beldan chaunce aryanne
Nickie Koskinen
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I find very difficult to sight read. I usually play the passage once very carefully and memorize it well so I don't have look at the music while playing. I play while continuously looking down at the keys and find it difficult to lift my head up and register the notes and then play. I know all the notes on the staff, but I can't register them in time to play them on the spot.
Since your problem is looking down at the keys, devise a practice method that prevents you from doing so. My teacher growing up always held a notebook above my hands so that I couldn't look at them. Do you have someone in your household or school that would be willing to do that for the 10 minutes a day you practice your sightreading? If not, you could always try rigging something to blog your view. (Or you could really be ridiculous and get one of these.)
Once you've mastered this, you may eventually have a problem with not looking ahead while you sightread; to address this, have someone cover up the current chord you're on, which forces you to look ahead. And so on.
I'm doing Grade 3 exam piano pieces but my sight reading is poor. I suppose it can be explained. I spent many hours practising and polishing pieces. Comparatively, I worked relatively little on sight reading. I'm now evening up the emphasis and I hope it will pay dividends.
To train, I think you have to avoid becoming familiar with the music. So I have bought lots of short exercises (over 100 in all) and I play them at random. If I am in danger of knowing the music to the point where I can play from memory, I stop playing it for a few weeks which usually does the trick. This is different from reading the notation as one would the text in a book. I really want to develop the skill where you read the notation and hear the music in your head without playing a note on the instrument.
There are various method books, YouTube videos, phone apps and books of practice pieces at the right level out there. I had to experiment to find what worked for me. I have not found a magic method that doesn't require a lot of work. I'm on my third method. It has taken me a while to get here. I am now happy enough with the method that I decided to stop looking for a better (magic) method and just get on with it.
I set myself an aim to practice for at least 20 mins every day. It takes a lot of mental effort, so I make sight reading practice the first exercise of the day. If it goes well I might do more; if it goes poorly I might go back to simpler exercises or stop after 10/15 mins if my head just won't take it in. I found sight reading exercises too hard to be tacked on to the end of practice after working on exam pieces and technical exercises.
As with any skill you need to start very slowly in order to build the physical and neurological mechanisms to operate faster and more competently. And when I say slow, I mean 30 or 20 BPM. If you have never payed with a click I suggest you begin to learn and as you get used to it, it will start act as a guiding hand, sharpening your timing and sense of rhythm. This leads me to my next point.
You know all the notes on the staff and that's great but how is your knowledge of rests? Knowing when not to play is as important as knowing when to play. Learning typical rhythmical groupings is also important because then you can view these groupings as single entities rather than as a collection of individual notes. I suggest you youtube drumming tutorials that have sheet music accompanying their instructions. You'll get a better sense of what I mean then. If you develop strong sense of timing and rhythm, irrespective of the key, melody etc.., and begin to see note placement patterns at first glance, you'll have moved a good way down the road of becoming a competent sight reader.
When you say you play it carefully once through and then memorise it, are you really playing it through or do you make a ton of mistakes on the first attempt and then begin studying the piece, foregoing any other sight reading? Improving at sight reading should be a long term goal with consistent observable progress. The little aphorism of 'little and often' should become your mantra - do a little bit of sight reading often. How often? Well, if you do twenty minutes of practise everyday devote 2-5mins to sight reading. Short focused blast of deliberate and intense concentration that will find satisfying and beneficial to your practise.
How little? Try one to four bars of music and then move on. Make mental notes of your weaknesses (you missed the rest, I can't read those ledgers lines, You've never seen so many accidentals!). Wash rinse repeat daily or whenever you practise ;). Consistency is King.
(0-10 seconds): identify time signature, key and tempo. Mentally play the main scale or mock-play it (think of Adrien Brody in the Pianist). If there are awkward notes (accidentals and sharps for example) rest your fingers on them for a moment and internalize the fact that you will have to play them at some stage.
I'm going to approach this answer from a different perspective, my own. For years I had trouble sight reading because it took more time to focus on the notes and be certain of their place on the stave. I have problems with my sight where I see double images when I look at things from certain angles so I can see double notes, double staves etc. when trying to sight read. Very confusing when sight reading. I had my eyes checked by several doctors with no solution, but I kept trying and finally found a doctor who knew the solution. He tested me, gave me a new prescription for glasses and now I don't see double when I'm wearing them. If your problem stems from eye problems, you'll need to get that fixed before you do anything else.
That's natural. In my experience, it is better to train separately for sight reading and for speed of execution. The primary goal must be continuity of execution and respect of relative duration of notes.
The basic tool to improve this aspect of sight-reading (and it is not limited to music), is to be able to group information in your head in larger and larger patterns. The number of patterns that you can hold in your working memory is not much larger, but the information content and the speed at which you can see ahead are greatly expanded.
When you learn to read in the latin alphabet (but something similar happens for kanjis), you first look at words as heaps of letters, each needing to be deciphered, then gradually are able to recognize specific syllables or small words quickly and consider them as units, then almost any word is a unit, then word groups, quickly scanning punctuation. When you learn to speak in public, be an actor, you develop a sense for learning whole verses and sentences, then whole speeches.
So be warned that sight-reading is partly specific to a given musical style (as it would be for a given language) and can be enhanced by good musical typography. That's one of the challenge of contemporary music. Almost every composer has his/her musical idiom.
Train to quickly memorize a whole bar: glance at it, try to play or sing what you remember of it slowly while looking away (but do not look at your fingers or at your instrument), skip one or two bars, do it again. Do that with pieces and studies much simpler than your current playing level. Try to describe/classify each bar in a personal language : "this is all repeated notes", "this is the same that two bars before", "Oh, I know that rhythm, that bowing", "This is a scale fragment", etc. Then make a short break and try to play the whole piece from the start, slowly again and enjoy a certain sense of familiarity.
Develop peripheral, structural vision, prepare for awareness of the score while playing. Try to be aware of your surroundings, of the color and shape of things surrounding the score while playing it, try to be a little farther from the score than you use to be. Look at a score before trying to sight-read it (always aiming at a difficulty level lower than the difficulty level of works you train for and memorize). Choose one or two target bars, thinking something like "I will recognize you when your time comes". Try to make for yourself a map of the score : rhythm and volume changes, repetitions, places where you will have to use the G string, pizzicati, double stops, fifth intervals, etc. places where the page and staff layout is awkward in relation to the music. When you play the piece, try to recall and enhance these deductions. Do not use this awareness to play faster : use it to play better, more in tune, strict rythm, better respect of expressive indications, better placement of hands and body.
There's an exercise for learning to read ahead that's similar to the first one ogerard mentions only more externalized: as you're sight reading a piece, you cover up the measure you're currently playing, such that you're forced to look ahead to the next measure.
However, getting into Chinese books can be a frustrating process. There are very few decent resources for adult learners of Chinese, especially for intermediate learners, let alone ones that use traditional characters.
Hi,
Thank you for sharing such great advice for Mandarin learners. ?
I would love to read mangas in Mandarin, but I do not live in Taiwan! How could we access them? Is it possible to have access to a library online that provides ePubs for people reading mangas on a Kobo?
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