A lot of pianists find sight-reading difficult and stressful. I remember dreading sight-reading when I first started learning piano. These days it is genuinely my favourite thing to do. Nowadays as a piano teacher I get to help my students improve their sight-reading, and today I’ll lay out everything I tell my students in the hope that it can help you too.
1) Tackle the Hardest Elements For You Individually
Most people find some elements of sight-reading more difficult than others. If you can figure out what you find the hardest part/s about it, then you can directly work on that skill in isolation using the following techniques:
Rhythm
One of the difficult things about reading piano music is that you have to read two different rhythms at once. If you find that reading the rhythms at speed is the hardest part of sight-reading for you, then you can make use of this exercise that I use with my students:
Take a passage that you want to sight-read, and ignore the pitches, dynamics and articulation. Tap out the rhythms by patting your hands on your head, clicking your fingers or tapping your hands on a table. Tap your right hand every time the right hand plays a note, and tap your left hand every time the left-hand plays a note.
This allows as much of your brain as possible to be dedicated to the rhythm, but can still be challenging in terms of the coordination, depending on the piece.
Once you are happy with tapping out the rhythm using both hands, return one hand to the piano. Play the passage normally with one hand whilst continuing to tap with the other.
Now you do have to think about some of the pitches as well as the rhythm, but you can still ensure that the rhythm lines up well between both hands.
When you are happy playing that way round, swap which hand is playing the piano and which hand is tapping, and do the same thing.
Over time, you will become more and more comfortable reading the two different rhythms at once whilst also reading the pitches.
Key Signatures
For some of my students, remembering to play all of the sharps or flats in the key signature when sight-reading is the most challenging part of it.
What I get them to do is play a passage through normally a few times, observing the given key signature. Then once they are a little bit familiar with the notes of the passage, I will artificially change the key signature and ask them to play the same passage, but this time observing different sharps or flats.
Because they have just played through the passage a few times prior, now the majority of their attention can go on looking out for the new sharps or flats that I have just created for them.
I find that this works best on music that you had never heard before starting this exercise, because depending on which new key signature you choose, the music can start to sound pretty weird…
If I have a student who still forgets to play the sharps or flats even when that is our main focus, then I will go one step further and ask them to sharpen and flatten particular notes that do not even equate to a real key signature, for example “Please sharpen all the A’s, and also flatten all the D’s”.
This is such a weird request that they are usually able to remember it pretty well as they play through the exercise again.
You can create fake key signatures for yourself in your own practice to encourage yourself to keep that front of mind whenever you are sight-reading.
If you have perfect pitch/absolute pitch then this may well annoy you too much to be beneficial, but if you don’t, like me, then it can be a really helpful exercise.
Reading Chords
Chords are notoriously difficult to sight-read in the beginning, because you have to find 2 or more notes in the time that you would usually only have to find one. Personally this was the part of sight-reading that I found the most difficult for years.
If it takes you a while to work out all the individual notes of the chord before you are able to play it, then one thing that you can do is only find either the highest or lowest note of the chord first, and then find the other notes of the chord using how far away they are (the interval) from the note that you found, rather than by which letter they are.
E.g. If you have a chord where all the notes are in the spaces of the stave/staff, then you know that they will all be multiples of two notes away from your original note.
The easiest way to practice this is by getting hold of some chord-heavy music such as hymns.
If you can get your fingers used to playing a variety of differently-structured chords (for example major and minor triads in root position, 1st inversion and 2nd inversion, and dominant 7th chords in all their inversions) in a variety of keys then you will be able to recognise them quicker when sight-reading.
Recognising the Notes
If you are still at the stage where working out which note on the page is which, and are counting up or down from notes that you know, then a great thing to do is download an app to help you practice note recognition.
There are plenty available on the App Store.
They show you one written note at a time and ask you to say which letter it is, and vice versa. This is a great thing to do when you are away from the piano and have a spare 5 minutes e.g. waiting for the bus.
2) Practice Carrying On Without Stopping or Correcting
Carrying on playing without pausing or stopping to correct mistakes is often what people find the hardest part about sight-reading at first. Here is how you can get better at it:
Imagine you were playing a piece that you knew well in a concert. Hopefully if you made a mistake you would try to carry on and not let the mistake impact the overall delivery of your performance.
That is what we want to replicate when we are practising sight-reading. There are 5 main ways to do this without just going and sight-reading in public straightaway:
Imagine Yourself in a Concert Setting
The lowest-pressure way is to simply imagine that instead of practising sight-reading in your home or in a practice room, you are instead giving a performance of this sight-reading exercise in front of a live audience.
This can be a performance space that you know well, or a really scary fictional venue, depending on how much pressure you want to put on yourself.
Really try and convince yourself that you are there, and that the music that you are about to sight-read is actually music that you know very well. Try to not let yourself go back and correct any mistakes, like you wouldn’t in a live performance.
