How to Improve Your Sight Reading

hello everyone our topic today is site reading and especially how to go about improving your abilities now when I was young I thought that there were two kinds of players out there the readers and the memorizers and I thought this was more or less uh genetic or or determined by Nature you were born either one or the other and you would be good at one and bad at the other and I was a memorizer and I did not feel confident about my reading but I felt like I could devour a score in a reasonable amount of time and and remember it pretty well and uh just sort of accepted the idea that that some people were great at reading and I was not it was only um later I realized this is not pre predetermined or or or born or innate it's simply a result of the kind of experiences that one has had so the young person who is put in a position of doing a lot of reading is going to get good at it and the person who's put in a position of needing to memorize is going to be good at it and often not having learn to read will provoke being a good memorizer because it's an avoidance tactic if I could just somehow absorb everything either by slowly painstakingly reading it a few times or by ear and then memorizing it I I can just avoid having to learn this skill and of course any teacher will tell you they've seen students who have gotten away with this for years they they just um hear something and then they can repeat it and the teachers never catch them until sometime later but actually it is not innate one way or the other uh at all it's simply the result of the kind of experience so who ends up as a good reader well the the young pianists who get stuck with accompanying their sister's flute andata or the kid the the um child of clergy for example who gets stuck on the piano or the organ in religious services and so you know play all the stuff um all all of those kind of experiences U and and it's this repeated experience um early on in life that that really is what gets it going or you know a a 12 or 14-year-old child in middle school and they're going to put on a musical and uh it's all pretty low level it's all volunteered they don't have any professionals and that kid's the only one who can sort of play the piano so they say you're going to accompany the whole musical so it's hours and hours of rehearsal it's it's a lot of time to practice and so anyway those are the kind of people who end up being good readers um usually because they have to likewise the people who memorize are the ones who have the time and the experience doing it and there's no reason at all that someone can't be a good memorizer and a good reader there's nothing against that you just have to put in the time for both um now the challenge is that when one has reached a certain age and not gotten great reading skills going to try to make up for that to try to remediate that and Remediation later in life is always a little bit harder okay it's never as easy as just learning things when you're a kid because in childhood we soak up everything effortlessly uh whereas older it's just harder we we just get Dumber we just get slower um so it's good if you can be purposeful about how you learn to read if you're doing it at a later period of life um now the way I actually learned to read better uh I was just kind of memorizing in everything through most of undergrad and I could memorize big things you know all recitals and stuff um and just never felt great about sitting down and just reading through Schubert art songs or whatever I always I always practiced them carefully in advance so that no one would catch me reading badly and what actually did it for me was teaching young kids when I got into graduate school I was in my early 20s and I had a lot of students right away I had a very big Studio and one of the things that you're always doing is you're always playing the the pieces for the young student either to correct something or maybe to show them the next piece that's coming up or to help them choose you can choose one of these three and so all day a couple of days a week I was doing this kind of reading of very easy music now as a teacher it needed to be correct so I was very very careful to read accurately um but also the music is pretty easy cuz they're kids and so I was reading a lot of easy music and I was being mindful to do it correctly and I realized after teaching for a couple of years like that my reading had just improved dramatically not just for the easy stuff but for you know more difficult things Mard in Beethoven and whatnot uh and I I realized it was just putting in the time it was just developing the mental habits of of pattern recognition that that really did it for me so I actually learned by UM playing the Teddy Bears Picnic and you know whatever um the naughty little crocodile or you know whatever those songs are that's that's where I learned to site read so um anyway when you come to this project of remediation later in life I think you can be very purposeful about it and it doesn't have to be a terrible experience so this is what I give to my students who need to improve in this area I call it site reading boot camp like when you go away to the military and they're going to make you exercise all day long and run around so uh for many people 20 minutes a day is a possible commitment it's it's reasonable you you have 20 minutes a day probably um you might not have an hour or two but 20 minutes if it's very focused that's a good amount of time so you take 20 minutes per day and you read easy easy music and the reason it has to be easy is because when you are reading one of the skills that you're trying to develop is the skill of continuity not stopping not fixing not going oops darn it let me do that again okay so continuity is where you just don't stop just goes forward therefore if you want to practice continuity the music has to be really easy it can't be the roov chalata right it can't be transcriptions of Strauss tone poems it's got to be easy stuff and sometimes I give college students childhood methods you know piano methods to play easy easy music um depending on their level it it might even be beginner level stuff if they need it because you can mostly play this with continuity if it's way below your level your technical level so the rule is no stopping cannot stop and you must play in rhythm okay wrong notes are not desirable but they are permitted in order to let you continue in Rhythm and in continuity without stopping so never stop never fix anything and don't play a piece twice play straight through the page once Turn the Page and never look back turn to something new because as soon as you're playing twice now you're memorizing now you're rehearsing something you're not reading anymore so it's very important at each piece only one time with no no repetition no fixing what you can do is imagine you're accompanying a a group of people who are singing whether that's uh you know church songs or happy birthday or it doesn't matter what it is when you're accompanying a group of people singing you cannot stop and fix anything the group wants the song to keep going and they will hate your guts if you stop and go back a measure you can't do that um so continuity playing in Rhythm if you're getting all the notes wrong then you need to go down to an easier level if you're getting only a few notes wrong it's probably an appropriate level okay uh Play In Time Turn the Page never look back if you find that you're constantly having trouble with rhythm count the piece out loud first without playing just look at look at the page and and say The rhythms out loud or conduct it with a pencil like so okay away from the keyboard don't play any not notes but you can conduct or count and that will help you have an idea of just the rhythmic feel so now when you fill in the notes you know what the rhythmic feel is so you have to get the rhythms right okay so if you need to count that's fine I don't recommend playing hands separate it's better just play Easier music where you can do hands together because that's what you're trying to learn to do that's what that's the skill you're trying to develop you know you're not trying to learn to play hands separately you're trying to play hands together so choose music where you can play hands uh together I think it's much better you play hands seply it's not going to kill you but it's just not as efficient okay um and finally remember that your site reading will never be better than your Technique if you struggle with certain things Alberti bases scales arpeggios drills Etc in music that you practice well you're not going to be able to play them in music that your site reading either so your site reading will not be better than your overall technical level so it may help you to work on your technical level and if you've never really dealt systematically with the fundamentals of piano technique what I like to call the four pillars of piano technique you might want to consider putting some work into that because that will turn around and help your site reading as well uh as far as tricks tips shortcuts here here they are there are none okay there there's simply none um it's a matter of time and exposure in order to just become comfortable with notation uh now in the language that is your native language what are the tips and tricks you use to have a conversation what little helpful tricks do you use to remember what's an adverb and what's a noun you don't need any of that because you're fluent you're so familiar with the words and the structure and the syntax and so on that you don't need any tricks you just know how to do it uh and really tricks tips and all that kind of stuff is just a way of avoiding fluency it's a way of avoiding putting in the time you actually need to be good at something so honestly whenever anybody asks me if I have any tips or tricks I always I'm always slightly irritated because what it sounds like is can you give me a way not to do the real work that it takes to be good at this I I want to get credit for being good at this but I don't want to actually do the work so I I'm always I always trying to think of something sarcastic to say when people say that so if I've ever said something like that to you I'm sorry I'm just a sarcastic person so that's all to say don't look for shortcuts just work on discipline and put in the time and with time using this method every day you will see some results for some people it may be a month two months three months but it it will take time but it does work so good luck with your site reading see you next time

Channel: cedarvillemusic

Views: 21,394

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Id: GVMW7zo4w90

Length: 12min 34sec (754 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 18 2023