Hello, it's Tom Donald from the London Contemporary
School of Piano. Well, today I'm gonna talk about the topic that we all love to hate - sight
reading, but the reality is that sight reading, no matter where you are up to in sight reading
on the piano, sight reading is something that is not only just a critically important musical
skill to have, but sight reading, even just making the smallest improvements on your sight
reading, getting it to be 5, 10, 15, 20% better, is gonna have a huge positive impact on your
playing, on your speed of learning pieces, comprehending music, and just generally moving
your musical progression forward. So let's dive in and talk about this all important
topic sight reading. And if you like our work at the London Contemporary School of Piano
feel free to click the bell button and subscribe to our channel, and therefore you're not missing
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So sight reading. Now, today's video, I want to help you master your sight reading. I want
to be a little bit ambitious here. I don't just want to get you sight reading 10 or 20%
better. I want you to have a little bit of a sight reading revolution in your head. And
I want to unblock a few things for you because there's some wider concepts here. So today
we're looking at ways to master our sight reading, and not just to master our sight
reading, but to master the way we practice sight reading. And the thing about sight reading
is it's not just about sitting down with a score in front of us and reading note by note
by wrote verbatim, looking up and down the music and playing one note at a time. That's
a very mechanical process and it's very unmusical, and that's not how we want to sightread.
And the reason why most people struggle reading music is that's the way they do it. Now, you
wouldn't read a book like that, wouldn't you? You wouldn't just pick up a book and read
word by word and not have a comprehension to what the bigger picture is, what it is
you are actually reading about the comprehension of what it is you are reading. And the big
problem with musical literacy, it isn't actually the fact that people don't know where notes
on the stave are. It's the problem is the comprehension - they don't understand what's
behind the notes and that's the real problem. You know, some of the best sight readers I've
ever come across have actually been conductors, conductors that conduct symphony orchestras,
and they have the ability quite often, and I've seen this before in rehearsal to sightread
an entire orchestral score, you know, with all of the instruments of the orchestra on
this massive score and be able to walk up to a piano and play it.
And that's because they have a wider conception and understanding of the music in a harmonic
way, in a polyphonic way, in a structural way. And music is a language, and we wanna
think of it like a language. And often the reason why people struggle and can't read
music very well is because they're not treating it like a language. And that's what we're
going to do today. Now, there's no one magic formula to crack your sight reading, but I'm
gonna say that there are three, and I'm gonna show you three formulas. And if you tackle
sight reading from these angles, I guarantee you you're gonna make a big result and you're
gonna see some big changes in your reading of music. So the first tip, and this first
one is more of a, a conceptual understanding, but it will make a big difference to many
of you. So this is looking at sight reading from the
keyboard angle, and this is so, so important. So look at the keyboard down here and look
at the notes. You know the notes of the keyboard and you are playing it and you are learning
pieces of music. Well, I want you to imagine something about the keyboard right now. I
want you to flip the keyboard, literally flip it so the top notes in the air, are up in
the sky and the low notes are down on the floor. So imagine that these, this is the
top notes up in the sky and the low notes down on the floor. Now that is exactly what
a musical stave is. A musical stave is basically a keyboard and it's a keyboard where the top
notes are higher up here and the low notes are lower. Sort of makes sense.
It's the verticalisation of the keyboard because harmonies and music of a harmonic nature of
a note given nature is vertical. And what's horizontal is the rhythm, the movement of
rhythm and scales. So that's why we have this notation system designed the way it is, well,
the western notation system. And for most part it's very effective. It's a very effective
way of looking at it. So I have put together a special crib sheet to help you. And if you'd
like to get a copy of this crib sheet, please head on over to our website, contemporaryschoolofpiano.com.
We will gladly send you this special sight reading crib sheet. Let's have a look at it.
So if you remember your first ever piano lesson or if you remember the first time you learned
anything about a piano, I think for many of us we just learnt where all the Cs were or
we learnt where middle C was. So if we play all of the Cs on the piano and
on the keyboard, they belong in certain positions on the notation. So for instance, this is
your middle C, this is your C above middle C, this is your C above that. And notation
tends to only work in three to four octave ranges in both hands. And the reason for that
is that you just get too many ledger lines otherwise, and it just gets unreadable. So
we have this octave sign. So the charm of the notation system is that we actually only
really need to read a few octaves. We're not actually reading every 88 note on the keyboard.