This will set you up well if you ever need to sight-read in front of people e.g. in an exam.
Keep up with a Metronome
Trying to keep up with a metronome tick/pulse can be a great way to encourage you to continue playing through your sight-reading without stopping to correct mistakes.
You can set up a metronome click before you start playing, and treat each click as one beat/count of the bar/measure. If you miss a note or make a mistake, try to carry on and “catch up” with the beat, even if you end up missing out multiple notes in the process (more on this later).
There are plenty of free metronome apps. MetroTimer is the one that I personally use.
Practice Starting from Anywhere
I know that carrying on through mistakes or missed out notes can be difficult, so one way that you can get used to this is by starting your sight-reading or practising at random points in the extract that don’t necessarily make musical sense to begin from, i.e. start in the middle of a phrase, start midway through a held note, start partway through a passage of continuous notes etc.
Being able to start from any point in the music, rather than just the beginning of a section, will make it much easier to reset after any mistakes occur when you are sight-reading, and enable you to maintain the pulse of the piece more easily.
Video Yourself
Recording your sight-reading attempt with a phone or camera is a great way to artificially turn up the pressure when you are sight-reading, whilst still not actually playing in front of anybody else.
When I turn on a camera to record my playing, it induces a similar adrenaline response to performing in front of other people. If you are being recorded, then you are less likely to go back and correct mistakes when you are sight-reading.
When I do this with students, we delete the videos immediately afterwards, to release the pressure. Often there is value in listening to a recording of your playing (in order to catch details such as inadvertent tempo changes that can be more difficult to notice whilst you are using most of your brain on actually playing the music), but that is not the purpose of this for me here, so we go ahead and delete them.
Play in Front of Friends
The highest-pressure low-risk way of practising sight-reading is to actually play an unseen piece or passage in front of people that you know and trust.
It’s a great way to make yourself carry on, no matter what goes wrong, whilst still being a safe environment.
If you have friends who are also musicians then you could even get together and have a little sight-reading mastermind where you choose music for each other to have a go at playing, and offer constructive feedback if you are feeling brave.
It’s important to be aware of whether you are getting tense whilst doing any of these exercises, and if so, have a little break and lightly stretch or shake off some of that tension.
Getting tense is common when sight-reading in the beginning, because it is a stressful task for many people. Regular practice of the above methods should help to get you used to sight-reading under some pressure, and in turn make it less stressful eventually.
3) Practice Missing out Notes
Intentionally missing out notes might sound counter-productive, but in many musical contexts it is okay, or even the best thing to do.
If you are sight-reading under pressure, for example in an exam or in an ensemble with other people, and there are some notes coming up in the music in one hand that you are so unsure about that you think you will almost certainly get wrong or not know how to play, then it is almost always better to leave some notes out in that hand, and jump back in whenever it is easy enough.
If you practice viewing sheet music in small horizontal phrases or motifs, then when you need to miss a few notes out you can simply reset and jump back in at the beginning of the next small horizontal section (which is hopefully in the next bar!).
Maintaining a consistent pulse is almost always more important than playing every single note. Especially if you are sight-reading with other people, you altering the pulse or playing obvious wrong notes will be a lot more noticeable than a temporarily sparser texture.
The great thing about piano is that you have two hands playing at once, so if one hand needs to miss some notes out, the other hand can still be playing and cover it to some extent. Ideally you would choose to keep the melody going, and sacrifice whichever hand had a more accompanying role.
The better way to miss notes out, which you can practice, is to instead simplify a passage as you go, rather than missing it out completely.
Usually, the important things to keep in a piece of music are the outline of the melody, the harmony, and the general rhythmic style.
Melody
The general shape of the melody is important to keep, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t simplify the melody if it is tricky to sight-read.
If the melody is written as consecutive octaves, then these can be immediately simplified to just one note at a time, without affecting the actual melody at all.
When the melody contains ornaments, or semiquaver/16th note flourishes that don’t impact the overall direction of the melody, then these can also be immediately scrapped when sight-reading, if necessary.
Harmony
It is important to follow the general harmonic progressions of the music that you are reading, but it’s okay to simplify them.
If the chords are written out as broken chords/arpeggios or more elaborate ways to outline the chords, then depending on the context you might be able to just play them as static chords. Whilst this does mean reading ahead a little as you go, to see what the chords are ahead of time, it can sometimes be physically easier to just play one chord per bar instead of what is written.
Rhythm
Rhythms can often be one of the easiest things to simplify if needed.
Repeated semiquavers/16th notes can be simplified to quavers/8th notes, and repeated quavers/8th notes can be simplified to crotchets/quarter notes etc. without really impacting anything else.
However, you need to make sure that there is enough happening on the beats so that the pulse is always clear.
