The principles of sight-reading – free course

Sight-reading means playing an unfamiliar score at first sight, musically and without stopping. It's a skill that opens huge doors: accompanying, playing duets, discovering hundreds of pieces, learning your own pieces faster. Good news: it can be trained, and it improves quickly with a small daily dose.

Rule number one: the pulse never stops

A good sight-reader is not the one who plays every note right, it's the one who keeps time. In an orchestra or with a singer, the music goes on: whoever stops to correct themselves is lost. Better a missed note, a simplified bass, an incomplete chord… than a stop. Rhythm comes before pitch.

Choose a slow tempo, clearly slower than the marked tempo, but steady. Count one empty bar out loud before you begin.

Look ahead

While your fingers play one note, your eyes should already be on the next notes. At first, one note ahead; then a beat; then a bar. It's like reading a text aloud: you don't read word by word, you anticipate the end of the sentence.

Don't look at your hands

Every time your eyes leave the score, they have to find their place again, and you lose the thread. Learn the keyboard's geography by touch: the groups of two and three black keys are your tactile landmarks.

The 30-second routine before playing

Clef(s): treble, bass? Any clef changes along the way?
Key signature and key: how many sharps or flats? Major or minor (check the last bass note)?
Time signature: 2/4, 3/4, 4/4, 6/8? Hear the pulse.
Hand position: which starting note, which finger?
Patterns: scales, arpeggios, repetitions, sequences?
Hardest passage: find it, decide how to simplify it.
Tempo: choose the one that suits the hardest passage.

Try it on this exercise: apply the routine (key signature? time signature? first note? where is the tricky spot?), then play it once only, without stopping.

M:4/4
L:1/4
Q:1/4=72
K:F
F G A F | c2 A2 | B A G E | F4 |]

Did you remember the B flat from the key signature in the third bar? And the E just before the final note? Those are exactly the details the routine brings to light.

Common mistakes:

Starting again at every mistake: you never learn to keep going.
Setting off too fast, then slowing down in the hard bits.
Forgetting the key signature after two bars.
Always sight-reading the same piece: you end up knowing it, so it's no longer sight-reading.

Daily exercise

Every day, 5 minutes: the routine, then one single non-stop reading of a short new extract. Complement it with the site's note reading and rhythm exercises: reading speed and rhythmic security are the two pillars of sight-reading.