music, ask an inexperienced reader "What's here?" and he might take ten seconds of study to tell you, "Eleven notes". Ask the good reader about the same music, and he might say after only two seconds "A scale followed by a triad". The inexperienced reader has to think about eleven things; the good reader has to think about only two things, so of course he's faster. Again that was not a real type of situation, just a fake example to give you an idea.

Notice I didn't say you should play fast either. I just told you something about how good readers do what they do. If you play too fast then you get everything wrong anyway, so there's no point in that.

Read a measure, and then hide it with a card, and say out loud what the notes were. Start with simple notes, all quarter notes, for example. Limit the time that you have to read the measure, to the real time for a mesure.

This goes better with someone holding the card for you.

Or read a measure, hide it with a card, and then play it.

More advanced, read a measure and then hide it, and say it out loud while you read the next measure; say the second while you read the third, and so on. Train your eye to look ahead.

Always strictly maintain a beat, avoid stoping, never go back. If it is too difficult, find something more simple, or slow down the tempo.

If you do this sort of exercise everyday for a few minutes you will surprise yourself with your rapid progress in reading.

This is my opinion and I'm pretty much a beginner, 6 months playing so not very inexperienced but learning to read music is no different to reading any other language in my opinion.

When a child is learning to read a language, it begins with sounding out individual letters to make up the word. Very much as we do with reading note by note. It's often said a child has an advantage over an adult when it comes to learning how to read, be it words or notes but i don't think all is lost. When a child learns to read, there's no looking for shortcuts, they don't question how things work. They just get on with learning, it's very natural. After continuing to practice they eventually start to build a vocabulary, no questioned asked, just regularly reading and or/writing words.

I think us adults tend to over analyze, we have forgotten how it was to learn as a child. We ask too many questions, look for shortcuts and i personally think trying to learn more like a child is the way to go. I think with patience it's possible.

Myself, i was working quite well with reading but then took a couple of months off really, playing pieces that were too advanced for me to read other than a note at a time. I've since gone back to a much simpler level for my sight reading practice. I still struggle with some notes, particularly low and high on the keyboard. Just recently though I've noticed in some of my playing that I'm not reading individual notes, I'm reading and playing intervals. I never made any conscious effort to do this, it just happened. I've also found the same with chords, i now recognize chords and play them accordingly, again, no conscious effort. Now I've also started noticing I'm recognizing a few patterns and a lot of the fear of playing from sheet music is fading. It's a good feeling though i still have a long way to go.

So really to me, it's just like being a kid. For this type of practice, I'm using sheet music that is very basic, i have a lot of different music. I practice playing from the sheet this way every day for about 20 minutes. I may increase that shortly to 40 minutes. I'm not trying to force anything, i don't ask questions of the music, i just continuously play and try to let things happen and so far, for me, it's working. I'm pleased with the way my reading is progressing.

I think you might be surprised if you just play from sheet music continuously and allow things to happen how much you can progress. I think it's also important to play from sheet music that is below your level and to play slowly. As you learn, i think you naturally start to speed up as you become more proficient.

Thanks for all the suggestions. My teacher and I spent the entire hour lesson today covering this. I think i'm on the right path. It's just going to take a lot of work!