Still Plodding Along

Just a quick post to let you know that I'm still working away, and still doing 1-2 hours of sight-reading every day.  The three latest insights from my teacher that have helped recently are (I'll post more about these when I am less busy):

1. Leave stuff out.  At one of my lessons, my teacher said "I sit here thinking how much better he'd play if only he'd leave things out."  That made an impression on me, so now, if I'm playing a hymn or chorale, and I start to have problems, I leave out the middle voices.  That is, first priority is the top voice, second is the lowest, and after that, the middle voices.  I can now play the Bach chorales (slowly), that were way too difficult when I first encountered them.  This works for modern pieces also.  Surprisingly, it takes practice to not play each note.
2. Play slowly.  I've known this from the start, but had found that if my metronome were slower than about 50 BPM, it was hard to follow it.  Now, I use the metronome beats for eighth notes.  For example, for a Bach chorale, I might set it to 60 BPM. 
3. Learn and see the harmonic structure of a piece.  That is, try to understand what chord notes make, and how that chord functions.  For example, these notes make up a G7.  I never thought this would help.  What, I see the notes and figure out what chord it is, to understand the notes?  How would that help, since I already know what the notes are?  Well, it does seem to help, partly because I know what notes to expect next.  For example, in the last measure of a Bach chorale, I know there's going to be some kind of standard cadence (e.g. F chord, G7 chord, C chord).  Even if I don't get all the notes, I can fake it.  But it also seems to help me put my fingers down in the right places.

Hang in there fellow sufferers -- more later.

Progress Report (4 Years!)

Whoa -- I've been working on this for four years! Hard to believe.

I've worked pretty hard on sight-reading during this last year, mainly because I've been taking lessons. In the last six months in particular, I've felt like I'm finally gaining traction, and seeing a faster rate of improvement. Check out this post for a description of what I've been working on, and advice about what has helped my playing the most.

Here are some recordings to give you a feeling of where I stand today.

I've been using the first tunes below for all my progress recordings, so of course it's not strictly sight-reading anymore. Also, I've read through my hymnals many times, so although I don't remember the tunes, I have played them before.

This is how I played Hymn 296 after three months of sight-reading.

This is how I play it now, after four years of sight-reading.

After three months.

Now.

After three months.

Now.

Here is a hymn from a Methodist hymnal that I just got from the library. I have never played it before, but it's possible that the same song is in the other hymnals I've worked with.

This is what it sounds like when I play it.

Here is a non-hymn tune from a library book. I've never played this, nor do I recognize the tune.

This is how I sound when I play it (BTW, I'm aware of the the rhythmic errors I made).

Finally, I've mentioned that one of the benefits of my sight-reading work is that I can practice tunes and get better at them without actual memorization. I read through this song a bunch of times each year, though I've never worked on getting it close to perfection.

Click here to hear me play it.

And you can hear my regular playing in my most recent Christmas Video.

That's it for now. Thanks for all the words of encouragement. I'm hoping that I'll make faster progress this next year -- see you then!

Tips From My Teacher

I really wanted to call this post "Sh*t My Teacher Says," (take-off on this popular book) but I didn't want to imply that her tips are sh*t.

First, due to a technical glitch, I hadn't realized that there were many comments awaiting moderation, so I apologize if you didn't see your comments appear; I'm sorry I didn't reply to them until today.

I had thought that my blog was drifting away, unread, into the boonies of the Intergoogle, so it's encouraging to see that people are still reading it.

In a few days I'll be posting my four-year progress report, but I wanted to get these great tips out to you first.

Here's my big tip: You will make much faster progress if you work with a teacher who is very good at teaching sight-reading. This advice is coming from someone (me) who is very independent, and usually likes to work on his own. I've been taking lessons (twice a month) with a Dr. Robin Miller for almost a year now, and I think I've progressed as much in that year than in the three prior years.

Warning 1: there are teachers out there who are not very good at sight-reading. I called one teacher and told her what I wanted, and she told me, almost whispering, "Well, I have to admit that I'm not a very good sight-reader myself."

Warning 2: Even if the teacher is good at sight-reading, he/she may not be able to teach it well. I took a year of lessons in the eighties, but my teacher at the time didn't help my sight-reading much.

I'll tell you about my new teacher, Dr. Robin Miller. She is on the faculty at Humboldt State University, and she's been teaching piano for over 35 years. She can sight-read effortlessly, but more importantly, she sees what I'm doing wrong, and has a bag of tricks and exercises to help me fix my problems. I'll show you what I mean below. I have a lesson every other week, at $50/lesson. Of course it's unlikely that you live close enough for lessons from her, but for completeness, here is her contact information:

• Faculty Web Page: Click Here
• Email: rashamelamed-AT-gmail.com
• Phone: (707) 826-5448

Here are some of the tips she has given me. In many cases, I knew these things, but wasn't applying them well.

