Reading music

Hmm.  I guess I find everything on YouTube to be very lowest-common-denominator.  But thanks for the advice anyway.

I struggled my whole life with this and I never learned. In the frank conversations with people who can read and with those who think they can teach you, my conclusion is "they don't know what they are talking about". And I'll make you a comparison: walking. Assuming you don't have a disability, you can walk fine on even terrain, and most people can walk fine on irregular stairs or uneven terrain too. How do you walk? How do you keep balance? You do it subconsciously, and have *absolutely no idea* on how you do it, let alone how to teach that to somebody else. Yes, you can say trivial things like "lift your leg, move it forward, etc". But that's useless information! How do you keep your balance once you are on one leg only? How do you keep all the timing right? Think about "building a robot who can walk like a human" -- as of today nobody has ever being able to do it with the same level of skill and accuracy of an *average* (let alone highly skilled) human being, even though today Boston Dynamics Robotics is coming close these days.

Back to music, in my experience those who can do it have *absolutely no idea* on how they do it, besides the trivial "lift your leg" analogous. In my opinion, teachers, books, youtube, piano marvel (the most valued website for learning to read) and the likes are all trying to "teach you to walk" cluelessly and for most people it does not work, even though it could provide some simple impression that it does *at first*. I know this is a very bold statement and it may feel unsubstantiated, so I'm stressing "in my opinion". I would add that I formed that opinion with several decades of trying *really hard* with every approach I could put my hands on, and failing.

Now some people do learned, how did they do it? I think the only answer is "like a toddler", who does not think like "I should raise my leg 37 degrees up while moving this other muscle to shift my balance and not fall while my weight is on the only foot touching ground". They just do it without thinking. And fail, fall and try again, over and over and over.

Can an adult be successful with this? I don't know, that's what I started trying, but I'm only a year in the journey, too early to say for sure, but it definitely feels like it (admittedly many others felt like progress for a year or two, until I realized that I was simply going in circles and found myself at the same point I started from). I take couching lessons with Phil Best for the purpose. These are not "piano lessons" in any traditional sense, he's a Maverick and he pushes the people he coaches in "everything you know is useless, forget everything, you are now a toddler, just push yourself to simply have fun as a toddler would". Reading is just a part of a well-rounded musicianship in his approach, and you really have to become back that small child to follow his lead.

Hope this helps (if anything to let you know that you are not alone in the struggle)

Presuming, as others have done in this thread, that you're referring to "sight reading" and not just general notational literacy, my mentor always used to talk about >>das Notenbild<< (the note-picture)... to improve your _prima vista_ facility, start with looking at a small fragment (say a single measure) and then, without looking at the score, play it on the keyboard.  Do this (adjusting the initial amount read as necessary for success) until you can consistently and immediately play what you've read accurately.  Then double the amount being taken-in (ie circa two measures at a time) and repeat the process.  Continue doing this until you can "digest" a "suitable" amount of notation in a single go (my mentor claimed (and often demonstrated) to be able to take-in an entire page of music at a time with this method as it allows for the development of the sense of notation as a single pictorial entity vs the temporal-linear approach most of us take to it when first learning to read).  Then, when applying this to _in situ_ reading, make sure to _always_ be looking (& digesting) _ahead_ of the material actively being played.  This all will not happen overnight and will take some serious dedication to implement (and of course you'll need to have reasonably developed technical proficiency—scales & arpeggios!—to make anything work properly in the first place), but it will assuredly improve your reading abilities if pursued diligently.

You can now kindly pay my lesson fee for this wisdom to your local musical charity...

My advice?  Forget note reading...learn the chords instead.  Once you get the chords down it's not very hard to figure out the melody.  Hell...it's the way the Beatles did it and they did pretty well!

Hi wws,

I've been teaching piano for about 16 years - getting beginners past the sight-reading hurdle is one of the biggest challenges, there are so many aspects which need to be understood and then combined.

Perhaps you could go into a little more detail as to which areas you'd like to improve?

