At some point, every serious
That’s right — sight-reading is a skill and your proficiency depends on how much you’ve practiced and continually learned. With that being said, improving your sight reading chops by doing it repetitively isn’t going to give any results if the steps you’re doing are not quite there yet.
These 7 great tips may help you make fast progress in your sight-reading for
1. Focus On the Notes, Stop Looking at Your Hands
As if it isn’t hard enough dealing with new notes, you also have to make sure your fingers are pressing the right strings. This way, your eyes are employed shifting from your hand to notes to the neck and so on. The less you look at your hands, the more you’ll be able to focus on what you’re sight reading and before you know it, your
2. Focus on Rhythms First for Sight-Reading Success
To help yourself achieve great
3. Be Prepared: Practice Thinking Ahead
The point of sight-reading is actually being able to simultaneously coordinate your hands and eyes and concentrate on what you need to play. The secret to multitasking of this kind is always being one step ahead of your body, so your brain gets to analyze things first. Simply put, to be able to sight-read on
4. Practice with a Metronome
Beginner
5. Don’t Underestimate Chords
As uninteresting as scales, arpeggios, and chords may be, they are essential sight-reading skills. However, knowing how to strum through a guitar chord chart isn’t enough. When you come across chords with added tensions or reading rhythmic notation can be tricky, so consider all of the aspects when sight-reading.
6. Explore Different Genres
Being acquainted with classical manuscripts is a solid base for sight-reading, but who can tell what kind of genre you could encounter on different occasions? Consider practicing reading rhythms and grooves that are unique to different genres of music. Find and study big band charts, musical theatre parts, and transcriptions of
7. Made a Mistake? It’s Not the End of the World
Although we always tend to aim for perfection, when sight-reading it’s inevitable that you’ll at some point miss a note. Of course, that’s not the reason for your sight-reading performance to completely fall apart. However, some mistakes are worse than others. While a missed note is an unfortunate error, a wrong rhythm or bad counting can completely throw you off track, so try to focus on important elements of your performance. In any case, keep in mind that it’s all part of your progress, collect yourself, keep a cool head and move on. Dealing with mistakes is necessary for making progress!
In the end, perfect practice makes perfect, don’t forget that. The key to good sight-reading on
By Simon Dupree
Simon Dupree has discovered he has a passion for music from a very young age. Ever since then, music has been an essential part of his life. When he is not practicing, he’s probably behind the keyboard writing for Music Groupies.