Sight-reading is the ability to take a page of music you've never seen before and play it in time and with the correct notes and expression. For a pro, it's obviously a valuable skill, but it can also open up new musical worlds for keyboard players of all stripes. If you don't think of yourself as having this skill, the idea of sight-reading can be more intimidating than other aspects of keyboard playing. In some cases players may even think their difficulty with sight reading means they can't really read music, even though they have a grasp of standard music notation. In this article I'm going to show you how you can easily make sight-reading one of your keyboard skills -- one that you'll enjoy using more and more as time goes on. The Traps Learning to sight-read doesn't mean you stop relying on other skills. Some players have a notion that using your ear and reading music are mutually exclusive entities: Using one means you can't use the other. I have a student who originally learned piano through a method that emphasizes repeated listening to a piece of music followed by quick memorization -- rote learning, in other words. Some of my colleagues were critical of this particular method, and often said something to the effect that "students who learn this way end up unable to read music" -- trap number one. While it's true that her reading skills needed improving, her aural and memorization abilities helped her to grow in that direction. Another trap awaits those who have a knowledge of music notation, but feel they need to hide away in a practice room to dissect a piece for what seems like an eternity, rather than playing it straight through. This can be caused by the difficulty of reading both hands together, or by the need to look at the keys before playing. This sort of difficulty can discourage a player from learning repertoire, or worse yet, from playing altogether. They think it's a matter of "having it" or not, and they can't see how they can improve the reading aspect of their musicianship. Lead sheets provide another trap. A lead sheet is a sort of shorthand, usually showing just the melody with chord symbols displayed above it. With lead sheets, not only do you read the melody, you also must be able to improvise an accompaniment using the chord symbols provided. The trap? For years, lead sheets have been compiled in volumes called fakebooks -- which says it all. At some point, somebody thought if you read a lead sheet, you were faking the music, as opposed to really reading or playing the piece. In reality, lead sheets pose their own unique challenges that require preparation and practice. The ability to sight-read from a lead sheet is as real as the ability to read Mozart sonatas. Putting It Together All of the traps I've mentioned have to do with attitude, and it's important that you resist falling into them. Life is short, music is great, and the ability to sight-read will give you access to more of it. But music is in motion, so you don't want to stall while trying to figure out what dotted notes, triplets, rests, or chords will sound like. In order to strengthen the sight-reading "muscle," you should simultaneously develop the following seemingly separate aspects of your musicianship. Music Notation It may seem obvious, but the more you know about music notation, the better your chances of being comfortable reading it on the fly. If you're unfamiliar with key signatures, accidentals (sharps and flats), or notes that appear on ledger lines above or below the staff, you'll have difficulty interpreting them in real time. Technique You increase your potential to be a good sight-reader as you develop your keyboard proficiency. For example, if you can fluently play scales and arpeggios, you'll have an easier time reading them when they occur in a piece. Being able to hear the music in your head is good, but good fingerings and chops are also a factor. Music Theory The phrase may scream "academia" to you, but the more you know about theory, the better your musical intuition will be. With a good background in theory, you'll be able to anticipate what to do when faced with chord progressions, modulations, key changes, and harmonic devices.