Tip #1: Intervals are Indeed Important

Robin showed me that I need to pay more attention to intervals. Hey, Al, you say, you knew that four years ago (see this post and this one)! True, but although I talked and thought about it, I was really still paying attention primarily to the notes. It's frustrating that I was aware of this important key to good sight-reading, but wasn't really employing it well.

Robin has an exercise in which I say the interval by which the melody changes with each note as I play a tune. For example, in this piece:


I would say, out loud, while playing "Same, second, second, second, fifth, sixth, same, second" etc. Of course you can do the same thing for the bassline, some middle part, or chords. I'm not very good at talking while playing, but this helps me pay attention to the intervals.

I also created some interval flashcards. It may seem elementary, but they help me recognize the intervals very quickly. I use them on my iPod Touch, and I can just scroll quickly from one to another, and call out the interval. You can download all the flashcards here. They look like this:



So, if you scrolled through those, you'd say "Sixth! Third! Octave!" Realizing that for seconds, fourths, sixths, etc. (that is even intervals) one note is on a line, and the other on a space, helps. This exercise is only difficult when distinguishing the wider intervals (sixths, sevenths, and so on).

One other trick that I developed on my own to help see intervals is to transpose the piece to another key. For example, I might play the above piece in F instead of C. I figure out what the first notes are, and from then on, I must pay attention only to intervals, because the notes will be wrong. For example, in the above song, I'd start with G and F in the left hand, and B natural and F in the right. On beat three I'd move the bass up a half step, and the melody down a second (a minor second in this case).

This transposing is extremely slow, and often I have to go back to the beginning, and start over. But it's very useful, because you are forced to ignore the notes.

Back to non-transposing playing, here's an example of how I put all this into practice. Take this hymn:

Starting with the second measure, my fingers would be on F and C in the left hand, and F and A in the right. For the next chord, in the right hand, I see that I will still have a third between the notes, and I will shift this pair of notes down by a second. In the left hand, I see that the top note, C, is the same, but that the interval for these two notes is now an octave. So I leave my left thumb on C, and shift my hand position to that of an octave, which I know well.

I usually pick the note in each hand that moves the least, move to it, based on the interval of the change, then use the interval between the notes to find the other note.

Now, having said this, do I always pay attention to the intervals and not the notes? No. There are two reasons.

First, after years of thinking about the notes, it's hard to get away from that. Although I've benefited from my years of daily sight-reading, these years of doing it the wrong way have hurt me in this way.

Second, as Robin has pointed out, there are other ways of looking at the music, or taking in the information while sight-reading. One of those ways is the notes themselves (another is the harmonic structure, which I will discuss below).

However, I've felt that paying more attention to intervals has helped me more than any other tip. If I practice for too long, I find myself getting away from intervals. Often it helps to play a piece very slowly, and force myself to consciously think in the way I described in the above hymn example, explicitly thinking "OK, that note goes up a second, and the other note is a sixth below it." Also, if it's too much to do this for all the notes, I might just concentrate on using the intervals in the bass clef, and not thinking about how I play the top notes.

Tip #2: Don't do a Reset with Each ChordThis is an example of how having a teacher can be better than doing it yourself. One day, Robin said, "Let me show you something. This is how you play this hymn." and she played it, imitating my style. "Now, this is how I play it." and she played it her way.

There was an "Aha!" moment, because I could see immediately that when playing like me, she was essentially removing her fingers from the keys, then "starting over" and finding and playing the next notes. When she played her way, there was this beautiful seamless flow from one chord to the next. That is, it was about moving the fingers in an efficient way from one set of notes to the next. It was partly an issue of fingering, but more an issue of using the changes of the notes rather than the new notes themselves to play the next chord.

Tip #3: Keep the Beat GoingThis is the tip that Robin feels is most important. Of course I have always known this, but she has made me work on it more.

Tip #4: Know What to Leave Out

If you keep the beat going, but are having trouble, you can't slow down. So instead, you have to leave something out. Dr. Miller explained that the melody has the first priority, and the lowest note is a close second. That is, you can leave out the middle notes if you need to.

I pretty much knew that, but here's an exercise that helps me "cheat" when I get into trouble. Playing a hymn, Robin would have me play just the outer voices, or just the inner voices, or some other combination. At first this was extremely and embarrassingly difficult. I would have thought that leaving things out would be easy, but I had been seeing the music as a unit. I found that doing this exercise helped me to leave out some notes when necessary. Sometimes I'll practice by playing all four voices, then leaving out one or two for a few measures.

