Sight Reading

Sight reading is being able to sit down and play through a song skillfully without having played it before. A good sight reader can turn the music notation into a performance, even though it’s the first time they’ve seen the piece! Sight reading is an important skill to grow and it takes practice and patience.

Here are twelve tips to help you get awesome at sight reading:

Focus on music in your skill range. For the Royal Conservatory of Music exams, for example, they expect you to be able to sight-read music that is about three levels below the grade you play at.
Read as much as you can get your hands on! Since sight-reading requires you to read and play through music only once, you need to get a lot of songs to try out! Borrow from the library, search the internet, play through old books, go to garage sales. Do whatever you need to do to read, read, read!
Learn the discipline of moving on. If you ever play in ensembles or accompany other instrumentalists or singers, you have to get into the habit of playing through your mistakes without hesitating, or being able to join in again if you falter. One of the important keys to sight-reading is being able to stick to a tempo. Don’t stop to correct. Keep your eyes moving forward.
Set yourself up for success! Begin by having good posture at the piano. A teacher told me that in order to sit up straight, imagine a string pulling through your body and up through the top of your head to properly align your spine. Adjust your piano bench so that you are at a comfortable distance and height to reach keys easily. Centre yourself using the piano pedals as a guide. Place your music on the music stand at a good distance for reading and make sure you have good lighting! Have your feet ready and near the pedals in case they are needed.
Analyze with your eyes. Put the first minute to good use and analyze the music with your eyes before you even begin playing. Scan quickly from left to right. Look at the clefs. What is the key signature? What is the time signature? Set up your finger position correctly right away. Take in pedal markings, articulation, tempo indications, accidentals. Try to figure out any large leaps or ledger lines. Add phrasing and dynamics.
Picking your tempo. Look at tricky spots (lots of notes or difficult rhythms) and pick your starting tempo based on how quickly you can play this. Play slowly and deliberately and feel the pulse of the piece.
Look ahead! I can’t stress this enough. Looking ahead gives your fingers and brain extra time to react. The further you can look ahead, the more “buffer” time you have. Consider how a car CD player works: in order to prevent skips, the player feeds in the next couple of seconds into temporary storage (a buffer) and then the playback can be smooth. This is exactly what you are trying to achieve with sight reading! When you are reading ahead, you are mentally storing notes to be played back a few seconds later.
Try to look for patterns. When you are first learning to type the word “the” for example, you may have to hunt for the individual keys “t-h-e”. As you get more experienced, you can automatically know what the correct key and finger sequence is for typing the word “the” as a whole. Same deal with sight reading. Look for notes that outline chords. Did you play this phrase before? Is this part of a motif or sequence?
Tempo. Sight reading is a little like getting onto a moving train. Once you’ve started, you can’t change the speed (unless the score says so). So pick your tempo carefully (see tip #6). Count the tempo out loud and count slow enough to give yourself a chance to play the notes correctly. Try practising your sight reading with a metronome.
Keep your eyes glued to the page. In order to make sure that you are feeding your brain and fingers with as much detail as possible, it helps to keep your eyes on the page of music! Whenever you look down at your fingers and back up at the music, you lose precious seconds when you have to find your spot again. Going along with this tip, it helps to have good finger position and to know where your hands need to be. If your eyes are on the page, you can still use peripheral vision to see where your hands are in accordance with the black keys.
Use the given fingering. Most fingering is there to help you. Take note of this especially at beginning of phrases. It gives you a clue as to what direction the notes are going to go. For example, if you have to lift at the end of the phrase and restart the next phrase with your thumb, chances are that the phrase is going to move upwards! Some editor went through the song carefully to determine the best fingering practice to get you through the song. Use it!
Relax! Sight reading is fun to do. If you think of it as a puzzle, a challenge, or even a game, it is much easier to enjoy. The bonus is that when you are relaxed, your muscles are also relaxed–therefore it improves your sound and you get a much better reaction time to the notes that are in front of you!

Hopefully these tips on sight reading take away some of the mystique. Like all worthwhile things, sight-reading is a skill that will take practice to develop fully. Once you are able to sightread well, a world of possibilities opens up. It’s great to be able to read through tons of music and decide quickly whether a work is worthwhile to spend time learning.

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