Here are a few questions/music notation areas (just off the top of my head) which might help us guide you to the right resources:

1) Will you be reading music so you can play a keyboard of some sort, or just for using software such as Pianoteq or musescore?
2) Are you familiar with the treble and bass clefs, and the various methods (such as F.A.C.E. 'mnemonics') to speed up note recognition?
3) Chords and harmony - major/minor/diminished/7th etc.
4) Musical expression notation, such as dynamics, articulation (staccato etc.), Italian tempo indications
5) Instrument-specific notation -  i.e. bowing markings for violin, pedal markings for piano/organ, drum-kit notation, guitar chord symbols, mutes/breathing indications for wind players.
6) Rhythm notation - note lengths (eighth-notes/quavers) and rests, ties, dotted notes.....this part is very much about mathematics

I've acquired and created quite a variety of resources over the years - happy to share anything which might be useful, once I know what you need!

Good luck!

without knowing your playing level it's hard to make a recommendation, but what i always tell people who want to improve their sight-reading is to get an old hymnal and sight-read the SATB arrangements in there.  typically those arrangements are challenging enough to give beginners something to sink their teeth into, but not so difficult that they're impossible (compared to say Bach's harmonized chorales, which are much more musically interesting but not easy to sight-read without a lot of practice).  old hymnals contains hundreds of arrangements and are basically free (churches often through out old ones, or send them to junk shops).

Best of luck to you. FWIW, to be more specific with what I mentioned in my previous message, I had exactly the same goals as you. I did try all of these things, one at the time: I diligently did my practice, 15-30 min a day for a couple of years with each one of these approaches (including the Harris books and many other ones). I did not improve a bit.

Once again, hope you'll have better luck.

Lots of good advice in the thread already.

Youtuber Nahre Sol made video on this subject last week:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wcsuofd...cmVzb2w%3D

If your teacher won't help you learn to read, he's not a "great" teacher in my opinion. If I were you, I'd cast about for a teacher who can teach you the fundamentals as well as more advanced techniques and concepts. Take it from one who knows. I already knew how to read, but I went through two teachers before I found a third who bothered to teach me other fundamental concepts that were necessary for advancing on piano. You'll hear from many people that sight reading isn't important, but if you don't have a great ear, you'll need to read. It's worth the effort to find the right person for your needs.

There's nothing like a good old rant!!!

The Paul Harris books someone suggested are not bad. I have them, and I particularly like the rhythm sections which take pitches out of the equation and get you drumming cross-rhythms, ties, dotted rhythms, unusual time signatures, syncopation etc. etc.

ABRSM have a series of books called "Joining the Dots". They are similar to the Paul Harris books, but perhaps a bit more modern, more tuneful and focus around specific key signatures, including a little improvisation and other creative approaches.

The thing which I *believe* made me a good sight-reader was getting music which was far too hard for me (Beethoven Piano Sonatas!) and just hacking my way through them at full speed, somewhat recklessly. Not something my teacher would have approved of, but taught me to tackle anything fearlessly, and got me playing the best I could without slowing down or hesitating. Wrong notes are an inevitability when you're sight-reading, unless you want to go at a snail's pace and be pedantically accurate!

Sometimes quantity is more important than quality - others will strongly disagree!

Download a score of your favourite piano concerto, one which you might hope to be able to play in 10 years time, and give it a bash right now!
Throw caution to the wind and have some fun!!!

P.S.

Play different genres of music - classical is full of scales and broken chords, jazz has lots of interesting 7th/9th chords with plenty of annoying accidentals.
Atonal music adds the element of "If it sounds wrong, it could still be correct!".

I worked for several years as a ballet accompanist - I had no say whatsoever over the tempo. I just had to keep on going, the pulse and rhythm were vital, getting the right notes came 2nd. Plenty of times I'm found myself thrown into the deep end, I usually managed to keep my head above water and survive until the end!!

This sounds very strange, and makes me think that you are using the term 'interval' differently from its accepted use.  Interval as a musical concept has nothing to do with five fingers or with hand position or fingering at all.   

It makes no sense at all to say thinking in intervals "doesn't take you past a 5 finger hand position."  So, maybe describe what you think an 'interval' is, so someone here can explain to you how you're misunderstanding things.  Or explain how you think 'interval' is linked to hand position, and why this somehow limits the usefulness of thinking in terms of intervals.

It's really mostly about increasing your facility to translate distances between notes on the staff to distances between notes on the keyboard.  There is no magic way to get it immediately.  Like everything with music, it's one thing to read about it, it's quite another to develop the actual ability to do it.  It will happen over time, possibly longer than you'd like, but faster if you do exercises that focus on it specifically occasionally.