Additionally, each musical style will have its own rhythmic characteristics that differentiate it and make it interesting. Try to keep as many of the original rhythmic patterns as you can, to convey the style even if you are simplifying the melody and the harmony.
How to Practice This
You can practice this in two ways – away from the piano, take any random sheet music and think about which notes are necessary, and which notes could be left out if needed.
Sometimes you can have different levels of what to miss out e.g. if the tempo is just slightly too fast, you can simplify the music slightly, and if the tempo is extremely fast and you need to just play the minimum required, you can simplify the music a lot more.
After you’ve done this, you can go back to the piano and practice reading the music with your pre-planned simplifications. This takes a bit of getting used to, as it is weird at first to be intentionally ignoring some of the notes written in front of you.
If this is new to you, then start practising this at a very slow speed that you are more than comfortable playing at. Artificially simplify the music at a slow tempo, and then when you are happy with what is being missed out, increase the speed.
If you are going to be sight-reading along with other people e.g. accompanying, then it is a good idea to force yourself to practice at a speed that you know is too fast for you to realistically play all the notes that are written. This is a more realistic way to practice missing out notes as you go along, and making immediate decisions about what is kept and what is left out.
In an ideal world we’d all be able to sight-read everything without missing out notes, but if missing out notes or simplifying things enables us to maintain the pulse then that is still a success. Sight-reading isn’t supposed to be perfect, whether that is for an exam or in any other context.
4) Practice Not Looking at the Keys
Sight-reading is a whole lot easier if you don’t have to look at your fingers very much. Because you are reading the music for the first time, the more your eyes can be on the new music in front of you rather than helping to figure out where your hands need to be at any moment, the quicker you will be able to play a new piece of music.
Often beginner pianists are (or believe they are) very reliant on their eyes to ensure that their fingers are on the right notes. What can you do about this?
The boring answer is that the more you play the piano, the better your awareness of where all the keys are will be, but there are some ways to speed it up a bit.
When my students struggle with this, as an exercise I get them to play a piece where I allow them to find their starting notes for each hand, but as soon as they begin playing they are only allowed to look at the music, and never at their hands.
Of course mistakes are to be expected, but very often they are surprised by how much they could play successfully, without ever looking at their hands.
And that is the point of this exercise – it’s not so much about immediately improving your awareness of your hands in relation to the keys, but more about giving you the confidence that you can trust your hands to be in the right place a lot more than you might previously have thought.
I have students who, when playing any piece of music, will read the upcoming notes and automatically get their fingers on the right notes without looking, but then take extra time doublechecking with their eyes that they are indeed on the right notes before they play them.
The more you can do this exercise and convince yourself that you know the key layout better than you thought you did, the quicker you will be able to sight-read anything.
If you find that the hardest part about this exercise is actually stopping your eyes from automatically glancing down at your hands periodically, then you can instead memorise a short passage of sheet music and then close your eyes to try and play it.
That way you can’t accidentally glance down at your hands.
For a lot of people, the most difficult part of not looking at the hands whilst playing is when you have to leap from one note/chord to another that is quite far away.
While in most playing scenarios you will actually be able to look at the relevant hand that has a big jump to ensure you get to the right place, and indeed this is the main case where it’s good to take advantage of looking at your hands in that moment, when sight-reading you can save time by needing to look less.
And plus, what if both hands have a large jump at the same time?
When practising, you can pick two notes that are a large distance away, put them on a repeating loop, and force yourself to alternate between these two notes whilst your eyes are still glued to the music, or even better, whilst your eyes are closed.
Usually people find that it only takes a couple of seconds before they can pretty comfortably jump between the two notes accurately. Repeat this for different note/chord combinations and you will soon see an improvement in your ability to sight-read big jumps without looking.
If you want a suggestion of what music to use for practising this, then pretty much any ragtime piece will be a good bet, particularly for the left hand.
The other technique that you can use to practice this is what one of my piano teachers used to call “feeling the notes”.
Essentially, when you practice a leap from one note/chord to another that is far away, take a split second to really dial into the physical sensations in your hand and doublecheck that a) the notes that your fingers are on physically feel like they are the notes you are expecting, and b) your fingers have solid contact with the middle of the keys, and are not going to accidentally catch a neighbouring note as well.
The more you incorporate this connection into your practice, the quicker you will get at it when playing for real.
5) Practice Choosing a Sensible Tempo
Sometimes when my students are sight-reading, they start off at a very ambitious and impressive speed, but then have to slow down when they reach a difficult passage. This is understandable, but can be fairly easily avoided.
As mentioned earlier, maintaining the pulse is one of the most important elements of sight-reading. It’s usually best to start at a speed that will allow you to tackle the most difficult passages of a piece without the pressure to keep up a tempo that is too fast, even if this means that the easier passages are played slower than you might have liked them to be.