Robin has also noted that I tend to leave out the bass when I get into trouble, getting caught up in the top voices -- I need to work on that.

Tip #5: See the Harmonic Structure

The number of chords used in a piece are usually pretty limited, and often predictable, especially in hymns. For example, you can be pretty sure that the second-to-the last chord will be the dominant seventh for the key.

Robin's tip is to get used to instantly knowing what chord is represented by the notes. The exercise she suggests is to say the name of each chord as you play it. So, for example, for the first line of this hymn,

you'd say: F, C, Dm, C, F, C, F, C7, F, Bb, F, C7, F, C. That bolded C7 might just be some passing tones, but it seems to work like a C7. Some tunes are not as easy as that one, with, for example, the tonics of some chords left out, but the basic idea is the same.

I've been a little resistant to this tip. My reasoning is that it seems that you are using the notes to figure out what the chord is, in order to know what the notes are. But you started with the notes, so what's the point?

But apparently the point is to instantly notice the chord, helping you to know ahead of time what the notes will be. I'm going along with this, and it does seem to help. I find that with the common keys I already recognize many of the chords.

Tip #6: Take a Minute to Look Through a Piece Before Playing It

This probably should be tip #1, because it's one of the first things my teacher told me. I knew I should be doing this, but felt that it may help my playing, but wouldn't help my sight-reading. In other words, I wanted to practice being surprised by the notes, and dealing with it. But I'm a dutiful student, and I now take the time to check through, looking for clef changes, checking out the rhythmic structure, watching for difficult places, etc. I don't do it as much with hymns, since they are quite predictable, and I enjoy going from one to next, and noticing the sound of the change in key. But this is definitely good advice.

BTW, I don't want to imply that I'm playing only hymns -- I also work with modern stuff and non-hymn easy classical pieces.

I'll stop here and pass on some more tips in future posts.

In three days it will be four years since I started this crusade, and I'll post a progress report along with recordings.

Getting Professional Help

It's been over a year since my last post; now three years from the start of my quest.

During this last year, I haven't done quite as much sight-reading as I did during the first two years, since I've had a lot of gigs and have been working on other piano tasks. I've done a good bit more non-sight reading, that is, reading the same piece repeatedly to get better at it instead of memorizing it. I have even performed a simple piece from music -- a first for me.

I've continued improving, but way too slowly.

But today, I took my first lesson with an accomplished teacher who is confident that she can help me improve faster! This is big news.

During the lesson she had me sight-read a very simple classical piece. I did a great job at demonstrating how poorly I sight-read. I was hampered a bit by not having the right glasses, and by performance anxiety, but in general I think I communicated my level of skill in this area.

Some of her initial comments were:

• I should spend much more time analyzing the piece before I play it, checking all the way through for what will be happening, noticing patterns, thinking about the key, etc.
• Intervals are indeed important, and I have to get better at thinking about intervals instead of individual notes. I should be thinking more of relationships between notes. One exercise is to say the interval out loud ("second," "third," "fifth," etc.) either while playing or away from the piano.
• I need to always practice not stopping or slowing down; I should make rhythm the first priority.
• It's best to start at a slow tempo, and work my way up.
• I should think more about where I'm looking. Not only looking ahead, but also making sure I scan up and down, and not get locked into just the treble or bass clef.
• I should pay attention to the fingering suggestions, seeing them as something that will help me.

I'm optimistic that this is going to help, and I will keep you posted!

Two Years and Counting

Well, I've now been working on my sight-reading for two years! Where does the time go, huh? I'm continuing to improve, and more importantly, I'm reaping the benefits of my new skill:

(1) It's great to be able to read and play examples in instructional jazz texts (see an earlier post for an example).

(2) I'm enjoying learning pieces by reading through them multiple times. For example, click here to hear me play this nice arrangement of Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas (from the Reader's Digest book of Christmas Songs).


(3) I'm finding that t's much easier to memorize songs when I can read pretty well. Instead of laboriously reading through a measure or two at a time, I can more quickly play a segment of the song and commit it to memory. For example, I've recently memorized Bach's Two-Part Invention #8 (hear me play it in our 2009 Christmas card video (about halfway through. All the music in that video was me playing on my Yamaha P90), Bach's French Suite 5 Allemande, and Schubert's Scenes from Childhood (Foreign Lands & People).

Back to the actual sight-reading progress aspect, I've continued to do about an hour of reading per day. I do more repeated readings of songs -- while technically not sight-reading, this has the benefit of letting me practice reading at a higher tempo.

I'm getting more comfortable at sight-reading. That is, it's less of a strain than it was in the past. Things are becoming more automatic, and my hands go where they are supposed to go with less conscious thought.

