Piano - Improve Your Sight-reading - Grade 2

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When the music stops, you’ve got to keep clapping and count through four bars of silence. That’s 16 claps that you’ve got to maintain at the same tempo, and on the 17th clap shout “NOW”. Rests– The quarter rest, half rest, and whole rest are pretty easy to identify and adjust to. Eighth rests and beyond do present more difficulties, especially when they are not frequented throughout the piece. Even if you play wrong notes, continuing to play on will help develop your ability to be a more focused reader. Stopping only creates bad habits that are tough to fix later on. Here are some simple tips to sight read without stopping. Every piece of music has an awkward spot that presents some sort of difficulty. Sometimes it’s a rhythmic difficulty like 32nd notes, and other times it’s a random note or articulation. Below is a list of 5 common difficult spots that can make sight-reading tough for anyone. You can choose any pitch, it doesn’t matter. Don’t read music, just look at the rhythm, and make sure you’ve got the metronome on.

Improving your sight-reading is one of the main focuses inside my Learn Music Together Membership. There are numerous exercises and videos to help you make progress alongside monthly duets. A description of the beats of music. (What pitches occur on each beat? How are the beats grouped into meter? What happens between the beats?) We hope that you now feel a little more confident and ready to jump into sight reading practice. Make sure you have plenty of pieces of music in different styles ready to practice with. With patience and focus, you’ll start to see huge progress in your ability as a musician.What happens once in a piece usually happens again somewhere. Doing simple form analysis can help you identify those measures that are similar and even verbatim. Take a mental snapshot of those and that way when you see those measures again you can feel confident in what you’re playing.

As you can read, I have always been exposed to sight-reading and it is the reason why I am so proficient at it! It’s ok to play the notes more slowly than instructed when sight reading, especially in the beginning. When you’re on your first few pieces, focus on just hitting the right notes. Don’t worry about reading ahead at this point; just work on playing right note after right note. The sight-reading books provided by The Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music are fantastic but you can also choose easy compilations of pop songs. It could definitely make it more fun to sight-read a song that you already know. Tempo Changes– Seeing an abrupt change in tempo is kind of a rarity when sightreading short passages, but it does happen. An accelerando accompanied by notes you’ve never played before can easily be a disastrous scenario.

Improve Your Sight-Reading: New Edition

Even if you’re still learning to read music or are a new piano player, you can still start sight reading. But it may be a good idea to practice sight reading the parts for each hand separately. Increase the conditions that lead to more sight-reading. Work on eradicating whatever’s getting in your way. With practice, your sight-reading will improve.