Do you find sight reading
challenging? Are you curious on
how you can actually improve
your sight reading? So you actually get to
play the music faster? Hi, I'm Jazer. I'm here to give you three tips on how you can improve
your piano sight reading. Let's get to it. The first point is to stop
looking at your hands. When you're playing the
piano and you're doing this and you're sight
reading, right? And you're looking up and you're looking down and up and down and
up and down. It's just going to be too
boggling for your mind. Your mind's going too much is happening and so many of my students, so what they do is they are
looking up and down up, up and down to try
and find assurance by looking down at their fingers
when they don't have to. And what ends up
happening is they end up stopping the music so many times when they don't
really need to. What I recommend you do is when you sight
reading your piece, look straight up at the music stare, stare down like it's
your arch enemy. And don't look at your
hands at all. Or at least as much
as you can. What you do when you, when you're doing this is you're building a really
good spatial awareness of the keyboard. So what that means
is your fingers, you start to build this ability for your
fingers to know what a fifth is, one five or what an octave is. And it knows exactly
how far to go. For example, that's a fifth
and that's an eight. So for example, whatever
note I play on the piano, [Music] Look, that's a fifth [Music] somewhere else. [Music] You know, my fingers
just knew exactly what a fifth actually is. So I'm going to play
a "Chim Chim Che-ree" from Mary Poppins of peace, Probably everyone knows. And notice how I am
looking at the music as much as possible. I am looking at my hands
as minimally as possible. Let's give it a go. [Music] [Music] tip number two is to learn
chord patterns. Really familiarize yourself
with chord patterns. Now, why? When you see a chord, let's say in the piece that
I was just playing, let's say you're looking at this cord right here. Now you have an F and A and a D. Now when you sight
reading a piece like that and you're thinking F A D If you are looking at them separately, individually, you're probably not
really good sight reader. Now what you're supposed to
do when you're sight reading is you are suppose to chunk all that into
one block and that may seem hard
to do at the start, but that's how you improve. You have to play enough, have enough experience to chunk all that
into one block. Your brain cannot
see them separately because that's too many
things to do at one go. To illustrate my point, think about this word now, Piano right? When you look at this word, you see the word piano, you hear the what piano. You're not thinking P E A N O You're just not. Well, why? Because you have spoken the
language enough. You've read it enough to see this entire
word as one whole. It's the exact same thing with piano chords, right? So when you're working on your sight reading, make sure you're chunking
all that information into one or at least working to
do that. Play a ton of pieces. That chord there, That D minor chord of F A and D with a the root on
the top F A D. I've played that numerous times. I've played that so many times. I don't think
about that anymore. It's just one thing to me, a really good way I like
to actually practice, I'm playing these chord patterns is to play hymns. So you can Google any sort of
hymns on the internet or you
can buy some hymn books. So I've got this really random hymnbook from an op shop, I think it was $1 or something. And look at the music like that. So Look how good that is. Just for really recognizing and playing these chord patterns. [Music] Tip number three, is to play each chord
extremely slowly. Now if you need to, when you're seeing
a complex chord, don't rush it. Actually try and figure out
each and every note step-by-step. Even if it like completely
stuffs up your rhythm. It doesn't matter. What you're trying to do is if the chord is G B D F, you want to make
sure you're playing G B D F and not anything else. You want to build the
right connections, to the actual music and the things
you're doing with your hands. Built that correct caught a neuropathway. Just take your time. So don't play with
the metronome. Okay? You're not trying to keep time
when you're sight reading. You're trying to learn what these chords are. So that these chords, they can enter your hands
and it sticks with you. So that next time when you're
sight reading another piece that has this similar pattern, you can perform the same pattern again. So there you go. Those are three tips on how you
can improve your sight reading. So that you can get to play
your music faster. It's so frustrating to in the some of the
learning stages of music, but it's very essential. And each time you do it, it gets better and
better and better. So keep it up. Keep up the practice. If you liked this video, give it a like, give me a comment, ask some questions, so I can answer these
questions for you. And consider
subscribing as well. I'll see you in the next video. [Music]