The more chords and voicings you know, the easier it will be to spot them in sheet music and create them when reading lead sheets and chord charts. Rhythm The more rhythmic patterns you're familiar with, the more accurately you'll be able to render those you find when sight-reading. Music Styles The more you know about the style of a piece you're reading, the more you'll be able to anticipate where the piece is going, and how it should feel. The more types of music you listen to, the more you'll improve your reading. Your Ear You don't need to be able to play by ear to read well, but if you think playing by ear renders you unable to read music, think again. Everything I discussed above deals with anticipation and intuition. Hearing where music is going in your head before it happens, knowing what a chord sounds like before you play it, and an aural familiarity with a particular style are all tremendously helpful skills when sight reading. Consistent Practice As you see, these elements of music are all related. Improving one aspect will reinforce another. Consistent practice will improve your musical background overall, which will in turn help you when you're working on your sight-reading. Where To Go From Here If you feel you don't yet excel at some of the skills listed here, don't be discouraged. Volumes have been written about each of them, and they take their own fair share of time and commitment to master. The fact is that if you have a knack for one or more of these skills, you may be closer to becoming a good sight-reader than you realize. Let's try an experiment to assess where your skills are now. Find a selection of sheet music for which you also have a recording, either a classical piece (a Bach prelude) or a lead sheet (a jazz standard such as "All of Me"). Play the first note or chord on the piano and then look at the music -- no more playing or looking at the piano. Read through the music with your eyes only and imagine how it will sound. Then listen to the recording while following the sheet music. This process will help reveal which of the above elements are in place and which need improvement. For example, if it sounded reasonably close to how you thought it would, you're in good shape. You have a good foundation in reading music, and you need only to practice connecting your knowledge with your technique to become a good sight-reader. If your imagined performance was close on some things but off on others (such as rhythm), you may now have a good idea of which elements need strengthening. If you were out of the ballpark entirely, you need to become more familiar with the printed representation of music. Sight-reading a piece of music well requires processing the notated information in real time, keeping the music in motion. Standard Western music notation represents this motion horizontally, as the progression from one musical event to the next through time. As keyboardists, though, we have to read music not just horizontally, but vertically as well. The simplest example is that of a block chord. If it takes us too long to locate all the notes of a block chord on the keyboard, the horizontal movement stalls, and the music is kaput. Build the Skills With practice, you can develop a keen eye for vertical sonorities and increase your sight-reading ability. You'll eventually begin to see entire chords the way you see one note, with your fingers instinctively knowing where to play. As you probably know, there can be several fingerings for any given chord. If the piece you're using for sight-reading practice has fingerings indicated, take advantage of them. Some of the work has already been done for you. The Exercises How do you gauge your sight-reading ability? Let's give it a shot, with the chords in Example 1, all triads in root position with one note doubled. Sight-read each chord separately; don't worry about timing or connecting them yet. Play them now, and then come back.
If you were able to recognize each note of each chord quickly and then play them simultaneously, you'll be moving ahead nicely. If you needed to look down at your hands before playing each chord or hunt and peck for the right notes, you've come to the right place. We'll start out by building good sight-reading habits right from the gate. For Example 2, look at your hands first. Position them in the neighborhood of Middle C. Then look at the first chord. Play each chord, looking at your hands as little as possible.
Still a bit more information to process at once than you'd like? No worries. Here are some methods for breaking chords down in ways that will help build proper sight-reading skills. Example 3 illustrates how a block chord can be arpeggiated, which means to play the notes of a chord one at a time. You can play the arpeggio from top to bottom, or from bottom to top. Practicing this reading technique slowly and steadily will ultimately help your ability to grab chords quickly.
Now play Examples 1 and 2 using the arpeggio technique. Still treat each chord as a separate entity, and play the arpeggiated notes as quickly as you can do so accurately. The next step is to expand your field of vision and to learn to see two bits of information at once. Example 4 shows the "outside-in" technique, in which you play the top and bottom notes together, then add the notes in the middle.
Now you're ready to apply these techniques to chord progressions. Example 5 shows how to apply the arpeggio method to a two-measure progression.
It's crucial to keep the tempo and rhythm steady when you begin to read progressions. Try this on the progressions in Example 6.
Once you're comfortable playing the exercises steadily with arpeggios, play them again using the outside-inside method. Practice these techniques on sheet music. The harmonized chorales of J.S. Bach are ideal for this. As you begin to apply the arpeggio and outside-in methods to sheet music, add this crucial skill to your repertoire: Once you play a chord, your eyes should dart ahead to the next one. If you've got your metronome set slow enough, you should have plenty of time to take in the upcoming events visually without disrupting the tempo or rhythm. Play as slow as you need in order to sight-read passages perfectly using these two techniques. There are many things you can do to begin improving your sight-reading. You can get the ball rolling with the following exercise: Listen to as many pieces as possible while following along with the sheet music or lead sheets. It could even be a piano method book for which you also have a recording. If you don't have sheet music in your collection, you can check out music and recordings from a public or school library. Include pieces you're familiar with as well as some you don't know. With lead sheets, you'll see quickly that there are many ways to voice a chord, and many performances will reveal extended, altered, or completely substituted chords -- and melodies, for that matter. Try this experiment a few times, and keep working on your scales and chords, too. Happy practicing! Tom Brislin performs synth and organ on Patti Rothberg's Candleabra Cadabra, and has worked with Meat Loaf, Glen Burtnik, and Jackie DeShannon, among others. He leads the band You Were Spiraling, and can be reached at tombrislin@ureach.com.
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