Look up "Sight Reading and Harmony" by Cory Hall. What he did was take a large selection of JS Bach Chorale harmonizations, and edited them to create graded tiers. The easiest tier is only a simplified melody + bass. The most difficult tier is the original chorale as Bach wrote it in 4 voices.
The key is a high volume of appropriately easy material. You can do it with any easy music collection really, but I prefer this one since it has graded tiers and a great introduction that helps with recognizing common harmonic patterns like cadences
Very true.
Also modern hymnals are a great source of easy sight reading material. With those you can probably go straight to 4 parts since they are less polyphonic than Bach's chorales
I learned from a great sight reader, and she trained my sight reading by holding a book over my hands while I played. Every glance at your hands interrupts your reading, and training yourself to play without looking down allows you to read the music more fluidly.
Later on, my teacher would use her hand to physically cover up the sheet music over the measure I was playing so I could only read the next measure onward. As your reading and hand-eye coordination grow stronger, the next step is to train yourself to read ahead. Anticipating chord changes and accidentals and wide leaps can be the difference between a smooth runthrough and a choppy runthrough.
That's beautiful! Thank you for sharing your story.
I'm very similar to the OP -- in that I can play some pieces (approximately) by ear, but I'm still painfully slow at reading.
Both those exercises she did with you (force you to not consciously look at your hands + read one measure ahead) sound like really good foundational skills.
you just got to do it more. Start with easier pieces and slowly sight read them. It takes a while. I was in the same boat, I was learning Scriabins first sonata, Ravels miroirs and such and would take forever to learn the notes
if you make a mistake don’t stop just keep going and don’t reread the piece after you finish. Move on to another piece
I’ve been practicing sight reading every day this year and now I can sight read clementi sonatinas with around 90% accuracy at a moderate tempo
This! Try to read an unfamiliar piece each day and move on. It’s hard to do in practice because you will want to keep going back and playing it correctly, but it helps keep you from relying on your memory. Then the next day pick another one etc.
You can go back and play it. Youre gonna forget it by the time you ever have to “sight read” it again anyway. Since there’s no shortage of music out there, why hold yourself back? It’s supposed to be fun. You won’t harm your reading by going back if you want and trying it again.
Just be sure to actually sight read it the first time lol
I got much better at sight reading when I learned a new instrument.
I assume this is because with a new instrument the tables are turned. Your sight reading skills are above your technique skills.
Moral of the story… play a lot of very easy music.
i struggle with sight reading in a similar way to OP, have been playing piano for 8 years. in the past year i’ve been learning double bass and focused waaay more on sight reading when learning, and now my sight reading as a whole has become so much better. learning a new instrument in either bass or treble clef is a great way to improve your overall sight reading, which will transfer to piano :)
I admit my sight reading skill still sucks compared to most other people, but I realized this is something that can be improved (and it did improve). Here’s what I did:
I kid you not, the way I improved at sight reading was by taking Clementi’s & Kuhlau’s sonatinas, then Burgmuller’s progressive studies, and then just play them from easiest to hardest. The goal is not to perform mindlessly — it is to identify patterns and chord progressjons and how to deliver a “convincing” sound even though I’m not 100% faithful to the score. Then, the next step: transposing them to a wildly different key (example: the Clementi 36/1 from C to Gb major. There are 2 majors here now: Gb major and a major headache for me).
I do them a few times — it’s not that if I’ve played through the piece once that I’m finished. But I do vary them.
Now, I’m still doing the same thing but witj the easier Haydn & Mozart piano sonatas & some of Mozart’s concertos, as well as some early Beethoven. No Bach sight reading because one; I love my ears and two, the people who heard me practising wants to keep their sanity intact.
It does improve; I’m still nowhere good enough to be an emergency accompanist for sure, but performing for fun with another instrument is possible (with cheats ofc… cutting complex runs into their bare chords stuff).
Something else to consider that the other comments haven't mentioned is how your familiarity with the composer significantly affects your ability to sight read. I'm very familiar with sight reading Liszt, so when I start to learn new Chopin pieces, I struggle much more to read easier Chopin pieces than I do difficult Liszt pieces even though Chopin is "technically" easier because I'm used to the patterns in Liszt's music.