With the greatest respect, it seems as though you're trying to run before you can walk. Sorry, but you do need to be really fluent in intervals before you can advance to your mythical 'next step'. And I do mean fluent. Once you can look at any pair of notes and know the interval without hesitation or working-out, then you're ready to move on - and you'll know what the 'next step' is without me having to spell it out.

well, not _entirely_ nothing...

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guidonian_hand)

Yes, I carried it too far.   But even in that case I think it's more that fingering depends on intervals.  Intervals themselves don't depend on fingering.

For the original poster, I would suggest a couple things.

1. Don't expect to get good at sight reading without a lot of work.  Getting good at it is something that will happen over years, not days.  You should  be able to notice improvement over shorter periods, weeks, months, but it may not improve as quickly as you want it to.  Get used to it, that's how learning to play an instrument works.  You will improve at sight reading more quickly if you do exercises focusing on it specifically, less quickly if you do it often but don't put laser focus on it.  (Yes, obvious I know.)

2.  As with many things in music, it helps to separate out what you're focusing on, things become too difficult if you're trying to learn more than one thing at once.  If you're sight reading and trying to focus on correct fingering at the same time, that's too much.  Limit it to one or the other.  Do exercises with laser focus on a single concept.

3.  In light of 2, above, as one exercise try sight reading and playing a note at a time, all with your index finger.  Or, limit your sight reading to just reading off the note names, literally saying them aloud, playing nothing (you can do this anywhere, even without keyboard).

4.  Sight reading is going to involve knowing keys and scales inside out.  What note is a fifth above C when you're playing in C major?  What note is a fifth above Bb when you're playing in F major?  What note is a third above D in C Major?  What note is a third above D in G Major?  You should be quick with verbal answers to these, not depend on hand position or fingering to help you in some way (although you can focus on that separately).

I'm not a teacher, so take my suggestions with grain of salt.  I'd also suggest watching the Nahre Sol video I posted above in this thread.  I watched it recently and, while I think I was sort of doing each of the things she says, I wasn't necessarily focussing on all of them.  Try devising separate exercises for yourself where you focus only on a single item among them.  Over and over in learning music, you will find that it helps to distill out a single concept, laser focus on it in exercises, become comfortable with it, then over time slowly combine it with another concept.  This combining of one thing with another (e.g., combining 1. recognizing notes/intervals by sight with 2. fingering)  will sometimes feel like starting again at level 0, but it will be more doable and you can progress if you're comfortable with each item separately.

Finally, I would suggest trusting experts.  If all the experts say focussing on identifying intervals is a key part of learning to sight read, accept that it probably is.  If you don't think the experts are right, try to figure out why that is.  Chances are (1) the experts are right, and (2) figuring out why the experts are right will point the way towards making better progress.

I guess one more thing.  I get the feeling that you might want to relax, slow down, don't try to rush things.  If you have the feeling that you "want to pull your hair out" then the practice you're doing is too complex; you need to simplify something and/or slow things down.  This involves also changing your expectations of yourself.  Doing practice at the appropriate level is of utmost importance.  You want something that's challenging for you to do, but not too challenging.  Whatever practice you're doing, it should feel like it's requiring you to focus, pay close attention, be at the top of your game.  But it should not be too hard, it should never make you feel like you want to pull your hair out.  If it does, that's a sign that you need to simplify things, either by (1) distilling things down to address a single concept (disregarding everything else) or (2) slowing down your playing, so your mind can process things.  Eventually you will be able to combine concepts and speed things up, but always helpful first to separate concepts and address one at a time, and practice slowly (very slowly) before you go faster.

Some good tips in that video!

+1 for Phil Best materials and 1-on-1 lessons. "Practicing" his way is the most fun I've had on the piano since I was a kid.

Before starting the piano I played classical guitar and never found reading from music, even that I'd not seen before, a problem. Then I started teaching myself the piano, initially just jazz. I already had the necessary music theory and just worked it out at the (piano) keyboard. Only a bit later did I come to trying to read music at the piano seriously, and from the outset it seemed very difficult. I persisted for some years and got steadily better, but never very good. I seemed to have hit a glass ceiling.

And then I realised that the problem was I kept looking down at my hands on the keyboard in order to move them (ie to change 'hand position'). When I did that, not only did I tend to lose my place on the page, but the fact I was doing it made reading ahead in the music - something which I now think develops naturally if you keep your eyes on the page, as it does with reading text - effectively impossible. I had learned to play this way largely I think because when I started I wasn't using written music at all and it's natural to look at what you're doing (with your hands), particularly when it's something new. This was what was different with the guitar. Right from the start I was reading from music, and so that's where I looked.

