A great sight reader can learn a piece in three days. A bad side reader needs three
months to do the same thing. So how do you get good at sight reading so
you can save yourself all this time and energy from learning pieces? Hi,
I'm Jazer. In this video, I want to share with you five common pitfalls of piano sight reading.
These are all mistakes that I've made throughout my life. So, I'm hoping that by sharing this with
you you won't make this error so you can save yourself all this painful struggles of learning
a piece. Before we get into the five pitfalls make sure you like and subscribe to this channel
so you stay in touch with these free piano lessons and tutorials.
Pitfall number 5 is not reading enough. Sight reading is not
actually sight reading. Let me explain what I mean as someone who's played piano for 18 years
and have read through thousands of pieces. What I can tell you is side reading is not
actually playing through random notes on a page but rather it is a test of your experience with
things like port shapes and melody lines and key signatures. To put it simply, sight reading is
all about your experience in music. When you're a great sight reader, it means you have seen and
analyzed a lot of music. When you are a poor side reader, it means you haven't done those
things. Have you ever had the experience of for example playing a certain chord or something in
a piece and thinking whoa this is the same thing that happened in the other piece and because I
have played it before I can easily do it in this piece. So great sight reading is basically this
but for not just that chord shape but everything in music. Let's go to an example now
So before I created this video I just looked at this piece for about five minutes so
technically right now as I'm playing it, it's not technically sight reading but I still want
to do this so I can take you through what's going through my head as I'm looking through
at something that is relatively new to me. So I was talking about chord shapes before for example
If you look at this left hand, this left hand is just doing this.
Now for beginners and people who are starting to learn piano, they might see
this part as oh that's a g and that's a b and that's a d that that's the way they
analyze it they're three separate notes but for me I have played this pattern
in so many pieces that it just feels like maybe a gardener doing some pruning in the garden
it's a very usual part of my toolkit this is why I always recommend students to read lots of
music because when you read lots of music you're building your toolkit you're building your tool
set so when you read each new piece of music you are able to use your previous experience to help
guide you to play each new piece better. Read lots of music.
Pitfall number 4 is to sight read pieces that are way too hard. Now you want to make sure when
you're practicing sight reading you're practicing pieces at a level where you can feel some success
in. What does success mean? Success means you can play through about eighty percent without much
stopping. For example, if you're sight reading a piece and you're stopping every two seconds
then I think for now that piece is just a little bit out of reach. Sight read something a little
simpler for now. Let's say you're in abrsm grade four piano I don't think you should side read
grade four piano pieces you should start read maybe grade one or two pieces there are two
reasons why I think you should sight read simpler pieces the first is that you'll feel
more success so you'll feel more encouraged when you sight read and the second thing is
something not a lot of people talk about but it's actually that you will actually learn something
from the process. You'll learn something about chord shapes or something about key signatures,
it's much better to do that than to sight read something that's completely hard and fumble your
way through it and then by the end of it, not really sure what you got out of that experience.
Pitfall number 3 is stopping or
restarting the music to fix notes. Now, there are two ways to sight read
the first way is with stops and the second way is without stops
most people will do it the first way so they'll do something like this
Now I have huge empathy for why people do this the first way. The reason people want to stop and
restart the music is because they feel they need to play correctly right so it's much better to go
back and relearn that correctly. Now even though from that perspective that has good benefits
because you want to learn it correctly right? I think students need to do a lot more of the second
one which is to try to sight read where they're not stopping the music and this is not easy to
do but you should try to do this second way and just learn how to be okay with mistakes as well
for example
okay so I purposely made some mistakes there, but the point of this is is you want to try to
also build into your skill set this way of playing music and not stopping at all it will shed a lot
of light on what you need to work on and it will also really improve your skill in sight reading
it's not easy to do this one but you you must try to maybe even imagine someone has a gun to your
head or something and at all costs you simply must move forward. A side note about this one
a really easy way to practice not stopping when you're sight reading is to use a metronome so
you can use a traditional metronome like this one but let's say you find the sound of the metronome
really annoying a product that recently i bought that i can't recommend enough is a soundbrenner
metronome watch so instead of hearing that clicking, I have the vibrations on my wrist
very very useful for improving sight reading. Soundbrenner is currently doing a deal if you
use the code JAZER20 you get 20% of your watch. Pitfall number 2 is fingers flying
away from the keyboard. This is something I've talked about in this channel various times but
I think it's very important for pianist to learn how to play legato and to learn how
to connect each note to the next note. So in this piece, let's look at for example bar four
this part here this joining part of
this in the left hand I think a lot of beginners will do something like this
they would fly up try to strike the c from from from up here whereas what I recommend
you do is to keep your fingers low okay see when you're playing this d here you can use
this d note as a reference for the next note which is your c
that's much better that's much better than okay when you when you fly off the keyboard you have
to find your position again whereas if you stay close to the keyboard you can use each note
as the reference for the next note. This is a really important high level concept that i
think can really help you in sight reading and that is to think about each note as a
reference point to the next note. Whenever you strike a note successfully that's really great
but use that note as well to feel where the next note is and then when you strike the next
note then use that note to feel where that next note is. This is why I always advocate
staying close to the keyboard that way you can feel where everything is instead of having to
find it from this kind of action. Moving on to our final sight reading pitfall #1 and that is
not reading ahead. Now let's talk about how sight reading actually works you gotta look on the page
find the notes and when you find the note your brain has to go oh that's a d and once you figure
out that's a d then you have to look for where d is on the piano before you strike it and then
you have to think about what fingers to use that's a lot of process and your brain needs time to do
all this stuff so how do you even keep up with the music? The only realistic way to sight read
a piece successfully is to always read ahead. So a really simple example is something like
look ahead look ahead look ahead look ahead so you have a half note here
when you're playing that d up here your brain shouldn't be going oh it's time to rest your
brain should be going what are the next right hand notes okay you have a b and d so
always looking ahead looking ahead look ahead look ahead look ahead look ahead look ahead
it's a very interesting experience where you sort of feel like you're in a time machine you're
always living ahead and the music is always behind you so try and think about this one always be
just one step ahead so that you're always prepared to play the right notes. A bonus tip for this one
is to try to do things very slowly so you have more time to process each note and to play on time
that's all for this video make sure to site read lots of pieces to build your toolkit which are
these sight reading pitfalls could you relate to the most let me know in the comments below
have a great day go and get some practice done see you in the next one
you