Six Animal Musicians playing different instruments on a little brown paper island/ Photo of Eagle Pond, Snaresbrook

What most people don't know is that I failed my Grade 8 sight-reading. I just HATED being handed some horrible piece with notes that tripped me up and key signatures and rhythms from hell. A few years ago, when a friend sent me a job advert for an accompanist at a well-known dance academy, my blood went cold. It would mean sight-reading. (Cue horror film screechy violin sound)…

“Sight-reading has been an area of research interest for quite some time, with studies going back nearly 100 years.” I thought I’d add to the conversation with my own reflections.

Piano teaching is one of several areas where I have deep knowledge and experience. I won prizes for piano-playing as a child. I have a collection of medals and certificates. I got a distinction in my piano performance diploma. I've played a fair number of live shows and recordings. My big strengths were memorising and performing solo. And that's what I felt most confident in!

What made it worse, or rather what highlighted my atrocious sight-reading was the fact that I lived with a brilliant sight-reader. I don't have siblings. It was my mum. She was also my first piano teacher.

Imagine living with your piano teacher. This means every time you practise, your piano teacher can hear you doing sight-reading.

Spending a lot of time with my mum, aka my first piano teacher has had benefits. Finally one day, not so long ago, I heard about the ten thousand hour concept. To be very good at something, you spend 10,000 hours practising it. But does it work for sight-reading? Surely some people are just good at it.

If you think that’s true, I can understand why, because I used to think like that too.

In recent years, I've been sitting down and sight-reading my way through pieces – with some competence but as importantly, confidence and a steady pulse! I honestly never thought I would be able to do this!

Thanks to some amazing learning experiences, I discovered that there were two key errors in the way I approached sight-reading:

I hesitated and repeated which wrecked the sense of pulse.
I avoided doing sight-reading because I thought I was bad at it.

BUILD SKILLS vs BORN PERFECT

Babies have to learn how to socialise. It's the same with sight-reading.

Developing the belief “I can sight read" or rather the attitude, “I can improve my sight-reading” will completely change your sight-reading – for the better. Sight-reading skills can be built.

Once I started to see that sight-reading is a learnable skill rather than an ability that I wish I had been born with, I started to understand that with, persistence and suitable training, I could improve.

If you know, you know, and if you don't know, you can find out.

I started to think more about the idea that we can (gradually) achieve things while reading the book, Mindset by Dr Carole S. Dweck.

The music pedagogue and multi-book author, Paul Harris’s talks have really got me thinking about the psychology around teaching and motivation. One of his points is about the importance of feeling good - for both student and teacher.

CHANGE YOUR SIGHT-READING FOR THE BETTER!

Here's what I used to do when I got a sight-reading piece.

Feel bad, get stuck everywhere and be left with the feeling that the piece sounded nothing like that.

Here's what I do NOW when I sight-read a solo piece.

If you find you have serious trouble with the pitches or rhythm, it may be that you need to spend some time sight-reading pieces that are easier or shorter and building up confidence and ability with those.

MENTAL & EMOTIONAL

First, I feel slightly excited and curious about how it will feel to play it.
I think of it as a “quick adventure” or “temporary state” that I will probably forget about by the same time the next hour.
I will be slightly curious to know what it sounds like, but I will know that by reading the music in my head.
I look at the last bar. It's good to know what your final stop is for the journey. Also then you'll find out if the piece is 16 pages long, or just 2 pages.
I look for “traps”. Key signature changes, time signature changes, clef changes.
I look for clues as to the mood of the music – e.g. louds, quiets.
I don't usually look at the very beginning until the end.

PHYSICAL

Based on the trickiest rhythm/ shortest note values, set your own pulse.
Hum the rhythm in a tuneless voice. Yes, it will sound weird.
Move your hands to the rhythm of the piece. Yes, you probably won't really know what you're doing.
Play certain chords or patterns. Don't worry if they don't sound right.
There are tricks you can use to keep in time. One of the main ones is to count out a bar you feel you can't finish. Sometimes this might even be a few bars. But while you count, look at the next place you can play and get ready.
PLAY IT. Just keep going. Laugh when it goes wrong. Keep going. Try and finish it even if you think it sounds awful. Every effort you make to sight read will make you a better sight-reader.
After you play it, be proud of yourself for having collected some more sight-reading experience.

FIVE IDEAS FOR IMPROVING YOUR SIGHT-READING

Five ways that frequent and regular music-making have helped me to build sight-reading skills:

Play through lots of music regularly with another musician/s.
Improvise to a steady beat.
Play together with other musicians to a steady beat
Train your rhythmic and coordination with activities to a steady beat.
Consider finding out if the student has a learning difficulty/ies.

1. Play through lots of music regularly with another musician/s

The pressure of playing solo in front of a teacher, or even alone makes it quite daunting to sight-read new pieces.

My mum told me that from a young age, her dad (a self-taught violinist) frequently asked her to accompany him on the piano while he played the violin. When you play together with another musician (or more) from a score, you learn very quickly that if you stop or repeat, it won't sound good. This “penalty” means you focus more on the “reward” of keeping going which means you stay together.

My mum collected many many hours of accompanist training from a young age, so by the time she was even 20 years old, she had done far more sight-reading than I had.

An adult student used to accompany in a school. Even though she says that it was quite easy – songs for children and hymns, for example, her sight reading is better than mine because she carries on. This for me is great evidence that accompanying helps build the skills.

Either she told me only recently, OR she had told me before but I just wasn't listening...

2. Improvise to a steady beat

Improvising to a regular beat can help you internalise a steady beat. What happens if you don't have access to a drummer?