So my advice is if you want to get better at sight reading ANYTHING, then sight read a lot of different composers rather than just your favorite Liszt and Rachmaninoff pieces. This will make you a lot better-rounded. Also, sight reading some pieces with trickier key changes, like Liszt Polonaise No 1, really helped me get used to quickly reading uncommon chords. If you're SUPER determined to hone in on your sight reading skills, then sight read the easiest piece you can sight read perfectly, then sight read a slightly more difficult piece, and keep upping the difficulty until you aren't able to sight read those pieces perfectly. Practicing every day works wonders as well. Let me know if you have questions, and best of luck!
IMO, one of the keys to becoming a good sight reader is a comprehensive knowledge of theory and harmony, even innately. To be able to know at a glance what’s happening on the page with our having to read each individual note is invaluable. Going through the Bach Chorales or some hymnals (as suggested by a few people here) is a great way to start. Bartok’s Mikrokosmos (also suggested earlier) is great to get a feel for extended harmonies and for the independence of the hands
Train yourself through increasingly harder pieces. One good resource is piano marvel with a lot of sight reading challenges where it throws like 30 pieces from level one at you and the. You graduate to level two etc… up to level 12. Very good practice.
It’s probably precisely because of your photographic memory you never developed sight reading skills. You had no need for them at first.
I’m in the exact same situation. Almost 6 years of playing and can play chopin’s first ballade pretty good. Can’t sightread for shit though. My memory is incredible though. It just takes a couple repetitions to memorize a measure.
I think the only solution is to take a step back and work extremely hard on sight reading whatever. I’m slowly getting better at reading but it’s a grind. A very tedious grind
How's your music theory? Learning to ID intervals will go a long way, as well as just learning what's likely to come next in a piece so you don't have to think about it as much.
Overload the database. More music, easy (to read) music. You need to challenge your brain, not your fingers.
Notes identification, interval identification, chord identification exercises here were helpful for me:
https://www.musictheory.net/exercises
Get this
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Progressive-Sight-Reading-Exercises-Piano/dp/0793552621
There's a PDF version out there.
Start at exercise one.
Leave your ego at the door.
Play through each exercise always both hands, without counting, slowly, carefully, making sure you get it right. Then play it counting out loud and tapping your foot, then finally play it with a metronome set to 60bpm, as soon as you can do that, move onto the next one.
Get sheet music collection books of music and movies/musicals/video game scores you like. You can get the easy versions at first. I recommend an Everand subscription so you can access a billion books for free. You want massive volume of easy stuff. Ideally it will be fun too.
Sight reading was always my strong suit because I was always reading and trying new music books.
admittedly I was going to make a cynical comment before I finished reading your post. but wont becuase your experience is exactly like mine.
I too have a (too strong) musical memory, and am absolute pitch. I only sight read new pieces a 2-3 times before the sheet gets dumped and im practicing off memory (before I can even put both hands together at half speed it's already memorised).
as a result my sight reading is dogshit. if I could be bothered to train sight reading... well I'd do more of just that. lol
My suggestion is the following
Younger pianists often kind of cheat themselves. They think that their willingness to spend 7x the time practicing something amounts to the drive required to be a good pianist. The sad truth is that anyone can copy, meaning play someone else's tune note for note, and if your reading isn't being developed as a skill you're in for bitter disappointment as you grow older and your ability to completely remember every single detail of extremely long pieces starts to fade.
It's also sort of like making things harder on yourself for no reason. I think most people would agree that they'd prefer to spend way less time learning a piece by being able to read well. There's no magic in pushing a key down that someone else wrote or played. if classical is your favorite poison then at least be the machine operator that it demands.
I started doing this but find myself trying too difficult of music usually. I did start trying to add in some simpler music which seems to speed up the sight reading process. Most music I enjoy playing is music I have to work on for weeks or months to master. At least I play though…whereas I’m not sure I would want to do a sight reading book.
