Hi, I am a pretty competent musician, playing sax. I can also play piano real book style and a lot of jazz, but my sight reading is pretty rubbish for piano. I am looking for a good application to teach myself how to sight read. It must be dedicated to piano (two staves) and be able to start from basic easy reading (does not have to be too tuneful) then methodically go on to more complex things. I am imagining settings tyhat I can limit te difficulty by key, note value, tempo and so forth. The best I have found is sight reading factory. Are trhere other's /better please?

Z

I'm not a teacher, and YMMV, but in my personal and recent experience on myself, after using two series of sight-reading books, including this one that I am still working my way through the best app for sight-reading "drills" has been Sight Reading Factory (SRF).

The pieces SRF creates are computational music, and as such, they are 20th-century like, non-melodic music, and not particularly inspiring, but drilling multiplication tables in grammar school wasn't particularly inspiring either, although ultimately effective as millions of children have found. The computational music is not particularly melodic, but does follow certain forms. For example, each piece ends on the tonic note, the chords and melody lines are not dissonant, some rules of accompaniment are followed, etc. etc.

Besides the "infinite" boost in sight-reading when I first learned to read music in February 2018, I think the last 6 weeks with SRF have seen me make the biggest improvement in sight-reading, mainly in developing an ability (still in its infancy) of reading a measure ahead and reading intervals in almost any key.

I don't have a very elaborate program in SRF - I just do six exercises a day of 16 measures each, in keys and time signatures randomly chosen by the program. I really wish there was some feedback on errors, but I've decided that just practicing sight-reading even without feedback is already leading to this improvement. BTW, for me, the first two weeks of exercises saw almost no improvement. I guess I was still acclimating to the process and had not internalized the different keys. But by the 3rd week, I started noticing gradual improvement, and now, 6 weeks in (spread over 8 calendar weeks), the improvements are definite.

BTW, I don't think SRF is a replacement for my sight-reading workbook series (mentioned above) since it doesn't teach the strategies and techniques for sight-reading. However, it provides an opportunity to repeatedly drill the use of the techniques/strategies once learned, until they actually work in practice and are automatic.

EDIT: BTW, I had started a sight-reading thread a few months ago on ABF.

Thanks for the reply, but I am looking for softwre. I am checking out Piano Marvel as well, site seems laggy - latency wise but seems to work. Are there better?

I don't understand. I was talking about Sight Reading Factory, which you even mentioned. Isn't that software? Or are you referring to a non-server based solution that just runs locally?


I have had a Piano Marvel account myself since February 2018. It is ok for testing sight-reading but not teaching or drilling it. The sight-reading test feature in PM uses the same pieces over and over. Since I have a good memory, I essentially memorized all of the sight-reading tests in PM without even trying to and this skews things for me.

PM though has a number of beginner pieces. Those can be informally used for sight-reading practice.

You can try Jalmus.
It is a free sight reading software.

Thank you all I decided tyo go with Piano Marvel