Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner Sight reading: some specific questions.

I’ve been playing for 8 years now and have achieved a reasonable level of playing ability however my sight reading has always been poor to non existent. Three years ago I decided to make a real effort to develop the ability to sight read to at least some level as at the time I could barley sight read even a simple melody. I decided I would devote an hour a day to this end as I was anxious about my lack of ability in this area and really quite excited about the prospect of being able to sight read along with the added benefits this would bring in learning repertoire much faster, as my only avenue to this end was and still is one of very laborious and heavy drilling of small fragments of the piece.

Having consulted my teacher I was informed the best, if not only, way to approach this was simply to do it, to read through masses of music and the skill would develop itself. So this I did, I borrowed a large amount of scores from the library and set about for an hour to two hours a day of reading through them. As I had already done quite a considerable amount of theory and analysis as well as being able to play to a reasonable level I was quite hopeful that all the elements were ready to fall into place, as it were, and I would soon seem some results.

After six months of this it seemed that I had made no progress at all and began to wonder if I was perhaps not somehow practicing it correctly. The way I had approached it was simply to identify the note on the page and then find it on the keyboard. This of course involved rapidly moving my eyes from the score to the keyboard and back again which did become quite disorientating but as my chances of finding the correct key without looking were next to nil and saw no other obvious way to approach the matter. I put the idea that I should perhaps be trying to play without looking at the keys and was told that this was “madness” and that you “have to look at the keys” in order to sight read. So I continued in this manner.

After a year of sight reading in this way for an hour a day I still seemed to not have made any progress. By this time I was with another teacher and again approached them with the same problem and demonstrated how I had been practicing. They assured me that the way was approaching the matter was fine and that I should continue, though I should perhaps try to lean towards slightly simpler pieces . This hour of sight reading had by now just become very much part of my usual practice routine and I continued this way for another year again seeing little to no progress.
After just over two years of seeing almost no results at all, my note identification has perhaps improved slightly, but as this was already quite developed to begin with it wasn’t really a significant improvement, I decided to try to begin playing without looking at the keyboard at all, much like you would if were learning to touch type. In order to do this of course I had to give up an pretence of being able to play in time as I would almost always need to spend some time grappling around blindly hoping to find the right key. After a few months of doing this however I found that I had in fact, although very tentatively, began to develop an ability to find keys on the keyboard without looking. I approached my teacher, a new one, again with my sight reading problem, explaining my recent experimentation and findings and was assured again that this idea of not looking at the keyboard was ridiculous and that I really need to concentrate on my fingering much more.

I was told that fingering needs to be planned out in full before attempting the piece, in opposition to what I had been told before that while sight reading any fingering would do. While I found the method of planning the fingering just about possible in small extracts of music, when trying to sight read anything larger I found it not possible to be able to decided on a fingering and then keep it present enough in my mind as to be able to apply it. I found with this process I would spend far more time trying to decided and then memorise a fingering for a piece of music than actually playing it.

So my specific questions regarding sight reading are these: Firstly, should I be never looking at the keyboard when practicing sight reading and secondly does the fingering really need planning in full before attempting the piece?

I’d be most interested in anything anyone has to say on the matter.

Thank you.

Dimitry,

First off, welcome to PW! I wish you had come here sooner, as you might have been given more practical advice much earlier and avoided the significant loss of time and effort you've described.

I hardly know where to begin, so I'll start by answering the two specific questions at the end of your post: (1) you shouldn't look at the keyboard any more than necessary when sight-reading, and (2) the fingerings should emphatically not be planned in advance.

Frankly, IMHO you have been given some terrible advice by teachers (and that's not an uncommon phenomenon, unfortunately).

Sight-reading should be commenced with the simplest material possible—not just random scores of random difficulty. It absolutely needs to be done with progressively challenging material!

Try to keep your eyes on the music as much as possible, because you need to absorb (and process) all the visual information you can while you play—about the notes you are playing at any given moment and, to the extent possible, about the notes that immediately follow. It's all about seeing, doing and anticipating—and getting your hands and fingers to learn the geography of the keyboard. And let what you know about theory work to your advantage as you notice (and foresee) the structures of chords and harmony.

There is no point in figuring out fingering in advance because of the nature of sight-reading versus learning a new piece of repertoire. When you're sight-reading, it's not to learn to play the piece! You may never play it again, and fingerings you choose "on the fly" are probably the least significant element of the process. (Some might even say the spontaneous fingerings are part of the process.)

