How to sight-read piano

Look first

Before the first note, take half a minute to read the page without playing. Four things: the key signature, the time signature, where each hand starts, and the hardest bar. Here is level 4 exercise no. 1, read that way:

• Key: 1 flat, F major. Every B is B♭, in every octave, all the way through.
• Time: 3/4, three quarter-note beats a bar. Count “1 2 3” before you start.
• Hands: the right hand starts on F₄, in the first space up of the treble staff; the left on F₃, on the fourth line up of the bass staff. Put them there before you count in.
• The hardest bar: bar 6, where the most comes together: a 4th, B♭ from the key signature, eighth notes and a move to a new hand position. Choose a beat you can keep through that bar, and play the whole piece at it.

Read a bar ahead

While your hands play one bar, your eyes are already on the next. By the time your fingers reach a note, you have read it, and a surprise has a bar's warning instead of none. It feels like juggling at first; it comes with practice, the way reading a sentence aloud does.

Clefsight's lookahead trainer practises exactly this: each bar fades as you reach it, so the only music left to read is the music ahead. It is always on in fresh sight-reading; for pieces, turn it on or off in Settings, or under Options beside the music.

Keep the beat and never stop

Count one bar in, then play to the end at that beat, whatever happens. A wrong note is one wrong note. Stopping to fix it costs the beat, the rest of the bar, and the next bar you weren't reading while you fixed it. If a bar is too much, play less of it, the bass note or the top note, and land on the next first beat with both hands.

Clefsight grades this as Keep going: every stop, restart and skip takes points off, so a take that keeps going with a few wrong notes beats one that stops to get them right.

Pick music a level below

Sight-reading grows on music that is easy for you: a level or so below the pieces you practise, so most of it reads without thinking and your eyes are free to look ahead. Clefsight's levels follow the order it teaches:

• Level 1: middle C position; C position, both hands
• Level 2: landmark notes; notes around the landmarks; 2nds and 3rds as shapes
• Level 3: G position and moving the hand; ledger lines
• Level 4: key signatures, one at a time; 4ths and 5ths
• Level 5: triads; inversions
• Level 6: 6ths to 10ths; keys with 3 to 7 sharps or flats
• Level 7: far ledger lines

The fresh pieces Clefsight writes use only what your reading profile says you have learned, plus the one new thing you are on, so they sit at the right level by themselves. The printed exercises go by level, from 1 to 6, and each asks for nothing a reader meets after its level.

The trap

Playing the same piece again until it goes right. That is practice, and worth doing, but the second time you are remembering, not reading. Sight-reading improves with a lot of new music, a little at a time: a short piece a day, played once. That is why only a first play of music you have never seen moves your reading level.