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Should a newbie start to practice sight-reading? When I practice a challenging part over and over, I see I memorize the melody and play the part without looking at the score. I saw some advanced folks come here and talk about their problems with sight reading. I don't want to be one of them.

What would you recommend that a newbie do for her sight-reading practice? I will have played the piano for two weeks by tomorrow.

Perhaps the best recommendation, provided you can afford it, is to get a teacher. A good teacher will help you immeasurably. Other than that keep trying new material. Also, there are a number of free apps for Apple and Android products that will help. They act in much the same manner as flash cards. Best wishes.

Three basic things we "read" from a piece of sheet music:
1)Pitch
2)Rhythm
3)Fingering (may be written or implied)

The goal of sight reading is to process all three at once. To do all of this at once is not easy for a beginner. It's better to do Rhythm separately and pitch & fingering separately. All of this information is from Howard Richman's book. This is our discussion thread on the book. There is a lot of good information available there.

Also, these links should be helpful:

http://www.pianofundamentals.com/book/en/1.III.11

http://www.pianostreet.com/smf/index.php/topic,11490.0.html

Sight reading is well worth putting time and effort into learning. It's an added bonus if you learn it while starting out.

There's a distinction between reading and sight reading. As the terms are commonly understood, sight reading refers to reading a score from sight that you've never seen before, playing it correctly and at (or at least near) tempo. In general, you'll only be able to sight read pieces that are some level lower than your current reading ability (that is, your ability to work through a score and learn a piece). If you've only got two weeks experience, I would say you've got a ways to go before you need to worry about sight reading.

If you're *really* keen to try working on it, I would suggest sightreadingfactory.com as a valuable resource. It can generate as many practice scores as you want with simple melodies in the five finger position (if you select level 1/2). It's an inexpensive membership site (I think around $20/year). As you get better, it can generate more complicated scores for you to practice with.

I would recommend that you relax. Unless you know another instrument _really well_, you'll have plenty of work to do just getting control of your fingers, and matching up what you see on the page, to what you hear, to what your muscles are doing.

Sight-reading requires a lot of mental coordination. Come back, and ask the question after a few months of playing.

. Charles

First thing a new player needs to learn it to identify a note name without hesitation. Try to avoid the use of mnemonic devices (Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, etc) or at least wean yourself off them asap. Second is to be able to find and play a given note as quickly as possible. These seemingly simple skills take quite a while to get down right but are crucial first steps and cannot be skipped.

You can download free flashcards from this link which are fun to test yourself with away from the piano.

As a user of sightreading factory I would recommend it but careful, it is addictive lol.

Why you find some advanced players having problems with sight reading is because in part they have not put in the necessary effort by regular practice. But also because it is a very hard skill to develop and like playing piano once you begin it is a lifelong endevour.

Oh dear I would have been lost many a time without the FACE in the space and Every Good Boy Deserves Fruit lol. I have found that with time I don't need to use them anymore as the notes are slowly starting to come automatically to me. I also found an app which I downloaded onto my phone so that sometimes when sitting watching tv I will play my little note game. I still have a long way to go, especially with the bass clef, but I am finding that the more I attempt different pieces, that it is slowly starting to come a bit more naturally to me. I think I'll have a look at that sightreading factory as that sounds helpful too.

What I find confusing is the use of the term sight reading. Some people seem to imply that sight reading is the first time ever you sit and play a piece and after that it's reading. Where as others seem to imply that every time you look at music and play it, that it's sight reading?

Mandy,
When you were first learning to read english, it didn't flow. you probably had to stop, maybe sound out the words. Every sentence was like a puzzle to figure out. Technically you were reading, but you weren't *really* reading, not fluently. Eventually you got to the point where you could just read. Your brain learned to interpret the symbols as words and you just flow with it. But if you were reading a physics textbook tonight (or something else very complex), you might have to slow down, make notes, figure things out as you went.

That's really the distinction we are talking about. Sight reading implies having your brain translate the symbols directly to your fingers so that you can sit down with a score you've never seen before and just play it. Reading generally means figuring out the puzzle.