Instead, your goals are aiming to get the notes and the elements of articulation as accurate as you can as close to tempo as you reasonably can. Try to keep momentum, don't sweat the wrong notes, and don't stop when you make mistakes.

And it's critical that you start with simple stuff so that those objectives are doable! Over time, you will progress from very easy material to material of a difficulty just below the repertoire you are studying. I can't overemphasize the importance of sight-reading only music that you are actually able to sight-read with facility, incorporating the techniques and aims that I listed.

Best wishes, and keep with it! Besides aiding the learning of new pieces, sight-reading makes piano playing a much more enjoyable experience. You will eventually be able to explore and play music without any intention of learning it simply for your own education and pleasure.

Steven

How you managed to get two such incompetent teachers in a row is bizarre. I agree totally with Steven. I don't think he mentioned play slowly.

In addition to Steven's advice, I'd add that a study of theory is very important. You need to be able to recognize and play scales, chords, and arpeggios fluently.

Hi Dimitry,

I set the goal early this year to learn to sight read and I've been largely successful by adopting some of the strategies stated here, plus a few others. In case these help:

- Get to know your notes on the keyboard as falling within the groups of 2 + 3 black keys, possibly even by touch using very simple music, being able to visualize the keyboard that way. There are only 7 white key notes, and if you get one into your consciousness per day, then you have them in a week.

- Practice sight reading v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y .... incredibly slowly.

- Learn to sight read by interval. Know what note you are starting with (you may look) but after that follow where the next notes go by interval: C to E is an interval of a third, or three keys apart, so you go up two more keys. It's insanely simplistic. It also forces you to be "in the moment" because you are constantly anticipating where the next note will be (1 up, 3 down) and the next and the next.

- Take your time. Less is more. 5 minutes of concentrated practice will yield more than 30 minutes where your attention will wander.

- Adding to what Kreisler says, study theory but also make it a real experienced thing on the keyboard, not just head knowledge. Try out everything you learn theoretically on the keyboard. Conversely, if you run into something in music you play, understand it theoretically too. When you understand theory, you can often anticipate where the music is going to go.

- In the same vein, if you see a run, which you see as a straight line of notes, you know you have a scale. If you know you are playing in A major and you have practiced scales, you will be able to play these notes without looking, and only have to consider the first and last note to know where to stop and start. (Oh, and practice playing scales without looking at the keyboard).

- Before you start, take a moment to scan the piece. Make it a habit to note the key signature and time signature. Knowing what key you you are playing in is helpful and probably necessary.

Sight reading, and reading music for preparing a piece are not exactly the same thing. You cannot prepare fingering perfectly when sight reading. However, being able to sight read helps you have a first play-through when encountering a piece so you know what it's about. On the other hand, when you prepare your music, if you remain alert for patterns as you are working, you end up building a map which you can apply back to sight reading.

Btw, a great many of the things I applied were things that I learned on this board. It's a fantastic place.

KS

All the advice given here seems solid, particularly that offered in detail by Steven. I can only repeat that it's a shame - if not a crime - that you were given such bad advice from teachers you have had.

Unless you were trying constantly to sight read material that was well beyond your skills and, hence, not developing your sight reading skills, I find it hard to understand how, after such considerable time and effort on sight reading, you feel that you had made no progress.

To repeat, then :
- know your key signatures thoroughly
- start with material that is well below your current playing ability
- play as slowly as you have to to keep a steady rhythm
- play as slowly as you have to to avoid mistakes
- avoid (as much as possible) looking at the keyboard

Regards,

There are several things that need addressing
here, in my view. First, when you play
with the score--and sight-reading is
included here--the most basic thing is
that you don't look at your hands as much
as possible. This allows you to concentrate
on the score better. A further benefit
of playing without looking at your hands
is that this allows your hands to find
the best fingering and technique on their
own, with no special effort on your part--
thus, you no longer have to read finger
numbers on the score, greatly simplifying
playing.

If all your teachers are telling you
to look at your hands when sight-reading,
they are at best incompetent, or at
worst liars, because not looking at
your hands when playing with the score
is the most fundamental thing in piano
playing.