The trouble was that if I didn't look down at my hands in order to change their position on the keyboard I didn't know where to move them - I couldn't play at all. So I had effectively to learn to play all over again, without looking at my hands, even when not playing from written music.

Unfortunately I've not really tested the theory - that piano sight reading problems are due largely to a reliance on the visual guidance of hand position changes - very thoroughly because my desire to play written music at the piano has greatly diminished. But I still play jazz (without music) in this way - not looking at my hands - and have found that it has changed how I play beyond recognition. I now realise that whereas before I was effectively thinking either about one hand or the other - because you can only look at (or 'foveate', to use the physiological term) one thing at a time - now I think about the two hands, or rather about what they are playing, together. So I can for example improvise a bass line and melody line together, something I found almost impossible before. (This is a bit off-topic, I realise, but not of no relevance.)

I've always found it strange that this general problem - of looking at your hands when playing the piano - isn't talked about more. One reason for it I think is that you often see very accomplished pianists who do appear to be looking at their hands as they play. Typically they'll be playing from memory - in performance. But I've come to realise that there's a huge difference between looking at your hands when playing and needing to look at them in order to play, specifically in order to guide changes in hand position. I could go into that further but it gets a bit technical (I have a background in the neurophysiology of human movement) and might not be of much interest here.

I'm not suggesting that there aren't other things to be learned in order to sight-read at the piano well. But they're all part of the business of learning the piano and about the technicalities of music in general. I think the fact that a lot of pianists (in particular) have a particular problem with sight-reading, when they might seem to be very good players otherwise, is likely due to a reliance (or over-reliance) on visual guidance for changing hand position.

It isn't easy, no matter which "method" you use or how many you tube videos you watch - - you have to put in the WORK and LEARN it.

I still struggle, but  a couple of suggestions might help;

Limit yourself to simple pieces in say the middle two octaves - yes, real beginner pieces.
As one of my teachers used to say "Say it as you play it".   

Note by note read the note out loud and play it - one note per second if that is what it takes.

A different instrument might help you to abstract sight reading from piano (keyboard) playing.
For me that is classical guitar - hard to describe but switching between keyboards and fretted instruments helps me to "un-hook" from the physical implementation of the sound making mechanics of things and focus on the sound and its representation on the printed page.

There is also the argument that says we learn to read and write simultaneously and this should be how we learn to sight read better.
Scoring pad and pencil or scoring software, either one.

Yes, well most piano method books are intended to be used in private lessons with a teacher filling in all those gaps. The self-guided books for adults are typically just very lacking...

Mikrokosmos is a fascinating series, but also definitely not intended as a self-guided curriculum; with basically no instructions for either students or teachers. It also has a very steep curve fairly early on, so it's almost never used on its own by teachers.

Yes, for sure. That's where a good teacher can be very helpful. It all depends on context and skill. With some experience, you pretty much never need to look down for jumps within an octave, and hardly ever within a tenth or so. With huge two octave+ leaps at high speeds (less of these in organ music as it's more "pianistic"), it becomes much more helpful (and often necessary) to get a split-second glance in. You get better at looking down very quickly and finding your place again, with practice. Huge and fast simultaneous outward jumps are notoriously difficult, but then most people don't have much of a need to sight read Liszt (most would just learn it and memorize it).

This is a little off-topic from sight reading, but there are tricks to performing these outward jumps. If you're not sitting too close to the keyboard, and you train your eyes between your hands, you can often keep the target keys in your peripheral vision. (By the way, if you don't wear glasses you can often use your peripheral vision to help you avoid looking at your hands.) The hardest jumps like this are when you have to leap to the very ends of the keyboard, but here you can glance at one target note, keep it in your memory, then start the jump the same instance you glance over to the other target note. It's always a bit risky, but with practice it can work quite well.

Speaking as an adult learner who has passed Grade 8 but whose sight-reading is still stuck at Grade 2 1/2, this is absolutely my problem and as obvious as it seems now, it wasn't diagnosed until I started to work with a new teacher who has excellent strategies for improving sight-reading. I like her description of sight-reading as trying to read War and Peace aloud while playing tennis, particularly on a polyphonic instrument like the piano. It's obviously a lot easier for flute or voice as the system of musical notation works well for monophonic instruments, but is a huge compromise for polyphonic ones. So if you have a student who can neither read nor play tennis would it make sense to try and teach them to do both all at once?

