Seems to have had the hug of death https://web.archive.org/web/20250522125504/https://sandrock....
Four years of sight reading practice
21–30 of 84 posts
Re: Four years of sight reading practice
#22I love data visualizations like these. OP if you want to improve sight reading faster, I would recommend using non-random notes - context is very important when sight reading and if you get a professional pianist to sight read random notes they will be much, much slower. Sight reading factory is one site I know that does this a bit better
This is the first thing I noticed when I saw a sample of music. How useful could sight reading random notes actually be? I can't imagine it's completely useless but a lot of music is remarkably similar and quite predictable. I'd imagine practicing sight reading music with real structure would be far more useful for understanding those patterns and helping learn new and more complex pieces.
Re: Four years of sight reading practice
#23After researching a few apps, I have found Piano Marvel to be pretty good for automating practice of both scales, arpeggios and ear training as well as having a bank of songs. I use the web version, and the interface is clunky, but it’s the closest I have found to a math academy like took for piano.
Re: Four years of sight reading practice
#24I've been tracking my sight reading practice for four years using an iPad app, storing the results and plotting them. I am still seeing progress even after four years.
I played horn for 4 years in middle and high school. Never got good at sight reading. But never really enjoyed playing either, practice was always a drudgery . Finally admitted to myself that I just didn't like it and quit.
Re: Four years of sight reading practice
#25This is cool, though the notes in your example look pretty random? Are they actually randomly or is it just too modern for me to hear it without playing it?
I'm a fairly average pianist, but sight reading is a (relative) strength. Being able to play random notes is definitely part of it, but I think for me sight-reading is more about getting a sense of the gist of the music (a lot of pattern matching of common phrases, cadences, hand positions etc) - this is kind of subconcious, then my focus is on keeping my internal version aligned with what's on the page (spotting where the written music is doing something different or interesting and making sure you hit those notes). The latter part would definitley improve by practicing random notes, but the first bit is more akin to improvisation - you've got some lossy, distilled version of the music in your head (from memory or from your first mental parse of the full manuscript) and you're trying to recreate it (or expound on it).
I think what really helped my reading was having lots of cheap/free sheet music on hand and just trying to play it (simplifying massively if needed, but trying to get the sense of it, even if only playing 20% of the notes)
Re: Four years of sight reading practice
#26I love data visualizations like these. OP if you want to improve sight reading faster, I would recommend using non-random notes - context is very important when sight reading and if you get a professional pianist to sight read random notes they will be much, much slower. Sight reading factory is one site I know that does this a bit better
I agree. Reminds me of that story about chess grandmasters having incredible memory for valid chess positions but performing no better than average when remembering random piece arrangements. There's likely some efficient compression you can achieve by playing real-world music patterns rather than random notes. And it sounds better!
An interesting middle ground might be using LLMs to generate plausible melodies based on real-world music patterns and emphasizing the unfamiliar patterns, but if the goal is to play real music fluently, nothing beats practicing with actual pieces from the repertoire you want to play.
Re: Four years of sight reading practice
#27> I was not learning to name the key signatures
It was mentioned the person was trying to memorize all these with anki or something. There's actually no need. You only need to memorize 2 key signatures and the rest follow a pattern.
C major has 0 sharps/flats F major has 1 flat
Every sharp key is a half step up from the last sharp shown. G major has 1 sharp F#. G is a half step up from F#. In A major the last sharp is G#, etc.
In flat keys, it's the second flat to the right. Bb has two flats in the signature. Bb and Eb. Ab has 4 where Ab is the 3rd.
All minor keys are a minor third down from their major key. Of course, you have to look at more of the music to determine if it is a in major or minor key.
If you can remember that you can tell what any key signature is pretty quickly.
Re: Four years of sight reading practice
#28>I am mostly counting the number of sharps and flats and translating that to the keyboard through a pattern I figured out early on. The sharps “activate” from left to right across the groups of black notes, starting with F♯, alternating between the two groups of black notes. This is easier to get into your fingers than any other memorisation technique. The order for flats is mechanically symmetrical – you just start from the right and move left, again from the “first” note in the group of three, which in that case is B♭. I am still not quite sure how other people are learning this, since most of the materials I’ve seen have focused on learning the actual names by rote, using mnemonics like “Father Charles Goes Down And Ends Battle”
Is this what self-taught looks like? I have never heard of that mnemonic and it was never hard to learn the order of sharps/flats in a key signature. You just look at the way it's written on the staff - two lines of sharps a 4th apart going up progressively, two lines of flats a 4th apart going down progressively.
I don't want to discourage the guy, but practicing every day for 4 years straight and he's only gotten to 60bpm... there are better methods to learn piano sight reading.
Re: Four years of sight reading practice
#29I've been tracking my sight reading practice for four years using an iPad app, storing the results and plotting them. I am still seeing progress even after four years.
Sight reading never really ends - I tested a friend (professional virtuoso) when he was drunk at a noisy party and he sight read one of the Chopin song transcriptions by Liszt (I deliberately chose something a bit obscure). Nothing quite as crushing as seeing people sight read things that would take you months/years to learn with the score... :) Thanks for sharing your journey!
It's the HORSE (basketball) equivalent of piano.
Re: Four years of sight reading practice
#30>I am mostly counting the number of sharps and flats and translating that to the keyboard through a pattern I figured out early on. The sharps “activate” from left to right across the groups of black notes, starting with F♯, alternating between the two groups of black notes. This is easier to get into your fingers than any other memorisation technique. The order for flats is mechanically symmetrical – you just start…
When you don't start with music theory (which took many centuries to develop) you end up with lots of things that work but not as well.
You don't have to learn music theory yourself, so long as theory is something someone knew in the past to design how you learn. What matters is that you learn the useful patterns, why those patterns are useful is not something you need to know (except if you are trying to break the rules - understanding the rules means you understand what happens when you break them and thus can come up with good breakages instead of unmusical noise)