Piano - Improve Your Sight-reading - Grade 2

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What’s more, all of these must be coordinated with the beat, the musical intention, the conductor, the singer, etc. Like any skill in music, the best way to improve your sight reading skills is to practice regularly.

As you can read, I have always been exposed to sight-reading and it is the reason why I am so proficient at it! Once our work on this specific first piece was completed, they asked me to choose a new piece to work on. I obviously chose a piece of the same standard. If your level is a Grade 1 piece, then great. That’s your ability and that’s where you start. But it’s hugely important to determine this before buying or borrowing loads of music to sight read; if the music is just too hard for you, you will get disheartened and discouraged. There are four books, and each chapter covers a new rhythm with plenty of exercises. The book has a duet part to help you gain confidence at maintaining a steady beat. Sound at Sight

Improve Your Sight-Reading: New Edition

Every piece of music has an awkward spot that presents some sort of difficulty. Sometimes it’s a rhythmic difficulty like 32nd notes, and other times it’s a random note or articulation. Below is a list of 5 common difficult spots that can make sight-reading tough for anyone. Anyone can learn how to improve their piano sight-reading. There is no magic bullet here. Basically, you just need to read a lot. The suggestions I’ve given here aimed at making it more fun and engaging for you to read so that you will be more likely to do it, and so that you will pay more attention while you are doing it. Your turn My harp tutor is hugely encouraging and open to me finding varied paths to help me on my musical journey. She suggested I might find Fiona’s sight reading course beneficial and she was right! Now I can focus on the instrument with my harp tutor and build other skills in this group. I have employed every tip you have given me and I have made rapid progress Wendy Ware

When you are a beginner, sight reading is difficult as there’s an awful lot to think about and process. You’ve got the notes to read, the fingers to co-ordinate, you’ve got to maintain a steady pulse etc. But if you truly wish to become excellent at it, you should definitely work on this skill daily and include it to all your practice sessions. It is definitely the second way to progress tremendously. If you get the opportunity to try it with friends and family, you’ll understand what I mean. People will inevitably shout now at different times, so there’s plenty of fun to be had. Even if you play wrong notes, continuing to play on will help develop your ability to be a more focused reader. Stopping only creates bad habits that are tough to fix later on. Here are some simple tips to sight read without stopping. Most people find it challenging not to allow mistakes to cause them to stop or compromise the rhythm. One of the best ways to get over this is to involve some level of improvisation in your sight reading training.One method I teach my students to do is to tap the rhythms of both hands when experiencing a piece for the first time. We call this “ghost playing” but it gives them a chance to work out the rhythms in their head, and feel the pulse of the piece. It’s also a good idea to label all of the rhythms that are reoccurring. By doing this and polishing those rhythms in your mind first, it helps you to see where the really awkward sections of the music are. You can choose any pitch, it doesn’t matter. Don’t read music, just look at the rhythm, and make sure you’ve got the metronome on. If you are new to sight reading music, you may not yet have put a lot of thought into how to choose your first practice pieces. When selecting a piece for sight reading, choose something easier than the level of music you usually practice. After all, playing something right when you see it is a lot more challenging than learning over time.

There’s a limit to this, however; if your notes are all over the place, even if your rhythm is correct, it won’t sound very good. You need to have a certain degree of note-reading accuracy, but as we mentioned, this is very flexible and nobody will really care if you play wrong notes as long as you can cover them well. Practice everyday. Set a timer, if you need to. If you skip a day or two, do not beat yourself up about it. Many sight reading mistakes can be attributed to not understanding the meter of the music. This goes a little beyond just knowing what the time signature is though. There are some passages of music that have accented notes, tenutos, staccato and other articulations that have a great impact on what the meter will feel like. In both cases, I had the same surprise when they attended their next lesson a week later. They were both totally unable to play. I could not understand it at all.When a pianist plays the wrong note because of a missed sharp or flat, it’s almost always due to them skipping over or not understanding the key signature of the music. Most novice pianists make this mistake, but it can be easily avoidable and prevent mistakes in the future. To help yourself out, I would identify the key signature, and then play the tonic pitch of the piece. From there you can assign scale degrees to the remaining pitches, or even use solfege(more on this later). ToneGym offers an engaging approach to sight reading with games, contests and daily musical workouts.

There is no secret. Like any other skill, it is by doing it extremely regularly that you will improve greatly. If you want to make it a bit more challenging, you could try playing a scale using these rhythms. For example, if you were practising violin sight reading, you could play D major as shown below.

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When you can do 80, increase that number, and maybe try 120. If you find it difficult, do one bar at a time, and slow that metronome down. Inside the membership, I also teach effective practice methods and how to improve your understanding of the core foundations of music. My advice to anyone sight reading is to think more about the feel of the piano keys and less on the visual. If you do some exercises that focus on feeling the distance between notes, then you can pull this off in any key. Developing a relative feel for all notes on the piano is a really crucial skill to have as a pianist.