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Hello, I have been playing all my life but have always had terrible troubles trying to read sheet music. I have never been able to get my eyes to see both staves at once and register what I am supposed to do. One staff is almost doable, but two at once i find my self looking at one then looking at the other. By the time I figured out what to do i forgot what the other staff said and i just fail.. Are there any tips on sight reading any one has to offer? I often look at individual notes and try to register what that note means then move on. Is that bad? I can play very well by ear and memorization but sheet music is just... Next to impossible but I absolutely HAVE to improve! I have bad vision but I wear glasses. Should I be approaching the music differently? Should I focus my eye in some way I've never done or what the heck is my problem?

as a beginner I managed to trick myself into thinking I could miss the early stages of sight reading or at least jump ahead before I was ready. I had a very frustrating year before returning right back to the start. I have seen more improvement since just by building on very small steps. First was reading very simple material, five finger position stuff starting with pieces that alternate between treble and bass. Then moving on to preliminary material and just going very slow. A daily routine is the other key, I set aside 20mins a day for this and never miss a day.

A couple of things I find useful.

Denes Agay books Joy of First Classics 1 & 2. I also use a program to be found at sightreadngfactory.com but I always stress this is not a substitute just an aid

I had the exact same problem as you not too long ago.

This link helped a lot:
http://www.pianostreet.com/smf/index.php?topic=2713.0

I am wondering ...

Since you can play very well by ear and memorization, what is so important to you about sight-reading ?

And let's be sure you mean SIGHT-READING. To me, and others, sight-reading means being able to pick up a music sheet and play it without having seen it before. Is that what you find important to you ?

Thanks I will definitely check out those links and heed to that advice.

As for dmd's question...
I am a music major, and composer. I find it very frustrating how long it takes me to learn material because I cannot sight-read efficiently. Also being a music major, it is required that I sight read pieces in order to pass my piano proficiencies. I can compose on staff paper no problem, but then playing it is a different story. I can improvise quiet well because my understanding of theory.

Well I am not the best natural reader, more of a ear player and memorizer, but I am slowly getting better at reading. Have a long way to go, but two things I have picked up:

1) don't read one note at a time or you are doomed. You have to be able to read the phrase not the notes one by one. So for instance I might read "four notes each going up by one" etc. etc.

2) scan ahead, read ahead. That gives you time to plan what you are going to do, and also gives you time to scan both lines one at a time.

So, combine those two and it helps a lot.

One tip on how to do this is to study intervals. If you know your intervals in and out, you just need to read the first note, and then noticing the intervals between the successive notes is easy. This allows you to read ahead more easily.

I spent a lot of time last year reading every website, every forum post, every youtube lesson, etc etc on this subject and the above two tips came up again and again. That and do plenty of sight reading.

Most educators in the field have a checklist for sight reading such as this one here. For myself at the start the temptation was there to think there was something more than this. The reality though is there is gold in those words and usually a fair bit of work involved which again is just practice.

I also found a blog from one of the members here "trombone al" very enlightening, which you can read here

Thanks for this interesting link. But could not understand this tip

3) The ledger line notes above and below the treble clef use the same letter name. This is also true for the bass clef.

Not quite sure what they mean by that either it is not plain

It shows the relationship between ledger lines above the clef and below the clef.

The 2nd ledger line above the treble clef is C. The 1st ledger line below the treble clef is also C.
Now go one note lower. Both notes become B.
If you keep going one note lower, the relationship continues. This helps memorizing ledger lines.
It's Similar for the bass clef.

Having bad vision and glasses could mean you have to live with this. I`ve had the same trouble, but I read books and stuff OK. I wonder what the difference is?

Thanks earlofmar and noobpianist for the inputs.

But rather than a tip isn't it just simply stating the obvious ?? Just the fact that the sequence of notes will always be ABCDEFG. Or maybe they are stressing this point for the benefit of beginners regarding use of ledger lines.

Not entirely. Since the pattern repeats, reading the ledger lines is similar to reading from a clef. So, you don't have to memorize the ledger lines as a separate thing, you just extend the clef and read them.

This is really interesting, but I don't get how it would make it any easier for someone to read ledger lines that way than having a few "landmarks" and counting up if necessary.

In other words, I learned a long time ago that two ledger lines above the treble clef is a C. I also know the relationship between C and E on the keyboard, so I could just intuitively "know" that three ledger lines up would be E. For notes that don't fall on a line, I use my understanding of the keyboard to "read" or maybe "intuit" when the note is B, D or F.

To me it seems like in order to use this new idea, you'd still have count, in fact you'd have to count up, not down, from middle C and then count the number of lines and spaces above the treble clef to figure out the note that has more than one or two ledger lines. This doesn't seem any easier, and almost seems like it's adding a step.

