How To Improve Piano Sheet Music Sight-Reading
As an organist, I have been working in club land in the North of
England for the past 30 years or so and one of the crucial
qualifications in this environment is the ability to sight read music
on demand. When I say music this can be anything from a beer matt to a
ripped piece of paper repaired with selotape and stained with beer.
To
be fair most of the music is written by professionals and is nice to
read but not always easy. As a club organist, you do not get a band
call. In fact, you are lucky to get five minutes to scan through
between 10 and 15 pieces of music. Some written in different keys, and
every organist will tell you they hate it when they get the dreaded 6
sharps or 6 flats or even 7 sharp keys in a piece of music that just
happens to contain a solo especially written for you.
So how do
you improve your sight-reading? Well I asked my music teacher this very
question as I embarked on my club land career. His answer was to
practice sight-reading. He went on to tell me that session musicians
practice by picking up any music book start playing on page one and
continue until they have finished the book.
Does it work? Yes it
does. Try it for yourself, pick up any piece of music you can find,
preferably one that you are not that familiar with, then start to play,
but do not stop. If you make a mistake it does not matter, you are not
practising how to play this piece of music you are practising
sight-reading this piece of music. You have to be strict with yourself
and don't stop playing, even when there are lots of mistakes.
When
you have finished playing the piece of sheet music, you can then go
back to the parts of the music that were giving you problems and learn
how to play it.
Basically sight reading, is the ability to
recognise musical phrases instantly. For instance if I ask you to read
and play a 1 bar phrase consisting of Middle C, D, E and F, all
crotchets, you should be able to play this phrase almost instantly
without even thinking about it. Now, if I write the same phrase out
again but two octaves higher, you might have to look at it twice. This
is because the notation, two octaves above Middle C, is not as common.
Musical
phrases are like words, we tend to learn what we need then stop
learning new ones. So it's no surprise that clever people know lots of
words and great keyboard players know lots of musical phrases.
If
you really want to test yourself. Get yourself an audience. I practice
my sight-reading every week in front of a 200 plus audience. Its
surprising how your concentration improves.
Michael David Shaw runs music websites http://www.mikesmusicroom.co.uk and http://www.keyboardsheetmusic.co.uk