Things are then just repeated with the use of the octave up sign and the octave down
sign. So if I play this, I get this. And of course, we're not going to be using
that many ledger lines very often. And when a composer does that, they almost don't need
to do it. They can use the octave sign to save the many, many ledger lines. So it's
a real priority really just to know this range. And it's actually good if you go to our website
and ask for this sheet, it's the sight reading strategy sheet. You can actually as a little
bit of homework just fill in the gaps and notate the notes in between. And that's a
really useful thing to do. It just gives you that wider concept. But this is what it looks
like. This is when you notate all of the white keys on the piano, by the way. That's what
it looks like. You get all of these, all of these ledger lines. So these are the notes
in between these C octaves and beyond. You can see how middle C is not entirely in
the middle of the piano there. And then when you go down to here - this is the same thing.
I've written it out exactly the same notes, but I've used an octave sign just to make
it a little bit more accessible to read. So it continues moving through all of the white
keys on the keyboard. Now there are many variations you can conceptualise with this as well. You
could actually notate all of the notes on the keyboard in different scales. So this
is like a C major scale, but you could do the same thing for D major and you can find
all of the Ds on the musical staff with the notes in between following the D major scale.
You could do the same thing for the E major scale, the F major scale and so forth.
The purpose of this exercise, the reason why we are doing this, is to translate the keyboard
conception into the notation conception. So if you'd like to have a copy of that crib
sheet, it's just a nice thing to hang up on your wall, put near your piano. It just gives
you that conception of the way you need to readdress your thinking in comparison to the
keyboard, the vertical concept of the harmony and of the notes written on the musical stave.
And so that is one little angle - it's a conceptual angle that can make a huge difference to your
understanding of reading musical notation on the piano. Here's the second one. And this
is, I'm going to use a very useful piano method book to demonstrate this sight reading method.
And this method is the Bartok Mikrokosmos method. And it's a lovely bunch of books that
the composer Bela Bartok put together. But I'm not just talking about these books,
I'm talking about the approach. It's the approach that really, really matters. And so this method
works really, really well, but it only works well again, if it's in combination with some,
some of the other methods that I'm going to be talking about. And it is a very powerful
method. And for those of you who particularly have a good ear but you don't read music so
well, this is a very good method because you can't really rely on your ear to do some of
the cover up work for you. You actually have to read everything. So the purpose of this
method is to not think about individual notes, is not to look at the score here and go - that's
a C, or that's a D, that's an E and so on. The purpose of this method is to think about
patterns and shapes. And really that's what good sight reading
is about. It's about thinking in patterns and shapes. So for instance, the only note
we have to think about is the starting note. And in the right hand I'm playing a C above
middle C with my thumb, and I can use that c axium handout to figure out where all the
Cs are in these notation examples. And the left hand, I'm using the C below middle C,
and these are unison melodies. So that means both hands are doing the same thing. So the
thing I need to think about now is not C D E F G, I just need to think about two things
- up or down. Now, later on, when the more advanced patterns turn up in this book, I
need to think about other things like skipped notes and repeated notes and different things
happening in both hands. But let's just do this as a starting point. Let's think of the
notes going up or down because that's what happens in musical melodic phrases. Notes
either go up or down or repeat or jump around a little bit inside the scale often as well.
So let's have a look at this exercise and not think about individual notes, but think
about patterns and shapes. So we have the first note.
And let's do the next one. Next one has more quarter notes, so it goes a little bit faster.
It starts in the same hand position. So if you are to practice through a method
book such as the Bartok Mikrokosmos, you are not guided by knowing what the melodies meant
to sound like. The only thing you have to go by are the patterns. And a really important
tip when you play through this repertoire is don't look at your hands. At all costs
avoid looking at your hands. Just get your hands into the right position to start with
first. So you can, you know, you can write down on the music the starting note, you can
give yourself a bit of a clue, but once you've got that starting note, what you are meant
to do is you're meant to see the melody as as shape, as a pattern, as notes that ascend
and descend and that repeat or skip that are creating musical patterns. Because that's
what a melody does. And I think actually singers seem to understand this better often than
pianists. Pianists can often can get too abstract about
notes and think of notes as, you know, individual entities that don't have a connection to other
notes. And that's a real risk if that's the way you think it's gonna make reading very,
very hard. Now, if you're still on this video, if you're still with me you are about to be
super rewarded by the third approach I'm going to show you because when you put the first
and the second approach with the third approach, some real magic can start to begin. And it
goes back to what I was talking about with conductors being such great sight readers,
often understanding the deeper concepts of what's happening in the music. And the piece
of music I'm going to refer to is the famous C Major Prelude by JS Bach.
