How to improve your sight reading

Music Lesson: Sight Reading, Interpretation, and Improvisation

In grades one to five, you'll be required to choose between sight reading and interpretation/improvisation. You might ask, "Why do I need to read?" Well, sight reading is a really important professional skill. It has many benefits.

If you find yourself in a professional context where you get a chart and you have to read it, then you need to be able to read, it's very important. At Rock School, we make sure this is a key criterion of the examination package.

Tips for Sight Reading

Single Line Reading

The first thing I'm going to do is give you some tips on how to get through:

• Single line reading
• Composite groove reading

These skills will help with interpretation and improvisation. We'll work through a few practice systems and I'll provide as much advice as I can.

Understanding Phrases

The process of sight reading typically involves:

1. Looking at notes
2. Putting notes together into phrases
3. Recognizing those phrases in a sight reading situation

Initially, when you're working on those phrases, you're kind of figuring it out. You break it down slowly and piece it together.

For example, consider this 16th note phrase:
1, 2, 3, 4

When you first start looking at that phrase, you need to work out:

• What it looks like
• Why it's written that way

You can essentially hear that sound: "one and a two and a three and a four and a one."

Then, you develop an automatic response to that rhythm when you see it written on the page. So when you see that rhythm, you know it will sound like "1 and a 2 and 3 and 4." You're not thinking about trying to work it out anymore; it becomes instinctual.

Recognition in Sight Reading

In the actual sight reading situation or while practicing, it's crucial to work towards this natural, automatic response. This process is very similar to how you'd learn to string words together.

If you saw a sentence in a book or newspaper, you would naturally read across the page without working out the individual words. Similarly, when you read notation, you string notes and phrases together the same way you string words together when you read or speak.

Phrasing Systems

Every subdivision note, pulse, and metric system will have a kind of phrasing system attached to it. For example, with eighth notes, if my tempo is:
1, 2, 3, 4

There aren't that many ways to break the eighth notes up:

• Downbeat (quarter note): 1, 2, 3, 4
• Half-beat: 1 and 2 and 3 and 4
• Two eighth notes: 1 and 2 and 3 and 4

These combinations of eighth notes come together to produce phrases.

Triplet Phrases

Moving on, if you need to play triplet phrases, break them down into groups of notes:
1, 2, 3, 4
1 triplet, 2 triplet, 3 triplet, 4 triplet

We can also create different variations, like:

• The last 2, 3, 4 triplet
• The first and the third triplet.

This is how we create triplet phrases.

16th Note Phrases

Of course, with 16th note phrases, the more notes you get per beat, the more phrases you'll encounter while sight reading. Let's check this out:

Four 16th notes at a tempo:
1, 2, 3, 4
One E and A, two E and A, three E and A, four E and A...

I can break those 16th notes into various phrases. Here are some common phrases:

• 1 E and A, 2 E and A, 3 E and A, 4 E and A
• First three notes: 1, 2, 3, 4
  1 e and 2 e and 3 e and 4 e

You can also play just the middle two notes or the last three, depending on the exercise.

Practice Requirements

The practice requirements for mastering sight reading involve recognizing how notes look and how rhythms sound.

If you commit to enough practice, you'll become a better sight reader in both musical and professional contexts. You can also work through 16th note triplets, 32nd notes, and other common phrases as you progress through the higher grades.

I hope you now understand how those phrases fit together and the importance of recognition, note values, and subdivisions in sight reading!