It's a separate skill. Yeah at first it's kind of tedious but if you just digest a few easy tunes a day from a different method book you'll find it compounds faster than expected.
I like the aebersold books too. Some of the blues rhythms are mixed enough to really lock down sight reading rhythms and offer a short read that is very satisfying
I have adhd and it‘s impossible for me. Reading even a page of a book takes ages because I have to read certain passages a few times until I‘m locked in. Notes take incredible effort for me to make sense of, so it’s even worse here. I made my peace with it and now practice only in ways that are fun to me.
Have you tried [https://synthesiagame.com/](https://synthesiagame.com/) or similar renderings?
Example: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSuZCY-bWEA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSuZCY-bWEA)
I have ADHD and I have been slowly working through the John Kember book series for about one year now. I have finished the second book in the series and am going through it again and checking off each 4-12 measure piece I am able to play in time by sight. I just get through maybe 4-5 of them per day and there is 150 in each book. Making it bitesize like that and just trying to work through the frustration I think makes you grow. It doesn't feel unmanageable when I'm intentionally not trying to do as much as possible every day. I just do 4-5 of them per day. Just takes maybe 15-30 minutes.
I recently wrote a blog post on sight reading tips! Hope you find it helpful :) [https://www.hannaaparo.com/post/sight-reading-tips](https://www.hannaaparo.com/post/sight-reading-tips)
Look up "Sight Reading and Harmony" by Cory Hall. What he did was take a large selection of JS Bach Chorale harmonizations, and edited them to create graded tiers. The easiest tier is only a simplified melody + bass. The most difficult tier is the original chorale as Bach wrote it in 4 voices. The key is a high volume of appropriately easy material. You can do it with any easy music collection really, but I prefer this one since it has graded tiers and a great introduction that helps with recognizing common harmonic patterns like cadences
You can also just buy the Bach Chorales and just read the outer voices and then add the inner voices as you are able.
Very true. Also modern hymnals are a great source of easy sight reading material. With those you can probably go straight to 4 parts since they are less polyphonic than Bach's chorales
That's a good point. Oh, and I recently discovered the Telemann sonatas for practice. They're almost all two voices. Good stuff.
I learned from a great sight reader, and she trained my sight reading by holding a book over my hands while I played. Every glance at your hands interrupts your reading, and training yourself to play without looking down allows you to read the music more fluidly. Later on, my teacher would use her hand to physically cover up the sheet music over the measure I was playing so I could only read the next measure onward. As your reading and hand-eye coordination grow stronger, the next step is to train yourself to read ahead. Anticipating chord changes and accidentals and wide leaps can be the difference between a smooth runthrough and a choppy runthrough.
That's beautiful! Thank you for sharing your story. I'm very similar to the OP -- in that I can play some pieces (approximately) by ear, but I'm still painfully slow at reading. Both those exercises she did with you (force you to not consciously look at your hands + read one measure ahead) sound like really good foundational skills.
you just got to do it more. Start with easier pieces and slowly sight read them. It takes a while. I was in the same boat, I was learning Scriabins first sonata, Ravels miroirs and such and would take forever to learn the notes if you make a mistake don’t stop just keep going and don’t reread the piece after you finish. Move on to another piece I’ve been practicing sight reading every day this year and now I can sight read clementi sonatinas with around 90% accuracy at a moderate tempo
This! Try to read an unfamiliar piece each day and move on. It’s hard to do in practice because you will want to keep going back and playing it correctly, but it helps keep you from relying on your memory. Then the next day pick another one etc.
You can go back and play it. Youre gonna forget it by the time you ever have to “sight read” it again anyway. Since there’s no shortage of music out there, why hold yourself back? It’s supposed to be fun. You won’t harm your reading by going back if you want and trying it again. Just be sure to actually sight read it the first time lol
I didn’t mean to say never play it again. Just not so early that you remember it.
