Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum (Sight) Reading material with prerequisites

I need sight reading material, or just reading material: I care about learning to read the notes fast so I can learn new pieces faster, not much about actually sight reading, which is about never stopping, accompaniment, etc, but I guess that doesn't change much my request.
With these prerequisites:

• free
• easy, e.g. grade 1 or 2
• easy to print and good looking stuff: I don't have the piano in front of the PC and I don't have tablets or similar gadgets
• a lot of notes in one page: I don't want to print a sheet that I'll use for 30 seconds. Ink is not cheap and I don't want to print big black circles.

Especially the first and last point are very difficult and I know it, but maybe some of you have some recommendations.
Please don't recommend things that do not fulfill these requisites, especially the last one.


I'll use this material for additional reading practice; learning new pieces already improve your reading, but I need a bit of a supplement material so I can read more notes without caring about actually learning yet another piece for the week.
Until now I've found various solutions; I bought some books (that didn't last a week!) and I printed a lot of music sheets (that didn't last a week!). So I really need a storm of notes to print for my enjoyment and economy.

Okay, I won't.
Good luck!

That sentence wasn't meant to be rude, it was just to stress the importance of the third point. Sorry if it sounded offensive.

I'm not offended.
When you are looking for free stuff you must remember that you'll get what you pay for. This goes for advice as well as for sheet music.

You could try looking at your local library or on imslp.com.

Something doesn't compute .

Music that's easy but with a lot of notes?

Music that's got a lot of notes (like Sorabji's Opus Clavicembalisticum) ain't easy.
Music that's easy has very few notes.

But if you want my recommendation (which won't fulfil your "storm of notes" rule), you can print Bach's Anna Magdalena Notebook, Tchaikovsky's Album for the Young, Schumann's Album for the Young and Bartók's Mikrokosmos Bk 1 & 2 for free off imslp. And look at the list of pieces in Denes Agay's 'Easy Classics to Moderns' and print them off for free from imslp too.

I was obviously referring to the formatting of the page. You can put 10 easy pieces on one single page or write 2 of them in 5 different pages. I prefer the first option, even if the notes are very small (I have no sight problems).

Maybe you'll like to practice with this in your computer. Have a look, it's for practicing notes…I liked it (just I am mostly with fingering yet):

http://www.teoria.com

Click Music Theory Tutorials --> then Reading Music --> you'll advance arrow in some pages if you don't want to practice the most basic and then get to the page Reading Musical Notes. There are entertaining exercises below.

And more things… You will like to at least do it once.


Notice you can choose Speed for the exercises. I got it to No Time, but you can try a speedy one if you dare.

imslp.org as previously mentioned is your go to place for free classical sheet music.

This spreadsheet has a large amount of pieces showing relative grades for you to sort through.

This may be useful as may this.

BTW there are some youtube clips to show how to extend your printer ink which are very helpful.

Album de Lecture, Opp.96-99 (Schmoll, Anton): 2 pieces each page.
Le petit pianiste, Op.823 (Czerny, Carl)

Also, take a look at the first book of Standard Graded Course of Studies for the Pianoforte (Mathews, William Smythe Babcock)

Will check them, thanks.


Thank you, good links!

Wasn't obvious to me.

Most PDF software allows you to select how many pages to print per printed page.
So download as many single sheet, easy scores as you want, then print as many as you can legibly read on a single page.
Personally anything smaller than one sheet per page, and I crane my neck forward to see the notes better, which is bad posture.
Many people, myself included, use electronic devices, such as tablets, iPad, computer monitors, e-book readers, etc to display scores. With no problem about expensive printer ink at all.

I was also considering this. What would you suggest for a budget of ~ $200 ?

You can buy an Android or Windows 8 tablet for that price.
Visit a store and actually view some scores on them to see which works best for you.

Look for a kid who quit piano after 3 or 4 years and take his / her piano books.