Sight Reading Practice -The Inside Story

Sight reading practice is all about knowing how to sight read effectively.

It's a subject that is often over looked by music teachers and students but is a valuable tool once you have a few simple rules under your belt.

Here in the UK our orchestral musicians are famous throughout the world for their sight reading abilities.

This has mainly come about from the fact that rehearsal time is often short and you often get thrown in at the deep end.

This is especially true of freelance musicians; I remember many occasions when I was freelancing that you would turn up for a rehearsal having no idea what it was you were about to play. It can be pretty scary, but you learn to knuckle down and get the job done.

In Wikipedia it states "Studio musicians (that is, musicians employed to record pieces for commercials, etc.) often record pieces on the first take without having seen it before. Often, the music played on television is played by musicians who are sight reading. This practice has developed through intense commercial competition in these industries...

The ability to sight read partly depends on a strong short-term musical memory. An experiment on sight reading using an eye tracker indicates that highly skilled musicians tend to look ahead further in the music, storing and processing the notes until they are played;

Sight reading also depends on familiarity with the musical idiom being performed; this permits the reader to recognize and process frequently occurring patterns of notes as a single unit, rather than individual notes, thus achieving greater efficiency. This phenomenon, which also applies to the reading of language, is referred to as chunking. Errors in sight reading tend to occur in places where the music contains unexpected or unusual sequences; these defeat the strategy of "reading by expectation" that sight readers typically employ.

Highly skilled musicians can sight-read silently; that is, they can look at the printed music and hear it in their heads without playing or singing..."

The Golden Rules of Sight Reading

1. Listen to the piece of music a few times before you start to play it; This will give you a real head start when you sit down and sight read for the first time.

2. Practice only the rhythms and not the pitches; Then you only have to concentrate on one aspect of the music at a time.

3. When you have practiced the rhythms, practice just the pitches and ignore the rhythms.

4. Play easy pieces at the right speed and keep going even if you make mistakes; this will help you develop your eye for looking ahead. The MOST important tool for sight reading practice

5. Play difficult pieces very slowly; you have to teach your mind the finger patterns and this won't happen if you fall over them every time you see them.

6. Look for patterns in the music; ultimately the more music you play throughout your life the more patterns you will become familiar with and the faster and more accurate your sight reading will become.

7. Study music theory! Here's where you should start Professional sight-readers never read every note (there's often too much information to take in) so they rely on their understanding of music theory to help them fill in the missing gaps. This is especially true for jazz where the musician will automatically know what chord should go where.

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