The second thing to address is the idea
of improving sight-reading by actually
practicing sight-reading with material
that you can more or less play at sight,
that is, material below your level. This
is what books on sight-reading improvment
recommend. But consider what is happening
when you do this. You are practicing s-r
by doing what you can already do, that is,
s-r below your level. But you accomplish
absolutely nothing by doing this, because
you are doing what you can already do.
You can do this for years, and you won't
achieve anyhthing. Consider if a swimmer
or runner loafed through every workout
at 1/10 effort; he would never make any
improvement in his times that way.

Moreover, you can't gradually improve your
s-r this way, because you can't improve
by doing what you can already do. Thus,
you never improve this way.

In order to improve you'll need to practice
s-r with material at or above your level,
but you'll have to take it easy, because
you're operating at your limits and can
easily burn yourself out this way
if you try to do too much. For example,
I've worked on the Chopin No. 3 Ballade,
and this is at or above my level, but I
could "s-r" (actually this is not s-r in
the pure sense because I'm familiar with
it) all 11 pages of it through in one
sitting at a fair clip. But if I did
that, I would be a basket case for
weeks afterwards, because I would be trying
to do something I'm not really capable
of doing and would burn myself out, frying
my nerves in the process.

So when s-r material at or above your level,
you'd only be able to do a page or less
per day at most. And with such material
it doesn't mater if you "s-r" it over
and over, because this is material you can't
really handle at sight, and so every time
you play it would be a tough reading task.

Gyro, do you really believe a thing that you say? People give you the benefit of the doubt and just assume you are both obstinate and dim, but increasingly I wonder of you're a troll in the truest sense and saying a load of tosh with the explicit intent to mislead, deceive and harm—especially a newcomer who's only visible clue to your issues is your refusal to use word wrap.

I know, freedom of speech and caveat lector and all of that, but the nonsense (i.e., non-sense, get it?) is detrimental, destructive and getting worse all the time.

Steven

"Firstly, should I be never looking at the keyboard when practicing sight reading and secondly does the fingering really need planning in full before attempting the piece?"

1. Sort of depends. If you don't need to look at the keys, then why do it? But if you could take a quick glance at it and know what to play, then look at your fingers so that you wouldn't miss a single note. (I find it hard to even look at two staves of notes. It's crazy how liszt could look at an orchestra score in addition to the piano part and add in some of the orchestra while sightreading).

2. No. As hofmann's teacher said, you could play the notes with your nose for all i care...Just make it sound good. Also, i see sight reading as more of a way to show off your abilities. If someone gives you a piece and you say, "Wait, let me put in some fingerings [which could take a very long time]", it would not be very impressive.

Hofmann (thought not really a good example, because he could listen to a song and play it) didn't have good sight reading. Does sight reading really help a pianist that much?

Many a pianist, in the role of accompanist, is called upon to go through scores s/he has never seen before to help a soloist decide which pieces both the soloist and accompanist might like to work on together. This has happened to me on numerous occasions where I would never have had the time to ask for the score in advance, to spend time learning it and then to go through it with the soloist only to find that that work may not be chosen. The accompanist's ability to give a reasonable facsimile of the score "at sight" is a great boon to a soloist looking for repertoire or beginning to work on new repertoire.

The ability to sight read reasonably well is also a great boon to the pianist. It enables the pianist to play through a work - even if not perfectly - to help him/her decide whether this is something to be chosen as a repertoire piece or not. It also give him the chance to get a "feel" for the piece before spending time working out details. That initial feel may be the deciding factor as to whether or not the piece is chosen.

Regards,

A couple of suggestions that I find helpful:

First, absolute placement, avoid note names: do not say them aloud or silently; go directly from the symbol on the page to the key on the piano.

Second, relative placement, read by intervals: once you have located and played a note try playing the following one(s) by its relative placement. Assume you are playing a piece in C-major, and there are no active accidentals. Say you just played the note on the line between upper and lower staff, the printed page indicates the note to be played next lays in the lowest line of the upper staff, i.e., jumping over one note of the scale. Just feel, or estimate the distance, corresponding to jumping over one note and play it. When you run out of notes you can get to by relative placement, then try absolute placement by following the first suggestion above.

ocd

Dimitry, welcome to the pianists' forum. You've already gotten some excellent advice from other posters, so I won't elaborate that much. I am also a bit in shock at how you managed to get so many teachers giving you bad advice on how to sightread.

In order to sightread material of increasing difficulty it's necessary to get some basic technique down. I don't doubt you know your scales and arpeggios, and being able to see those in chunks - ie, looking at the score, seeing a run of consecutive notes, seeing how many beats are left in the measure (or measures) and what rhythmic values they are - is very valuable.