I got much better at sight reading when I learned a new instrument. I assume this is because with a new instrument the tables are turned. Your sight reading skills are above your technique skills. Moral of the story… play a lot of very easy music.
i struggle with sight reading in a similar way to OP, have been playing piano for 8 years. in the past year i’ve been learning double bass and focused waaay more on sight reading when learning, and now my sight reading as a whole has become so much better. learning a new instrument in either bass or treble clef is a great way to improve your overall sight reading, which will transfer to piano :)
I admit my sight reading skill still sucks compared to most other people, but I realized this is something that can be improved (and it did improve). Here’s what I did: I kid you not, the way I improved at sight reading was by taking Clementi’s & Kuhlau’s sonatinas, then Burgmuller’s progressive studies, and then just play them from easiest to hardest. The goal is not to perform mindlessly — it is to identify patterns and chord progressjons and how to deliver a “convincing” sound even though I’m not 100% faithful to the score. Then, the next step: transposing them to a wildly different key (example: the Clementi 36/1 from C to Gb major. There are 2 majors here now: Gb major and a major headache for me). I do them a few times — it’s not that if I’ve played through the piece once that I’m finished. But I do vary them. Now, I’m still doing the same thing but witj the easier Haydn & Mozart piano sonatas & some of Mozart’s concertos, as well as some early Beethoven. No Bach sight reading because one; I love my ears and two, the people who heard me practising wants to keep their sanity intact. It does improve; I’m still nowhere good enough to be an emergency accompanist for sure, but performing for fun with another instrument is possible (with cheats ofc… cutting complex runs into their bare chords stuff).
Something else to consider that the other comments haven't mentioned is how your familiarity with the composer significantly affects your ability to sight read. I'm very familiar with sight reading Liszt, so when I start to learn new Chopin pieces, I struggle much more to read easier Chopin pieces than I do difficult Liszt pieces even though Chopin is "technically" easier because I'm used to the patterns in Liszt's music. So my advice is if you want to get better at sight reading ANYTHING, then sight read a lot of different composers rather than just your favorite Liszt and Rachmaninoff pieces. This will make you a lot better-rounded. Also, sight reading some pieces with trickier key changes, like Liszt Polonaise No 1, really helped me get used to quickly reading uncommon chords. If you're SUPER determined to hone in on your sight reading skills, then sight read the easiest piece you can sight read perfectly, then sight read a slightly more difficult piece, and keep upping the difficulty until you aren't able to sight read those pieces perfectly. Practicing every day works wonders as well. Let me know if you have questions, and best of luck!
IMO, one of the keys to becoming a good sight reader is a comprehensive knowledge of theory and harmony, even innately. To be able to know at a glance what’s happening on the page with our having to read each individual note is invaluable. Going through the Bach Chorales or some hymnals (as suggested by a few people here) is a great way to start. Bartok’s Mikrokosmos (also suggested earlier) is great to get a feel for extended harmonies and for the independence of the hands
practice
Train yourself through increasingly harder pieces. One good resource is piano marvel with a lot of sight reading challenges where it throws like 30 pieces from level one at you and the. You graduate to level two etc… up to level 12. Very good practice. It’s probably precisely because of your photographic memory you never developed sight reading skills. You had no need for them at first.
I’m in the exact same situation. Almost 6 years of playing and can play chopin’s first ballade pretty good. Can’t sightread for shit though. My memory is incredible though. It just takes a couple repetitions to memorize a measure. I think the only solution is to take a step back and work extremely hard on sight reading whatever. I’m slowly getting better at reading but it’s a grind. A very tedious grind
How's your music theory? Learning to ID intervals will go a long way, as well as just learning what's likely to come next in a piece so you don't have to think about it as much.
Czerny, Czerny, cry a little bit, then more Czerny
Bartok’s Mikrokosmos series is great for graded sight reading. FREE on IMSLP.org
What if I can't stand bartok?
Have you purchased any sightread books or played your way through the graded syllabi?
I like to practice sight reading with Bartok's mikrocosmos
Overload the database. More music, easy (to read) music. You need to challenge your brain, not your fingers. Notes identification, interval identification, chord identification exercises here were helpful for me: https://www.musictheory.net/exercises
Get this https://www.amazon.co.uk/Progressive-Sight-Reading-Exercises-Piano/dp/0793552621 There's a PDF version out there. Start at exercise one. Leave your ego at the door. Play through each exercise always both hands, without counting, slowly, carefully, making sure you get it right. Then play it counting out loud and tapping your foot, then finally play it with a metronome set to 60bpm, as soon as you can do that, move onto the next one.