Maybe I'm missing something?? I've been reading music for a long time now, so I might just be too set in my ways to grasp how this is a trick that would improve sightreading.

Also, I think people should memorize a few landmarks for notes above and below the staff (i.e. two lives above treble clef = C etc), then as you play more, those memorized ones become more automatic, and you can add more memorized ones.

for LeviathanMusic, are you primarily talking about sight-reading in the strictest sense, IOW reading a piece of music you've never seen before? Or are you talking about playing from the score (IOW music you have seen before but don't have memorized).

I call the latter (playing a piece you've been working on and playing or performing it from the score) "read-playing" (I don't think this term is catching on here however! I think the tricks/methods for improving read-playing are different than those for improving sight-reading, and if you're interested in read-playing, I'll try to make a list of some of the things I do. I consider myself very good at read-playing, and not very good at true sight-reading.

In any case, on the subject of sight-reading a never-before seen piece of music, if you follow the recommendations (given by just about everyone who says anything about sight-reading), one of the things you do first is quickly look through the score. If you know that notes above and below the staff are tricky, write them in before you start to play. Obviously, if you're having to write everything in, then you need to go back and do something different with some targeted practice before.

But for me, I know that I don't do so well with anything above F above the top of treble clef (so that's three ledger lines and a space). I also have trouble reading bass clef notes below... hmm, well I've been getting better with the bass clef and can probably handle down to B below the bass clef (two ledger lines and a space). Granted, that's not that far down...

Anyway, if I spot something above or below these, I'll write them in. One less thing to think about while playing. And if this helps you to play a brand-new piece more quickly, then why not take advantage of it. Again, if you're writing in everything, that's a problem. But if you can spot a tricky spot before you start to play, and write in one or two things to make that less tricky, I think that's a very good thing to do.

P.S. Earlofmar, I just ordered several books to use for sightreading practice. I thought they were books you'd recommended, but they're not the Agay books. Hmmm... I ordered 4 of the Hal Leonard Classics to Moderns series (Very Easy, Easy, More Easy, and Intermediate). Did you recommend those some where else? -- If not I just totally bought them on a whim!

PMFJI --

That's a problem, right there at the beginning.

. . . How do you expect to read two staves, when you can't read one
. . . _perfectly_, _quickly_, _automatically_ ?

When one staff is "doable" -- _really_ "doable", so you can read _one hand_ (on piano) reasonably fast, _then_ you might try two staves.

Until then, you've got a brain that's overloaded, and you're trying to force-feed it even more.

That won't work.

. Charles

PS -- "the best way to learn to sight-read is to sight-read". If you're into classical music, get some piano sonatas -- Mozart, not too hard -- and read _one hand only_. Just keep turning pages -- the goal isn't to learn the pieces, it's to "groove" the link from eye, to brain, to hand.

Maybe it is easier, maybe it isn't. It would depend on the person trying to learn. I was just trying to explain what that website is trying to say.

For sight reading, you have to
1)Read ahead
2)Process what you're reading
3)Play
4)Listen
These steps keep happening simultaneously. That's why sight reading isn't easy and it takes a lot of practising the right way to be good at it.

When you're "read-playing", you aren't actually reading all the time, you just have the score in front of you for reference and you play mostly from hand memory. So you only actually go through steps 3) and 4) and occasionally 1) and 2) if you lose track.

Maybe you could try my way of learning the ledger lines:
Take out a piece of paper and a pen and draw a treble clef. Now, instead of drawing individual notes on the ledger line, extend the treble clef and draw more lines above it, and you'll see the ledger lines fitting on this extended clef. Extend the treble clef until the note you need to learn, and then learn the entire extended treble clef.

If you have trouble with something, then keep doing that over and over until you don't have trouble with it. Practising what you already do well doesn't have any benefit. Practising what you can't do is what is necessary to improve, right?

Well mostly yes, except if you do that all the time, you end up running into the same problems as with pieces that are just played from muscle memory. So with pieces that I want to keep in my active repertoire, but that I don't have memorized, I make sure I *read* as I play, instead of letting myself go on autopilot staring at the page like it was a picture. That's why I use the term read-play, because it's still active reading.

Thanks for the suggestion re ledger lines, but I was sharing that as an example, not as a request for tips. I don't encounter notes that far up very often, which is why I always feel the need to double check the first time I see them in a piece. My point was more that if the goal is sight-reading (i.e., play-through on the first time ever seeing the music), then you need to know your own weak points, so you can quickly scan the score and confirm them *before* you start to play.

My goal with sight-reading is just to make overall improvements so that I can bring my sight-reading up a little closer to my general playing level. That's why I purchased the new books I mentioned above, because I think at this point the thing I need most is just to sight-read a lot of pieces and get back into the habit of doing that a little bit every day.

Yes they are the same books. Agay is the editor and I guess Hal Leonard is a distributor. Hope you find them useful.