The more you sightread without looking at your hands, and the more you do it while actively trying to look a measure ahead of what you're playing will help you see things in chunks. The difference between a beginning pianist and an advanced one, besides the vast gulf of experience between the two, is that the advanced one is looking at patterns and chord structures (among many other things) to make the process easier. A less advanced pianist will take things a note at a time until experience and technique has made him familiar with elements of piano music.

To that end, I suggest you supplement your sightreading with technique drills. Know your major and minor scales, 4 octaves each. Have your chord progressions down cold, as well as your inversions, because once you know them and see them your hands will shape themselves into those chords without you thinking about it. Practice arpeggios in every inversion, and then practice arpeggiated 7th chords of every type. Run through perfect, deceptive, and plagal cadences in the easier keys. Take some time to sightread rhythm, and be able to recognize rhythmic patterns (for example, a common one is eighth note double sixteenth followed by 3 groups of 4 sixteenth notes).

Try to feel your way around the keyboard using your black keys as a guide, and then close your eyes and visualize the keyboard on your eyelids. Pick a note, and see if you can play it!

Don't worry about the dynamics and the articulation until you have a good grip on looking at the score and not your hands. Best of luck to you. From what you've posted you seem to be very dedicated to becoming a good sightreader, and are willing to do a lot of hard work to achieve that goal. Keep it up!

Edit: As for the fingering question, if you know where you need to go on the piano, then you can make up whatever fingering you want so long as you play what's on the sheet.

I equate reading music to reading text aloud.

Anyone can recite a newspaper article or book passage at first sight, especially if it does not contain difficult words; however even these will come easily with enough practice.

The advice to start simply and progress to more difficult music... is correct.

Having to look at your hands is like having to look at your mouth with a mirror whenever you read aloud! When you think of it that way it reveals the illogic of what you have been taught.

Steven's advice is excellent.

I'm a very good sight-reader. Here are some of my ideas, just off the top of my head.

From the time I began to play, I loved to explore music. Playing many things, just for the sheer fun of it, was more important to me than playing them right. I had to do a lot of work later on to correct bad habits, but I got very good at getting "close" very fast. People who sight-read very well tend to be in a hurry. A bit impatient. And possibly lazy about certain aspects of practice. I loathe repetition. I know other people learn hard compositions, in small chunks, by learning and memorizing a few measures long before they can play them anywhere near full speed, but doing that makes me crazy. So even in practice, I tend to switch very quickly from one thing to another. I may only practice the hard parts of several things. Since I stopped performing (almost 30 years ago), it is very difficult for me to nail anything for myself, because I have no patience. But I will absolutely nail anything I teach, because I'm mentally breaking things out, then testing and testing and testing, to make absolutely sure that what I'm teaching works. I am especially careful about fingering.

When I sight-read, I use any fingering in the universe. Thinking about fingering slows me down.

For me playing at sight was a combination of actually playing things right, at sight, and some rather inventive faking. Later, this "faking" allowed me to make almost instant decisions about what to play, what to leave out, or what to play when playing piano accompaniments that were transcribed for piano.

It also lead to the ability to "wing things" on first reading, which can be terribly important when I am trying to get a general feel for a piece of music I've never seen or heard before. Until I get some kind of idea of what is going on, I have not yet made a decision whether or not to pursue a piece of music. If I'm never going to play it again, close is close enough.

Being able to read things through, even with some initial faking, gives me a very accurate idea of where the problems are going to be. The more I have to fake, the sooner I need to work on those parts, if I plan to play something.

My glances at the piano are very fast, and sometimes I'm actually seeing the keyboard almost peripherally. It's as if I look down a bit, but not all the way. I'm not aware that I'm looking at all, unless I think about it. And I really don't look at all whenever I can feel the notes, without jumping.

I made no effort at all to analyze anything I played at sight—when I was young. Analysis went on, but on a sub-conscious level. I'm not saying this is the right way, only that I was making money as an accompanist by about age 14, and I depended on the money I made accompanying in college. I also got a scholarship, accompanying, while in college. Without any doubt *anything* I studied, such as scales, chords, arpeggios, etc., improved my sight-reading. I did not study these things to become a better sight-reader. But they *made* me a better sight-reader.