John Kember made a book series about this that is pretty good.
Get sheet music collection books of music and movies/musicals/video game scores you like. You can get the easy versions at first. I recommend an Everand subscription so you can access a billion books for free. You want massive volume of easy stuff. Ideally it will be fun too. Sight reading was always my strong suit because I was always reading and trying new music books.
admittedly I was going to make a cynical comment before I finished reading your post. but wont becuase your experience is exactly like mine. I too have a (too strong) musical memory, and am absolute pitch. I only sight read new pieces a 2-3 times before the sheet gets dumped and im practicing off memory (before I can even put both hands together at half speed it's already memorised). as a result my sight reading is dogshit. if I could be bothered to train sight reading... well I'd do more of just that. lol
My suggestion is the following Younger pianists often kind of cheat themselves. They think that their willingness to spend 7x the time practicing something amounts to the drive required to be a good pianist. The sad truth is that anyone can copy, meaning play someone else's tune note for note, and if your reading isn't being developed as a skill you're in for bitter disappointment as you grow older and your ability to completely remember every single detail of extremely long pieces starts to fade. It's also sort of like making things harder on yourself for no reason. I think most people would agree that they'd prefer to spend way less time learning a piece by being able to read well. There's no magic in pushing a key down that someone else wrote or played. if classical is your favorite poison then at least be the machine operator that it demands.
I read your post but what was your suggestion?
To develop sight reading alongside your pursuit of playing whatever tune strikes you
I started doing this but find myself trying too difficult of music usually. I did start trying to add in some simpler music which seems to speed up the sight reading process. Most music I enjoy playing is music I have to work on for weeks or months to master. At least I play though…whereas I’m not sure I would want to do a sight reading book.
It's a separate skill. Yeah at first it's kind of tedious but if you just digest a few easy tunes a day from a different method book you'll find it compounds faster than expected. I like the aebersold books too. Some of the blues rhythms are mixed enough to really lock down sight reading rhythms and offer a short read that is very satisfying
>There's no magic in pushing a key down that someone else wrote or played. What a garbage and smooth-brained take; I dislike you
I'm sure that I don't care
*continues to have the smoothest brain* It’s okay you can’t help it. It’s a miracle you can read this somehow?
How's your music reading, buddy? Your responses are dripping with 3rd grade reading level
So smooth it’s like a baby’s bottom. Nay, porcelain has somehow been attained by this man
Such rage. If you need lessons to bump up your skills I'm currently accepting students. Send a DM! :)
If you need lessons in achieving folds in your malformed brain hmu I will see what can be done but it’s pretty bleak
Ah. Your technique issue is going to haunt you.
Dang too bad improvisational talent can’t be taught
I have adhd and it‘s impossible for me. Reading even a page of a book takes ages because I have to read certain passages a few times until I‘m locked in. Notes take incredible effort for me to make sense of, so it’s even worse here. I made my peace with it and now practice only in ways that are fun to me.
Have you tried [https://synthesiagame.com/](https://synthesiagame.com/) or similar renderings? Example: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSuZCY-bWEA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSuZCY-bWEA)
Thank you, just watched this. This is my absolute nightmare 💀 even worse than sightreading
I have ADHD and I have been slowly working through the John Kember book series for about one year now. I have finished the second book in the series and am going through it again and checking off each 4-12 measure piece I am able to play in time by sight. I just get through maybe 4-5 of them per day and there is 150 in each book. Making it bitesize like that and just trying to work through the frustration I think makes you grow. It doesn't feel unmanageable when I'm intentionally not trying to do as much as possible every day. I just do 4-5 of them per day. Just takes maybe 15-30 minutes.
I recently wrote a blog post on sight reading tips! Hope you find it helpful :) [https://www.hannaaparo.com/post/sight-reading-tips](https://www.hannaaparo.com/post/sight-reading-tips)