Sight-reading practice

Sight-reading means playing music you have never seen before, at a steady speed, without stopping to fix mistakes.

What sight-reading trains

When you practise a piece, you play the same bars many times until they are smooth. Sight-reading is a different skill: reading something new and keeping it going. It trains your eye to look ahead of your hands, your memory to hold the next few notes, and your sense of beat to carry on through small errors. Choirs, accompanists and orchestral players sight-read all the time, and many music exams include it, but it is just as useful for anyone who wants to try new songs quickly.

Thirty seconds before you play

Before you play a note, scan the page. Check the clef, because a bass-clef part read as treble will be wrong from the first note. Check for sharps or flats at the start of the line, and for the time signature. Find the highest and lowest notes so you know where your hand needs to be. Look for repeated bars, steps and leaps. Then name only the first note, place your hand, count one bar in your head, and start.

Keep the beat, let the mistakes go

The most important rule is to keep going. A wrong note is gone the moment it sounds; stopping to fix it breaks the beat and makes the next bar harder. Choose a tempo slow enough that you can keep it all the way through, even if that feels very slow. If you lose your place, skip ahead to the start of the next bar and rejoin there, the way a player in a band would. Afterwards you can go back, but that is practice, not sight-reading.

Look ahead. While your hand plays one note, your eyes should already be on the next one or two. This feels impossible at first and becomes natural with time. A simple drill is to cover the bar you are playing with a card and slide it along, so you can only see what comes next. Read in groups: three steps up, a repeated pair, a skip down. Group reading is why the contour practice in the last unit matters.

A little every day

Sight-reading improves with volume: many short, easy pieces rather than a few hard ones. Pick music a level or two below what you can practise, play each piece once or twice, and move on. Five minutes a day is worth more than an hour once a week. The quizzes below use random notes in both clefs. Answer them with sound on and try to name each note within a second; speed of recognition is the raw material of sight-reading.

This course is about pitch, but in real music rhythm counts just as much. A right note at the wrong moment is still a wrong note to the people playing with you. When a passage is too hard, keep the rhythm and simplify the notes: play only the top note of a chord, or leave out a quick ornament, and come back to the full version when you practise.