Hello,

Today at work I had a short break where I was waiting on things to finish or someone to get out of a meeting and had time to fill. A quick google search and I found a website that could be useful to others trying to read music better.

http://www.sightreadingpractice.com

You can configure it down at the bottom exactly what notes/octaves you want to practice. It will then throw notes at you randomly and you just click on the correct key. You can turn key-labels on and off.

Just in the minutes I spent with it today I feel like I've improved my ability to reconize notes on ledger lines quite a bit. I thought this could be helpful for others that have short bursts of free time away from the keyboard but want to continue their practice.

Looks good, 133 in the first exercise - not hard to beat.

Very nice, thanks a lot!

This is a great find. I will use with some of my pupils! Great.

Hey, nice site. Can't think of one of us who needs to improve sight reading more than I!

I had found this site before but never considered using it for note recognition on ledger lines. That's a great way to get use out of it, thanks for sharing!

For quick recognition of ledger lines, focus on 2 notes, high C and low C. Both are 2 ledger lines off the staff. So recognition of these notes should be as easy as seeing middle C. I always say, 1 line in the middle of the grand staff for middle C, 2 lines outside the grand staff for the low and high Cs. Relate all the other notes to those 2. For extremely high and low ledger lines, often they are an octave duplicate of another note. One line note and one space note about the same distance as the height of the staff. Recognize this interval and ledger lines get way less scary.

Great tip, Brian.

+1

I posted a short article about Brian's ledger line tip, including this image to help illustrate the point of using high C, low C and middle C as anchors:

extremely helpful, thank you!

The C on the treble staff is 3 spaces up and the C on the bass staff is 3 spaces down. That symmetry makes them very easy to recognize. Add those to the picture and you have an excellent set of landmark notes. Also the clef's themselves provide some extra easily seen notes as the G clef wraps around the G and the F clef marks the F with its 2 dots.

Maybe this time I can learn properly all those notes far from the staff. Now I stop and count the lines, sometimes I write the name of the note with a pencil, so it's there for the next time.

Thank you very much!

[oh, wait, I didn't read carefully. Now I see you're talking about ledger line notes...]

Eventually you learn to take in the position of the note on the staff without having to count the lines or spaces. This is the same as how if you see a person crossing the street, you can tell if they're on this side of the street, close to this side of the street, in the very middle of the street, closer to the other side of the street, or all the way to the other side of the street, without having to take out a yardstick and measure it.

What I like about the link in the OP is that it's drilling associating a note on the staff with a key on the keyboard. Don't get me wrong, I think it's important to know note names. But drilling only note names leaves out an essential step: can you find it on the piano, direct from score to piano. So drill finding the note on the piano, and then say the name of the note.

For people feeling they have to count lines and spaces: I don't know if this is useful, but you might try, after finding the note on the keyboard, calling out the name of the note, whether it's a line or space note, and which line or space it is on. You might not even need the numbers of the lines or spaces, if you can simply practice recognizing the relative position e.g. "treble clef D, line note, line above the middle" or "bass clef C, space note, space just below the middle." (Or you might need to call out the name of the note after identifying its location.)

The locations, without using numbers, might be, for lines: bottom line, line below the middle, middle line, line above the middle, top line. And for spaces: bottom space, space below the middle, space above the middle, and top space.

Ah ha! Now you're getting to the core of my method. I call them target notes, but landmark is exactly the concept I go for. Way easier than fancy sayings. I have 9 of these targets in my method.

Slight modification to your thought though. It's true that the C spaces are also symmetrical, but that won't be the case for other notes on the staff. I find it better to think of all the notes on the treble clef being one higher than the bass clef, and vice versa. So the Cs are 2nd space on the bottom and 3rd space on the top. This will translate to the other notes better. G is on the 1st line on the bass clef and the 2nd line on the treble.

Three spaces up and down? They are on lines so I'm not sure what you mean by this. I see them ( Cs) as first ledger line above the G clef and second line below the F clef.

If you're talking about the Cs above the treble staff and below the bass staff, as shown in Evan Murphy's picture of landmark notes shown upthread, then the one above the treble staff is on the second leger line (not the first) above the staff. The one below the bass staff, is as you say, on the second leger line below the staff.

But I believe the quote you cite was talking about two Cs which are not shown at all on Evan Murphy's picture: the Cs which sit squarely inside the treble and bass staffs. Inside the treble staff, C is on the third space up from the bottom. Inside the bass staff, C is on the the third space down from the top.

Thanks for posting this link Norrec. I've looked for something like this online but this seems better than the ones I found.

You are correct, thanks for clarifying this for me.

Thanks for this. This is bonza.

I haven't checked this website out yet, but I find myself using apps on my phone (Android). Ones called Note Trainer and Sight Read Music Quiz 4 Piano are really helping me along, quite practical.

That's a decent website. I think if they made it more 'pretty' it would be even better. Though it does exactly what its supposed to, and the ability to change pretty much every detail is very well thought out! Good find

There's an app for the iPhone/iPad called "KeyWiz" that I recommend to students. Not sure if it's for Androids too though.