On Sight Reading

I love the fact that we can interact with each other inside and outside the class time and try to answer each other's quetions. The other day I ran into Tom Beyer and he gave great tips on sight reading. He overheard me at one of the improv sessions when I was expressing to another student my difficulties of improvising and sight reading.


He said the key to improve my sight reading skills is to devote a certain amount of time everyday only to sight reading. Stopping everytime I make a mistake is habitual, he said, and instead of practicing in a right way, I've been practicing in a wrong way: stopping in the middle of the music. Of course if I am perfecting a piece of music I need to stop and practice passages over and over again till they are right, but practicing sight reading is different from perfecting a piece. I told him also that my eyes cannot capture many notes at once, they tend to only look at only a few and that my fingers often cannot measure intervals without my eyes looking at them.

So he gave me three main practice methods according to my needs.
1. Read a new piece of music and never stop no matter what happens
2. Read a single line of notes to expand my horizontal view
3. Play something I know in the dark

These are great insights and I have been devoting about 30 minutes everyday since. It's going to take some time and I will have to be patient with myself; however I believe that this practice menu will help me enhance my sight reading abilities, as Tom Beyer assured it would.

I have noticed that people who are great sight readers are also great improvisers. This may be because they can already hear in their head what's coming while they read a written score. So I hope by practicing sight reading I will also help develop my improvisation abilities. I look forward to the progress as well as the process in weeks, months, and years to come.