In her opinion, this is where it goes wrong for a lot of would be sight-reading pianists. Teachers try to teach them to sight-read before they can read properly or play properly (because the exam boards demand it), the sight-reading demands gets difficult too quickly (in her view the difference between a Grade 3 and a Grade 5 piece is not that big whereas the difference between Grade 3 and Grade 5 sight-reading is enormous), so most students start to get discouraged, think there must be something wrong with them and stop putting effort into reading altogether. Especially as you can easily pass your Grades and get Distinctions and Merits and still be a terrible sight-reader. I am Exhibit A. It would be interesting to get stats from exam boards to see whether points for sight-reading as a percentage of the student score for the pieces is linear or tails off as the grade difficulty increases.

The most important thing she has got me to do is to write music. She thinks it is insane that the vast majority of instrument teachers in her experience address reading without addressing writing. If we did the same with language learning, a huge proportion of the population would be illiterate. Learning how to spell and how to construct grammatically correct sentences are both a crucial part of learning how to read written text, it is so obvious, and yet a lot of music teachers (no teacher I have ever had before the current one) has ever asked me to write out even a note of music, except for the Theory exams.

Every week she would ask me to write out the melody to e.g. Three Blind Mice, Jack and Jill or You are the sunshine of my life for homework and then she would play what I had written on the piano. All sorts of musical illiteracy was exposed. Anacrusis, dotted notes and rests, triplets and notes tied across the barline were all accidents just waiting to happen for me, so she knew what to work on, and she devised rhythmic exercises to help me to correct specific weaknesses. It was a breath of fresh air compared to the "just do more sight-reading and eventually it will get better" approach that I had experienced before. No, practising the wrong things will make you get worse. She knows, and I now know, that if I can't effortlessly transcribe the fifth bar of Three Blind Mice then I have no chance of being able to read that bar fluently and play it in real time at the piano when I encounter it. There is no point trying to sight-read until you can read and write reasonably fluently.

It is working and I am now better able to transcribe more complex melodies with decent accuracy and crucially, it is improving my reading. When I am reading sheet music (away from the piano), I come across fewer and fewer bars that completely flummox me, and when I do, I make a note of the bar and work through it with my teacher at the next lesson.

There's a lot more to her approach. We do exercises to get my eye moving from beat to beat in perfect sync with an internal pulse, grabbing whatever info I can from each beat before moving to the next one, training me to never stop and never correct, but nearly all this work is done away from the keyboard. I am just learning how to read. If/when my reading becomes fluent, we will start to look again at sight-reading.

I still sight-read on my own, and I have noticed a massive improvement since working with her. For one, I am no longer flummoxed by difficult passages. If I can't read something, she has given me strategies to deal with that and keep the pulse going so I can rejoin the piece at a later bar. I have made more progress with my sight-reading in the last year than I have made in the previous ten.

And on her recommendation, I have joined a choir, which is also fantastic training.

Barbara, I appreciate your taking the time to listen. You have my deepest thanks. I’m so glad I can help. Here is another piece with different chords. Hope it inspire you and all in the forum. Chords are inspiring!  Learn chords and be a member of music, be connected!

Surprisingly this song instantly got the most views ever on my Youtube - over 1200 times, enjoy the chords:

https://forum.modartt.com/viewtopic.php?id=9941

Best wishes,
Stig

I enjoyed it, too. Thinking about chords and improvising is very liberating, but chords can also help with sight reading. One thing that I don't think anybody has touched on is simplification when sight-reading. I'm certainly not the world's greatest sight-reader, but I'm pretty good at quick harmonic analysis, and I sometimes use that to get through tricky passages when sight-reading. I know if I try to play complex patterns at sight and maintain the pulse I'll just play lots of horrible wrong notes, so I just reduce things to essentials to get an 'impression' rather than trying to play everything.

Also I very much like the 'write it down' approach described by mikali. Light shines from many lamps!

Thanks Barbara for your kindness. Stay tuned on Recordings...

Best wishes,

Stig

And thanks to dazric too.

not least of which is your puerile non-contribution above.
have you perhaps forgotten to take your medication this evening?