Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner Was sight reading ever a problem...

Was sight reading ever a problem when you were learning a piece? Like as if you had the technical ability to play the piece but due to poor sight reading it hampered the progress of your piece severely?

Sometimes.. when there are a lot of notes . However, I'd like to think that it never hampered progress *severely* but I'm sure it has slowed me down in the past. As a child taking the Trinity College performance exams, I consistently scored less than par on the sight reading task. So I never really was good at sight reading (but that's in real time, I can read notes well enough to learn a piece at a decent pace!).

I don't think that sight reading skills or limitations have ever been a problem for me. That may be because I have rarely tried to sight read works that are far beyond my technical abilities. Similarly, when I was in the early stages of learning piano, I was always working on repertoire that was within my grasp.

My sight reading is considered pretty good, however, and I don't know whether part of that is an innate skill or whether it is good because of the progressive way in which I have developed it.

Regards,
Regards,

My entire life. I've learned every piece I set out to, but slower than would be possible if I were a better sight reader I believe.

-Daniel

What you are referring to here is not "sight reading" per se - you're talking about difficulty in reading music in general.

"Sight reading" refers to picking up a piece for the first time and being able to play through it at a reasonable, steady tempo.

+1. I meant to say that as well..

Started off using more my ear memorizing the notes as I read them very slowly. I eventually just started dedicating practice time to sight reading as the pros are obvious. One of the most important skills in commingle a great musician.

Just pick a random score, random page and start. Pick a speed you can barely play. Your head should hurt.

Yes. It still does.

also another great thing to do is to use orchestral scores and sight read those. If you are able to transpose all the instruments and make a piano arrangement on the fly, sounds daunting but it gets easier , anyhow, when you go back to just piano, everything seems so easy.

From personal experience this is much easier said than done. I am/was considered an excellent sight reader but reading/playing an orchestral score presents/presented real challenges for me. Not impossible - but challenging nonetheless.

This subject has already been discussed extensively on PW. But the best way to improve sight reading skills is to simply start with easy piano pieces (things you can play accurately at a moderate tempo) and systematically and progressively build your skills from there. Piano method books are useful for this type of thing.

No, I'm really bad at sight reading but it makes hardly any difference since after playing through numerous times I just seem to remember the notes.

That's the same case for me, but I am working on my sight reading to improve it anyway, and I am noticing improvement.

I think having knowledge of theory helps with sight reading and also learning to play music very well. I know theory has helped me with both.

Sometimes with pieces in flat-heavy keys understanding what the shapes on the page mean can take longer than usual, but in general I find I have memorised something visually as soon as I have figured out what it is on the page. I tend to have a piece memorised before I can accomplish most of it technically, so I guess I have it the other way round to RTJM.

Consider yourself blessed !!!!

The curse is that I can't sight read for poop

And I could never memorize worth c_ _ p until I was about 21 and finally figured out how to do it!!

If your main way of learning music is from a printed score, isn't most of the "learning" done by reading? (Unless you memorize it instantly). I mean, what you're trying to do when learning a piece is translate the markings you see into what your fingers do on the keys. Lots of times I understand what the music is trying to say, but my fingers don't do it properly. Maybe that's saying my technique is behind my sight reading, but I think it could also be called bad sight reading. However long it takes me to learn a piece depends on how quickly I can read it properly. It's all connected. (I don't know if I'm making any sense at all.)

I could sight-read basically from the very beginning, and I am still better at sight-reading than memorizing. My first stumbling-stone was an aria by Bach. I had been playing for a short time, but I remember I found the voices difficult to sight-read back then, and even to play together without sight-reading, after studying them. Now I love Bach though. I have been playing Bach just this morning.

No... my problem is I can read the score... know what it's supposed to sound like - and get super frustrated when my fingers don't immediately do what I want them to do! My sight reading is OK - playing things through for the first time - but my brain does it MUCH quicker than my fingers do.

So I think my problem is much more like debrucey and Winsome - technically (or should I say physically) I have to catch up to what my brain is telling the music is saying.

Bach is going to be one of the composers I do a lot of sight reading from once I've built up my abilities just a little more.

What are you waiting for? There is never a time better than the present. Bach will help your reading immensely.

The Holy Grail of sight-reading is when the notes dissolve, and when you look at a score for the first time, you simply hear it. Then having envisioned how you want it to sound, you produce that sound. It took me a very long time, but I got to the point that I can do it with fairly high-level repertoire. It takes no effort to get a job as an accompanist now, but I don't want the work anymore, too busy!

well you start small.

Strings first
Then add non transposing winds
Then the rest

You start to see how things are not as difficult as they look. Much is doubled and there is usually only 2 actual melodies going on with the rest filling out the harmony.

Don't think I ever got past the strings ......

but what you say here makes good sense !!

If you say so, I'll do it! But right now, I'm waiting for tomorrow, because my parents are already asleep.

I'm actually starting to go through the inventions and little preludes of Bach. They really are wonderful reading material.

I don't find the fugues to be particularly good for reading, simply because careful fingering is necessary to maintain the integrity of the voices, and it's difficult to plan that far ahead "at sight." (The same goes for some of the more complicated suite movements, as in some Allemandes and Courantes.) But his preludes, inventions, some suite movements, things from the notebooks, etc. are wonderful.

I also, believe it or not, find Czerny to be excellent reading material. Part of the genius of Czerny is that his exercises really do contain the building blocks of the late 18th and early 19th century styles. When your hands are comfortable with Czerny exercises, everything feels more natural underneath them. Czerny may not be great "music", but he understood the hand better than anyone. It is no surprise that so many of his students went on to become some of the most important figures in the history of the piano (Thalberg, Kullak, Leschetizky, Heller, and of course Liszt.)

I like Czerny too.

I also like the 2 part inventions for sight reading practice - and some of the less complex Preludes from the WTC.

I enjoy noodling around Chopin nocturns when I have time. But many of his nocturns have lots of accidentals. Accidentals pose main problem for me in sight reading. I do ok with sharps and flats in the key signature and changes associated with the minor scale. But it's always the accidentals. How do you keep track of all the changes while my eyes are just reading the notes? I think you have to be really smart to keep track of all the changes. I have to write them out in before I play. I feel like cheating but it's the only way. Do you have similar problems? I usually have to ignore complicated trills when I sight read. Is this usual as well.

I am with you on this Carey. I was and probably still a very good sight reader. But for me I think it's a curse, because i get bored quickly and move on to a different piece before i can actually perfect the repertoire

Perhaps sight reading and learning are opposite ends of a continuum. To the extent that your memory supplies notes, you don't have to read them. So, to develop sight reading skill, you need stuff that you don't intend to learn -- and lots of it. You need enough forgetting time before you look at the same piece again.

The Local 47 movie and TV musicians of old were great sight readers, they had to record something different every week, and then never see it again.