Now, sight reading again, as I said before, is not about note after note after note after
note after note going, C E G C E G C E and reading like that, I mean it's just impossible
to sound musical if that's how you see sight reading. So what is the deeper concept behind
the music? Well, one of the most important things to consider on the piano is chords
and harmony because all of the music we listen to on piano is built on chords and harmony.
And if you have a deeper understanding of what is happening harmonically with the music,
reading the notes becomes much more palatable. So for instance, if I even just analyze what's
happening in this piece, in every bar in the left hand, we only have two notes.
And it repeats - I am just playing the left hand and the right hand consists of three
notes, which forms more of this chord, the first bar being a C major chord, the second
bar being a D minor chord, the third bar being a G seven chord. When you add the left hand,
it turns into a chord. So if I play this piece entirely by putting all the notes together
and treating it like a chord, the whole piece is really just a collection of chords. So
by understanding a little bit about the chord system, even if it's just the bare minimum,
knowing our major and minor triads for instance, and using our reading skills just to understand
the starting and ending point of the chords or the intervals between them, all of a sudden
reading turns into something like this as opposed to this - note, note, note, note,
note. I'm now just thinking C Major, I can even write it on the music. This is not a
test, right? Great concert pianists and great musicians when they're practicing, they scribble
on their music, they write this down, they write above the stave the fingerings they
want to use, but they also write down things like what are the harmonies that are taking
place? Things to just give them that assistance, that understanding to confirm that deeper
understanding. On the first bar we have a C major chord,
Second bar - a D minor seven with a C in the base, then a G seven with a B in the base,
Then a C major, then an A minor starting on a C,
then a D seven with a C in the base, then a G major with a B in the base, then a C major
seven with a B in the base, Then
an A minor seven, then a D seven, then a G major chord,
then a G diminished chord. And if you are learning this piece, or you would like to
learn this piece, if you head on over to our website, contemporaryschoolofpiano.com and
ask for our special sight reading pack, we will send you the lead sheet of Bach C Major
Prelude. We will send you these, let's say, DNA clues of the music because Bach didn't
just think of this piece of music as a bunch of isolated notes. He didn't get his quilted
pen out one day and go, okay, I'm gonna write a C and then I'm gonna put an E above it.
And then what, what should I put above that? Oh G, he's thinking about harmony. He's painting
colors with major and minor chords. And if you are not taking the time to even understand
this vocabulary, the systems of major minor chords, if you can't recognise these connections
of chords, sight reading becomes so, so difficult because you are reading all of the notes in
isolation. And that's why at the London Contemporary
School of Piano, we put a big emphasis on learning chords and harmony at the piano.
Not just because it sounds great for playing popular music and jazz, it actually also suits
learning classical music much better. All of the great classical composers were fully
trained and fully aware and obsessed by the movement of harmony in music. Harmony has
been around in classical and western music for centuries and centuries, and it's such
a useful thing to tap into, to understand the depths of our notation system. So and
this doesn't just apply to a piece like the C Major Prelude by Bach. I'm gonna show you
one, one other piece of music where thinking in chords is also paramount. And this piece
needs almost no introduction at all. Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, the first movement, and
again, this piece is built entirely off broken chords, harmonies, arpeggios. And if we just
cover the first few bars here, what I've done on this sheet music is I've added above the
chords the name of each chord taking place. And of course I'm using modern notation methods
for this. You can use traditional notation methods as
well, such as Roman numeral, so all be it how you'd like to do it. But by having an
understanding of what the shapes and the chords are, all of a sudden the notes all make sense
in combination and you can focus on what really matters. And that's playing with musicianship,
clarity and not chasing every single individual note as if it's some sort of horrible sight
reading examination. And so this is really important, and again, you can just with the
power of a pen and your paper, you can just write down the chords above each change that
occurs in the music and create these harmonic analysis of these pieces of music.
And it makes such a huge difference to your sight reading. It will revolutionise the way
you look at music. All of a sudden, you are not hunting for each individual note. You
are actually learning how to understand the deeper construction of the music, and that's
gonna pay off massive dividends on your sight reading. So if you enjoyed today's tutorial,
head on over to our site, contemporaryschoolofpiano.com and ask for our sight readers kit. It will
have a couple of the wonderful resources we've covered today, and it'll really help you take
those big bold next steps in your musical journey. It's been lovely seeing you, and
I look forward to seeing you on our next tutorial. Bye-Bye.