Later on, when you've got the piece figured out, usually you've practiced it so much you remember parts of it. you recognized patterns, you remember that in the next measure the chord changes, etc... So as you play, you're partly reading the score, but also partly remembering the song. You're relying on your memory as much as the score. You're not sight reading the music, you're just reading it.

That distinction between reading and sight reading seems to be pretty common, but it's probably not an official definition from the OED. It's more like a common slang that musicians sometimes use to communicate that distinction. And yes, often you'll see the terms used interchangeably, but in those cases you can usually divine the intended meaning from context.

Warm Regards

PS Regarding the common acronyms, All Cows Eat Gras and all that, there's a school of thought that says that they're counterproductive. Think of it this way, when you see a note on the score, your brain has to go, "o.k., all cows eat grass.....o.k, that's the G.....o.k., and I'm in the bass clef, and that's the one near middle C....so now I put my finger here....

There are a lot of steps from seeing the note on the score to putting your finger in the right place. There are ways to learn where to put your fingers that don't involve figuring out what the name of the note is (you learn intervals and landmark notes instead of note names).

Like a lot of things, probably some people would do better learning the acronyms and some people would learn better with the interval approach. People have different learning styles and all that.

In either approach you want to dispense with the crutch as soon as you can and move to "dot on page = put finger here"

Warm Regards

+1.

. Charles

For the bass clef I have to confess to acronyms. Above the high e or low e, I'm still just lost.

I'm getting better at it now, but every now and then I still use the miDDle reminder to get my bearings from D lol.

It's good advice about ditching these methods, and what you all say makes sense. I am going to make a concerted effort not to use them at all anymore.

The OED refers to sight-reading (hyphenated) as prima vista sight reading that has not been prepared. The ABRSM examine students for 'playing at sight', which means the same thing. This is a very specialised skill.

Reading, in general, may refer to either at sight or 'not from memory'. This is a slightly different skill and, for me, the more important one though improvement in one leads to improvement in the other and it is by doing more reading that I have, without any extra practise, improved my sight-reading.

The key, I think, is having sufficient technique to be able to play the music in question, being able to play without having to look at the keyboard, and the ability to hear, audiate or imagine the sound of what you're reading so as to memorise it enough that you can keep a bar or so ahead of where you're playing.

The reason many struggle with this skill may be that they tend to learn a limited number of pieces at a time and use procedural memory to avoid having to read in detail. They recognise where they are on the page more than they actually read. That has certainly been my experience.

Inspired by the Australian/Hal Leonard initiative of 40 pieces a year I have increased my reading ability more than any work I've done on sight-reading specifically - though I can't say how much latent ability and experience has increased the rate of learning.

I no longer practise sight-reading specifically (what relief!) and have found I can do it better anyway when I need to (what joy!).
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Learning to respond to the notes on the page tends to focus on pitch more than rhythm or time value of the notes. For true sight-reading it is far better to concentrate more on rhythm.

I taught my boys to read playing recorder and guitar. They only needed to cover the bass clef when they moved to the piano and the elementary music was simply an extension from middle C below the treble clef rather than a new set of notes.

All the instrument learning I've done and seen over the years begins with recognising only three notes at first, G, A and B on the treble clef. Reading facility develops quickly from there. All the piano tutors I've seen begin with ten notes, five in each hand in lesson one. It's no wonder people struggle with the reading.

My first guitar tutor used standard notation, full five and six notes chords, at lesson one. I got nowhere with it. The standard classical guitar tutor is Frederick Noad's 'Playing the guitar' and that starts with just G, A and B putting reading skill on a par with playing skill.

I have made much use of Louise Guhl's Keyboard Proficiency, which has conferred on me the ability to transpose music by one or two accidentals on the fly - at sight - I would not have even attempted that without this book.

I suggest starting sight-reading with learning to sight-sing (or at least learn the recorder) until the notation is familiar.

Always on the look out for book recommendations I found a second hand copy of this book online. Throwing caution to the wind it's now ordered. I suspect just having the book will not confer transposition mastery and there may been some hard work and hair pulling involved (which I can ill afford to lose any more of)