Photo credit: R A Pyke
If you’ve been reading my blog lately, you know that I devoted a couple of the most recent posts to helping students overcome the all too common difficulty of note reading. I’m so grateful for the wonderful conversation this has sparked. So many of you have chimed in sharing your thoughts, ideas, and suggestions for the collective good of us all. Thank you for joining the conversation! It’s because of this openness and willing to share that we can all make the world a more musical place. 🙂
If you haven’t checked out my ideas on note reading, you can do so here and here. While these tips will most definitely make a difference, I realized that I left out one major part of the equation: sight reading! Sight reading is playing music you’ve never played before for the first time. For some sight reading comes very naturally, whereas for others, it’s more of an acquired skill. Before I give some ideas on how to work on sight reading, I want to dive into reasons it’s important to spend time on sight reading in lessons.
Here are the top three reasons to include sight reading time in lessons.
#1: Better sight reading skills = less time needed to practice
If you can play a piece or passage very well with few errors the first time through, you won’t need to spend as much time practicing it and will be able to move onto more difficult music sooner. We all loving progressing and mastering things. Excellent sight reading allows you to bypass a lot of easier music and move onto the more difficult, exciting stuff you’ve been dying to play.
#2: You pay more attention to detail in pieces
As many of my students get older and more advanced, I notice that they don’t always pay enough attention to the details in their music. Unfortunately sometimes they’ll practice by playing through the music a few times, but won’t stop to make sure they are including all the little details (dynamics, articulations, tempo changes, etc.) in their piece. Even after working on the piece for a week, we’ll need to spend time in their lesson adding the details in.
Students who are used to doing sight reading often are used to looking out for the details. Then when they go to play a new piece, they are accustomed to seeking out these details and often catch them on the first try or very early on.
#3: It helps with note reading
Part of sight reading is playing the correct notes. In order to be good at sight reading, you have to be good at reading notes. Working on sight reading improves note reading and vice versa, working on note reading improves sight reading. It’s a win-win situation!
Now that I’ve covered why sight reading skills are so valuable, I want to share with you how I work on sight reading with my students. Many of my students have a sight reading book. I’ve enjoyed using this book thus far. Sometimes we’ll using the sight reading examples in their theory book instead or in addition.
At the beginning of the lesson or after we’ve gone through any scales or other warm-ups, we’ll do sight reading for a few minutes. We’ll turn to the exercise we left off on, and I’ll give my student some time (however long they need – 30 seconds or so) to carefully look it over. They look for everything in the passage they need to notice including:
– notes
– time signature
– key signature
– rhythm
– dynamics
– articulation
– any other markings
They can ask me questions about anything they are confused or unsure about. I do not allow them to put their hands in position on the piano and “air play” the selection. Once they are ready to begin, they play through, trying not to stop if they make a mistake. After that, if they’ve made errors, I’ll give them another try or so to try and correct them. If they continue to make mistakes and don’t notice what they are doing wrong, I’ll eventually tell them what is happening, so they can take care of it. Depending on how it goes we’ll go through anywhere from 1-3 four measure passages/ lesson. After doing this for not too long, students begin to play new pieces so much better when they are learning them then they ever did before. Hooray!!
Now I want to hear from you. What have you done to work on sight reading? Leave a comment below and share your thoughts. Thanks for reading and have a great day! Don’t forget to “like us” on Facebook and subscribe to the newsletter. Until next week….
Sincerely,
Cassie
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
I use the lesson book for sight-reading. We talk about the lesson, look for all the “road signs”, and they play the first line. Their assignment is to sight read a line a day, and then play the whole song at the next lesson. I don’t require the piece to be polished, and it gives them more time to work on supplemental pieces. Sometimes they decide to spend more time on the lesson piece but I make it their choice.
Hey Mary,
Thanks for sharing how you work on sight-reading with your students!
There are several ways to make sight reading a focus in a private setting. As a supplement to what you are already doing I would also suggest the following:
1. Sight read duets in several styles. This works well with my saxophone students and takes the fear of being the only voice out of the equation allowing the student to both sight read but also listen. I don’t teach piano but I would imagine there are many publications available.
2. I use a book called “Develop Sightreading” by Gaston Dufresne. It is a great resource as well.
3. Stress the importance of always being able to find the downbeat of 1 in any meter. Your students may not hit every single note on the page but will also very rarely get lost. This helped me as a young professional performer when the majority of my gigs were played from the book of a National act and arranged for a particular show. Other guys who were much more experienced than I were always amazed that I never got lost in the difficult passages. Some of them were even fired from gigs because they could play amazing solos but were often “lost” in the chart. The answer is downbeats. Fill in the cracks in a quick practice session. IMO the professional performance aspect gets lost on private students. We always stress the ability to be a better reader but don’t have a practical real world reason. That is mine.
My.02
Hey Ken, Thanks for sharing. Duets are definitely amazing for sight-reading. Also, I love your thoughts on being able to find the downbeat.