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After a very long time, I feel an actual increase in my sight reading ability. I can actually attempt to read stuff now which I couldn't previously, which is pretty exciting!

There's something I observed during my practice, and I wonder what your opinions are on this: It appears that working on reading a lot of simple classical era music à la Czerny works to drill harmonic patterns into memory making them easier to anticipate.

https://blizzardpiano.wordpress.com/2022/05/26/day-17-sight-reading-progress/

IMHO
You don’t need to be reading advanced music to work on sight-reading. It just needs to be music with a variety of musical patterns (chords/arpeggios/keys) and a variety of rhythms. The goal is to quickly identify the patterns when they reoccur.


I’m not sure if strong doses of Czerny will get you that since I did not have big doses of Czerny. Perhaps someone else can fill in that info.

Perhaps it's interesting to some, but looking at the linked post to your blog where you list what you did during every few minutes of your practice makes me wonder why someone would post that. It kind of reminds me of the FaceBook posters who detail the most mundane events in their lives on their FB feed in great detail.

I also think the clarity of your writing on your blog needs improvement. For example, in your post headed "sight reading progress", you say:

"I started off the day by reading the first two pages of an arrangement of Naruto Shippuuden – Blue Bird, and trying to play it through. This took about 45 minutes, and I followed it up by trying out another piece in my back-catalog for half an hour."

This sounds like you took 45 minutes to sight read a two page piece which IMO makes little sense.

Czerny is too predictable. Try Haydn instead.

Any type of music with repeated patterns will get you to recognize the pattern quickly in the same type of music but it will not necessarily help you with other music. You need variety for that.

Thanks for pointing it out! I'll keep that in mind. I meant that I was "read-playing" it, to use a term I see here sometimes.

I will try that! I feel like at the beginning, it helped to read stuff which was very predictable and to get it to the point where I can read it pretty fluently. I haven't actually been sight reading seriously for a long time (around a year at most), so I've been trying to get my basics in order

I would not use "read-play" because it is not an accepted musical term or one that would be meaningful to most. I think that term just causes confusion.

I always like to use the term read-play to refer to active reading that's different from sightreading (prima vista etc.). It may be that I was the first person to use this term on PW, so I am of course biased!

In any case, if enough people use the term, it will be recognizable and meaningful, that's how new terms come to be.



BTW Blizzard, I like that arrangement of Blue Bird, I clicked around and found that person's YT collection:
https://www.youtube.com/c/Animenzzz

There's lots of fun stuff there!

Did you purchase the sheets from this page: https://www.mymusicsheet.com/animenzzz

Can you pay with paypal?

Yeah, I consider him a pretty good arranger. He used to put the sheets up for free up until about a year ago. I think Paypal should work. The arrangements can get fairly hard, haha.