There are a few ways you can improvise with a beat:

a) Play along to a recorded drum beat or groove

Generous musicians have spent their time and energy to create drum videos. You can find some of these on YouTube, and possibly other places such as SoundCloud and Spotify.

If you know the style of music and the speed, you will be more likely to find something you like.

BPM means beats per minute. Bear in mind that what classical musicians call “beats” are different to what most other musicians call beats.

b) Play along to your own drum beat or groove

Make your own drum pattern and record it using Voice Memo on your phone.

3. Play with other musicians to a steady beat

A crucial change in my journey as a musician was forming my own band. I had enjoyed listening to and dancing to music with regular beats (alternative rock, metal, punk, indie, jazz, electronica, dance music etc etc over the years).

Playing together with a REAL drummer (in my case, she was called Caro) got me internalising AND enjoying the sense of pulse within my OWN music.

Away from the musicians, I would rehearse my part on my own. Then I started making tracks and adding my own drum beats using the drum patterns and individual drum sounds on my keyboard. These sounds also found their way into my playing. So this is the strange thing. I became a rhythmic player partly because of popular styles.

But it's not that weird actually because I've heard jazz musicians say that classical musicians don't play in time. I found that offensive at first. I thought it was as criticism, and maybe it could be if there's a classical musician who won't keep in time with a jazz drummer.

However, it's a stylistic and cultural aspect as well. Because of the solo nature of the piano, pianists can all too easily indulge in ignoring the pulse and convincing themselves that pitch and perfecting the rhythm for individual patterns is more important.

This is why I failed my Grade 8 sight-reading. I should have been in a band!

4. Train your rhythmic and coordination with activities with or without the piano

I have some other great tips and tricks that I use for sight-reading.

Breaking down the elements of music score reading and doing little activities focusing on each one, in rotation over time helps to build better score-reading.

They are similar to the ones I use for performance.

Over recent years, certain ideas which involve tapping and counting, selective playing and improvisation have helped my students.

I plan to collect them together in an article! This seems like a cunningly thought out teaser, but actually, I just have a lot of ideas about other topics like poetry, art, race, gender and community work... So, I want to do it... And if you're really interested in seeing it, write me a comment and I'll see what I can do.

5. Consider finding out if you or your student has a learning difficulty/ies

As a sign of my ableism, it's only really been in more recent years that I became more aware of how learning difficulties can go un-detected.

One musician I know was in their mid-teens before dyslexia was diagnosed. This meant they had faced years of struggle thinking it was the same for everyone.

Another music student was diagnosed with Erlin's Syndrome. They now have special glasses to help them to read.

A musician I worked with only found out that they were dyslexic as an adult. They said that when they tried to learn music as a young person, they had to listen to the music a lot of times as the score didn't help too much.

Another musician I worked with said they found reading hard. They preferred to mostly work with improvisation, playing by ear and score-reading lead sheets. While musicians who use lead-sheets still use notation reading skills, I would suggest perhaps that the difference is between looking at a printed map and going on a journey vs using sat nav.

Reading full stave notation = Using sat nav

Using a lead sheet/ chord sheet = Following a hand drawn / printed map

For myself, I find that a diagnosis helps a teacher to be even more understanding and to find and offer methods suited to supporting the student. These may include a larger score, tinted overlays, more time to prepare etc, as well as patience around the organisation of practice itself.

It is important to find a balance between the determination to fulfil goals (e.g. learn sight reading) and the student feeling a sense of autonomy, choice and empowerment.

If a student with learning difficulties finds sight-reading horribly difficult, rather than give up completely, it might mean that they need support to build skills, so rewinding can help. Here are just a few examples of ideas for approaching stave notation and building confidence. It is definitely not an exhaustive list, but it might inspire you to think smaller. I would not have thought of these ideas 10 years ago!

Sight read one bar.
Sight read 2 bars.
Find all the minims in the piece.
Find the dynamics and map out the dynamics using bodily gestures (e.g. hold hands high for forte, medium-high for mf and down for p) or facial expressions.

There are many musicians, including performers, recording artists and other types of music professionals such as sound sound engineers and experimental musicians and artists who don’t use stave notation. With electronic music production apps on phones, tablets and personal computers, people who don’t have what is considered a traditional music education can create tracks. While reading stave notation can open up worlds of music to us, traditions such as playing by ear, improvisation and composition are also traditions and open doors to worlds just as fascinating and relevant to our students.

CONCLUSION

No one was born knowing how to do sight-reading.

Falling for the satisfaction of a steady pulse helped me to feel more satisfied about my sight-reading.

If you want to improve your sight-reading, start with the mindset that it is possible.

Accompany someone.
Improvise to a steady beat.
Form a band and play to a steady beat.
Separate sight-reading skills into achievable outcomes.
Find out if you or your student has learning difficulties.

Reflecting on how many influential and well-known musicians did not / do not use stave notation can remind us aside from the world of exams, we can CHOOSE whether we want to do sight-reading or not.

Reflecting on how cultures use playing by ear rather than notation reminds me to be humble about what I consider to be a tradition and how it could be said to be a Western European dominance in education.

Far from devaluing sight-reading completely, this sense of humbleness helps me to see my music-making as part of the multitude of music-making.

Since I can read music, sight-reading can empower me to some extent, because I can open a piece of music and play it, not just for myself, but perhaps to show someone else (who doesn't read) what that music roughly sounds like. It's a fun and useful skill!

I definitely did NOT think this when I was twelve.

Try it...!

Home

FALLING FOR THE PULSE - How I finally became good at sight-reading (hint: see the picture!)