As mentioned before, I'm good at not looking at my hands, but I could still be much better at reading ahead. Here are several examples of my sight-reading, recorded yesterday. They give a pretty good feeling for where I stand, although I play better when I'm not making a recording destined for the world wide web.

• Slow Boat to China
• Slow Boat (after four read-throughs)
• Imagination
• When You Wish Upon a Star
• I'll Know
• Till There Was You (after one read-through)

That's it for now. I'm continuing to work on this, and I'll report back in a year!

Progress (1.75 Years)

Things are still coming together, but more slowly than expected. I see the end of the tunnel, but I figure it's about two years away. That is, I expect that in another two years, I'll be a really good sight-reader.

Before continuing, let me show you where I stand. Here are two pieces being sight-read, one easy, one a bit harder (click on the images for a full-sized version).

Click here to hear me sight-read Wabash Cannonball.


Click here to hear me sight-read When my Sugar...

So, I'm getting the hang of things, but I'm still quite slow. I just can't keep up if I increase the tempo. (I realize that got some off the rhythms wrong on the latter song.)


Not Looking at my Hands

One thing that I'm really, really good at is not looking at my hands. I can read an entire song, and not even glance down once, even when there are big jumps. I highly recommend getting this ability nailed. It feels really cool, and I never have to worry about losing my place in the music.

There are two things going on here: Feeling the keys, and knowing where they are.

Concerning feeling the keys, you have to get into the habit of caressing them all the time. Imagine that you are a lovesick teenager, and the keys are your girlfriend. You just can't get enough of touching her/them.

As for knowing where they are, I should give some credit to the book Super Sight Reading Secrets by Howard Richman (more on that book later). His keyboard orientation drills made me realize that I could move my finger to a note pretty accurately with my eyes closed, even if I wasn't starting from a known note. Here's the exercise I do:

I make sure I am sitting right in front of middle D (that is, with my belly button lined up with the middle of the middle D key). Then I close my eyes, put my hands in my lap, then think of a note and move a finger to it. I found that often I got the note exactly right, and my accuracy improved with this drill. In other words, the feeling of where your arm is can be pretty good for hitting the note you want.

Combined with feeling the keys, this ability can help you eliminate your need to look at the keys. It's true that doing this is a lot easier one note at a time than in the middle of some complex song. Also, I sometimes get "desynchronized" with the keys, and play, for example, an E when I'm expecting a B. But once you get some ability and confidence here, you might find that you can make those big skips without thinking about them.

I'm hoping that the habit of not looking down at my hands will get so ingrained in me, that I won't do it even if I'm playing in public or am nervous.


Looking Ahead

Looking ahead as I'm playing is still a struggle for me, and I'm still working on it. I play better when I do it, but that just may mean that the song is easier, and it gives me a chance to look ahead. Sometimes I try to look ahead just a half measure or so. I played prelude one in Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier yesterday, and was able to zip through it with almost no errors. Why? Because each measure repeats the same five notes twice, so there's plenty of time to read and understand the next measure as I'm playing the current one. If I can just get that same idea working for other songs, I'll be set.

That's it for now, sight-reading fans. Please leave a comment if you're finding this blog useful!

Progress Report (1.25 yrs)

Since finishing the year of sight-reading, I've continued reading at least 30 minutes a day, sometimes significantly more. I'm reading only modern/pop/standards stuff -- no hymns or classical.

I'm quite pleased with my recent progress. It feels like things are finally coming together. As a side benefit, I'm noticing more confidence in my jazz reading (that is, reading melody lines while playing chords). I'm also finding that working with transcriptions or educational piano stuff like this


is a lot more convenient, since I can play the examples much faster.

As an example of my progress, today I sight-read this piece pretty well (but with a lot of mistakes) at about 50 BPM:


I'm realizing that much of my progress is based on a new-found quick, involuntary understanding of the notes on the page. That is, I see, I understand, I play. To show you what I mean, look at the following sentence, but don't read or understand it:

I went to the store.

I'll bet that there isn't one person among you who could look at that sentence without reading it and understanding what it meant. That's what I'm now getting with the music. I see the notes and instantly have a feeling for what they mean and how I'd move my hands to play them. I also realize that this is something that takes time to develop.

Shorter Practice Time

Here's a comment concerning 30 minutes versus two hours per day: One benefit to the shorter time is that perhaps I do less practicing of bad habits. For example, it's hard to force myself to look ahead all the time when playing for two hours. As a result, I'm doing a lot of practicing of sight-reading without looking ahead. When practicing for a shorter time, I can focus more on practicing the good habits.

Things I am continually working on that seem to help:

• Focus on reading ahead
• Make sure I don't look down at my hands at all
• Feel the keys
• Always play with the metronome

So now I'm just continuing to sight-read, attempting to gradually increase the tempo at which I play songs.