How To Improve Your Sight-reading Skilld In Piano

How to improve your sight-reading skills in piano?

Sight-reading is the art of reading and performing a musical piece without previous knowledge.

Lots of students find it hard to sight-read. Furthermore, it is also quite challenging for music tutors as well!

Here you will find some tips of how you can improve this ability:

Start practicing with the simple pieces

When you learned how to read words, you didn t try to read philosophical treatises, instead you started with the simple fairy-tales and step by step gained the experience. Practice with the first grade music school repertoire: the further you go the more difficult composition you choose.

Spend some time exploring and analyzing the piece

Define the key of the piece, time signature, the structure of the piece and repetitive bars/motives/phrases. Extract bars with the complicated rhythm and imagine inwardly how they sound. Train your ability to see the image of the whole phrase or what is called READING AHEAD.

Let s have a look at this example:

This piece is written in C major key and in 4/4 time signature. The structure of the piece 4 bars, but can be split 2+2. First phrase (or 1 and 2 bars) have the same five fingers position pattern. Define the direction of the movement (up and down) and the way how this movement is organized (with the gaps or step by step?). Hence, you can think about the best option for fingering, which is obviously: 5-4-3-2-1-2-3-4-5-5-5, 1-2-3-4-5-4-3-2-1-1. In the beginning of the second phrase (3 bar) you can notice some changes in the pattern of this movement let s say it reminds such a waving shape down-up . Afterwards left had reflects the same type of the movement. Last bar depicts typical descending movement of the scale.

Simplify the musical texture

When sight-reading, it is important to hear the main motive, notice the moments and see the whole picture. After a while, you will learn how to understand which notes can be skipped without loss for a piece. Normally, stressed beats and long notes that belong to the major harmonies are important and build a skeleton of the music. If you have to play a complicated chord, you always can simplify it and play the basic note of the chord.

Try not to look often onto the keyboard

As the main idea is to read patterns (group of notes) instead of just reading note by note separately, you don t have a need to look and check always where are your fingers on the keyboard. Look at the scores and feel the keyboard with your fingers, unless you come across certain skips in melody or accompaniment.

Stay calm, don t panic and be positive

Don t be upset if it seems for you that you don t get a result. Stay calm and patient, just think positive towards your practice, at the end of the day your positive energy will be reflected in your result.

Practice more

The most important thing in the process of sight-reading is your daily practice. Don t give up, just dedicate 10-15 min every day for these exercises. While playing, don t stop in the middle of the phrase in order to feel the sense of movement, just carry on and after some time you will guaranteed see the result!

Good luck!

Elena