Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum Your favorite sightreading resources?

Completely agree.


Reading Skills and Sight-Reading Skills are the same skills.

You just have to be much better at it in order to be good at Sight-Reading.

When you are reading music, you should be doing more than recognizing that "This note on the page means I press this key down".

That is a very low level of reading skill.

You also need skill at recognizing groups of notes that form a DbMinor chord so you can immediately play that DbMinor chord instead of thinking separately of the notes Db,F,Ab .... and other things like that.

Actually practicing sight-reading should probably include more than just playing piece after piece which you have never seen before.

It probably should contain "hints" from a qualified instructor as to how you could have done better had you known that certain portions of the score were made up of "chords" and could have been played easier with that knowledge.

And then .... the next piece should contain those same elements to give you an opportunity to practice what you just learned.

Playing random sheets of music is probably less effective.

Of course, any reading helps you get better even if it is presented in a less effective format.

So, if you like to "Sight-Read" .... knock yourself out ... It all helps to improve you skill at playing piano.



BTW .....I am curious about how necessary it is to actually become a good sight-reader.

I would like to see a "show of hands" of how many users have actually been REQUIRED to do sight-reading AT A PROFESSIONAL LEVEL in the last 3 months. I am guessing ... NONE.

I will define REQUIRED to do sight-reading as .....

You were not given access to the notation more than 15 minutes prior to the "GIG".

... I was forced to sight-read an unknown hymn at a funeral. I had the name ahead of time but the score i pulled from a hymnal was not remotely related to what was sung ... except for the title

Well, as trying as that might have been ....

I am not clear on why you consider that sight-reading ?

If what was notated for that music in the hymnal was not what the congregation was singing ...
What were you "reading" ?

Reading Skills and Sight-Reading Skills are the same skills.

Most, like myself, who don't think one should "practice" sight reading, say that because they think most good sight readers got that way just by playing a lot of music for pleasure. Sight reading musically as opposed to just reading the notes and rhythms like a midi comes more and more naturally as one's musical ability develops. The purpose of sight reading is not to reveal poor reading skills or poor anything.

Sight reading means playing the music with the score for the first time. It has nothing to do with how well one does that with respect to the notes/rhythms/tempo or how musical one's performance is or whether one stops sometimes. When people use the term "reading" they generally mean playing with the score whether it's the first time or100th time although if they are talking about the first time they usually say "sight reading". The phrase "prima vista sight reading" is redundant. I have never heard anyone make the distinction you gave in your post between "reading" and "sight reading" although it's good that your teacher encourages you to play musically all the time.

I’m sorry but you are making an assumption about how others were taught and how they were judged on sight reading. I was expected not to just know the notes and rhythm, but to play it musically and with a suitable interpretation of the music. All at sight. I ‘learned to sightread’ by playing a ton of different kinds of music. My teacher evaluated how I was doing by playing duets. She never said ‘I want to evaluate your sight reading’; she always said ‘let’s play a duet together’ and would drag out something totally new. If I did not play musically she would say “let’s start over; when you play together you should be playing it based on the dynamics and the interpretation of the peace as well as the notes and rhythm’.

This did not take special training.

What I was reading was a version I had never seen before but had to immediately play

You do not happen to remember the name of that hymn, do you ?

I have the Bach Scholar book referenced in this thread and have finished level 3. But the snippets of the hymns that it is based on seem so dated.