Years of teaching has also improved this ability more. The effort of analyzing and breaking things down for students gives me more "tools".

I don't know if my personal experience will help anyone, and I repeat, this is really off the top of my head.

May I add that I think your advice, as it comes through your accounts of your experience, is excellent advice, also.

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I'm a very good sight-reader. Here are some of my ideas, just off the top of my head.

[...]
For me playing at sight was a combination of actually playing things right, at sight, and some rather inventive faking. Later, this "faking" allowed me to make almost instant decisions about what to play, what to leave out, or what to play when playing piano accompaniments that were transcribed for piano.

Accompanists often have to deal with "pianist unfriendly" accompaniments - orchestral scores reduced for piano - and the ability to "fake" some things is almost a given in these instances.

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It also lead to the ability to "wing things" on first reading, which can be terribly important when I am trying to get a general feel for a piece of music I've never seen or heard before. Until I get some kind of idea of what is going on, I have not yet made a decision whether or not to pursue a piece of music. If I'm never going to play it again, close is close enough.

Again, I agree; in this situation "close is close enough".

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Being able to read things through, even with some initial faking, gives me a very accurate idea of where the problems are going to be. The more I have to fake, the sooner I need to work on those parts, if I plan to play something.

... or you can relatively quickly decide that you are not going to play it, without having invested much time and effort into partly learning it.

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My glances at the piano are very fast, and sometimes I'm actually seeing the keyboard almost peripherally. It's as if I look down a bit, but not all the way. I'm not aware that I'm looking at all, unless I think about it. And I really don't look at all whenever I can feel the notes, without jumping.

I made no effort at all to analyze anything I played at sight—when I was young. Analysis went on, but on a sub-conscious level. I'm not saying this is the right way, only that I was making money as an accompanist by about age 14, and I depended on the money I made accompanying in college. I also got a scholarship, accompanying, while in college. Without any doubt *anything* I studied, such as scales, chords, arpeggios, etc., improved my sight-reading. I did not study these things to become a better sight-reader. But they *made* me a better sight-reader.

Right or not right, the "proof is in the pudding."

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[...]

I apologize for repeating your quotes from your post, but I thought that they were incisive and important enough to bear repeating. I like what comes "off the top of [your] head.

Regards,

I would like to see more teachers from the music teacher's forum comment on sight reading. I hope I don't stray too far from the topic here.

When I was learning a foreign language I was told to underline every word I didn't know. Then I was to go back over the the material and look up every fourth of fifth word depending on how many words I underlined. After I developed greater competence in the foreign language, I enjoyed looking over the earlier material I had underlined, and it clearly showed my lack of understanding some basic elements of the sentence structure such as verb conjugations, especially the subjunctive cases, as well as many colloquial meanings.

As in reading a foreign language, music has its unique sentence structure such as scales, chord progressions and arpeggios. I overheard a college music major saying that she doesn't like playing Mozart because he has too many scales. That to me is what makes his music beautiful. Regarding scales I already have the fingering embedded from my practice sessions playing the scales, and it becomes a pattern. When I sight read a piece, I recognize this pattern. I don't have to reinvent the wheel every time I play. Sight reading is seeing these patterns and simplifying the more difficult ones with the intention of filling the gaps with future readings. The rhythm helps me to keep going, and I practice recovering when I'm thrown off balance.

I really enjoy sight reading. But I need to work more on improvising and playing from memory.

If you do a search, both here and on the teachers' forum, you will find a great number of threads on sight reading, including some of excruciating length .

Me too!

So true! I take the faking a step further if I'm playing a reduction that is something I really care about. Rather than continuing to fake, which implies "doing it on the fly", I work out something different. Often it's not hard to improve the sound of such reductions by a bit of crafty "re-transcribing".

By the way, have you ever had to cut music, on pure reflex, because a soloist jumps? I was playing the piano part to the Hindemith Tuba Sonata (my student was playing the tuba part), and he skipped a section. Since I not only knew my part but his, I knew instantly what he skipped. This happened in front of a judge, and the judge did not catch it.

(Not a very good judge, obviously…)

Frequently .

Rearranging orchestral reductions is standard accompanist stuff too. Some people obviously think that all there is to writing an orchestral reduction is to put all the notes in. I try to listen to the original - what do you hear? Make sure that is there. When the reduction is so cluttered up with notes that you don't actually hear what you would hear in its original version, you know it's a bad reduction.

So true.