You can practice choosing a starting tempo in the same way that you could practice anything else – take a few seconds before you start playing a piece to have a quick scan ahead for what you think the most difficult passage will be.
Take a guess for how fast you could comfortably play that section, and then that is the speed that you start at, even if the beginning of the piece is easy.
6) Decide How to Prepare Under Pressure
There are very few real-life scenarios where you need to start sight-reading literally the second that the music is put in front of you. In an exam sight-reading test you will have your 30 seconds, and even for piano accompanying work or when working as a session musician, you will usually at least have a few seconds to scan through the music.
How you use this time depends on your strengths and weaknesses, but it can be good to have a plan for which things to look for.
Two essential things would be clocking the key signature (and potentially whether this changes at all during the piece), and finding your starting notes and which fingers to use for them.
If you have any time left over after this, then you could look for any element of sight-reading that you find more challenging, including: difficult rhythms, accidentals (extra sharps, flats or naturals that are not included in the key signature), difficult chords, difficult hand position changes (grade 3 onwards), or which tempo to play at (if you are playing by yourself rather than with others).
Having these options prioritised according to your needs can help you to make the most of your preparation time before sight-reading.
For example, I often sight-read as an accompanist, and when I have a few seconds to look through the music beforehand, I will often look for any bars/measures where there is an accidental early in the bar/measure that is repeated during that same bar/measure, without its symbol.
When I am learning music properly, I don’t seem to have trouble remembering repeated accidentals, but when I am sight-reading under pressure I found that I was sometimes missing them, so now if I have time beforehand I will go in with a pencil and write in any continued accidentals, just in case.
I don’t think there is any shame in doing things like that. Whatever helps you play the best is worth doing (although this may not be possible in an exam setting).
If you are not sure which of these things to look for would be best for you to do, then after you have played something once for the first time, analyse what was the hardest bit for you and why. You can then look out for that element of the music in the next sight-reading exercise that you do.
7) Make a Decision about Dynamics and Articulation
When you are sight-reading, you need to decide whether to pay attention to the written dynamics and articulation, or ignore them completely.
There are pros to both approaches.
Observing the written dynamics and articulation can be an easy way to level-up your sight-reading. Confidently playing dynamic contrasts and different articulation styles can convince your listeners that you are comfortable and at ease with the music that you are playing, even if, inside, you don’t really feel like you are.
On the other hand, looking out for dynamic changes and articulation notation uses up valuable energy that could be spent on getting more of the notes right. In some situations it makes more sense to ignore the dynamics and articulation in order to prioritise the accuracy of the playing.
Which approach is best will depend on the individual music being played, and on your own preferences.
With my students that are taking piano grade exams, I usually tell them to focus on the notes and the rhythms for the sight-reading part of the exam, since they only have 30 seconds to prepare the extract, and to only include dynamics and articulation if they have any brain space left over. Usually this is not the case, and that is okay.
It is usually a good idea to make a decision about this before you start playing a piece of music. You can always adjust partway through and scrap the dynamics if the music is more difficult than you thought, or re-include the dynamics if the music is easier than you thought.
If you want to include the dynamics, articulation and other details such as ornaments, but you are finding that difficult at the moment, then you can start by having one go at playing an extract once through where you only think about the notes and the rhythm, and nothing else. Then you can immediately have a second play through that same extract, this time with dynamics and articulation, now that you’ve had some practice playing those notes and rhythms.
8) Artificially Practice Reading Ahead
One of the challenges of sight-reading is that, as you’ve never seen the music before, you won’t know what is coming up ahead in the music.
It is tempting at first to only look at the section of the music that you are playing in that precise moment. That often leads to fluent notes within a bar/measure, but then an inadvertent pause before playing the next bar/measure.
I see this all the time with my students, and there’s nothing wrong with it in the beginning, but it’s something that we can work on to improve the fluency of the piece as a whole.
What you can do to work on this is a 3 step process:
Step 1: look at the 1st bar/measure of your piece or extract, and try to temporarily memorise it, or as much of it as you can. It only needs to go into your short-term memory. Then look anywhere except at that bar/measure in the piece (you can look up at the ceiling, down at your hands, or even close your eyes) and try to play that little section that you have just previously been looking at.
Repeat this with as many different single bars/measures as you like.
Step 2: look at an individual bar/measure again and temporarily memorise it again. This time, instead of playing it while looking elsewhere, stare at the next bar/measure in the music but play the music of the initial bar/measure. E.g. look at and memorise bar 1/measure 1, shift your eyes and look at bar 2/measure 2 but play the music of bar 1/measure 1 that you have memorised.
Repeat with many different pairs of bars/measures.
Step 3: look at and memorise an individual bar/measure again. Shift your eyes onto the following bar/measure again. Now here is the really difficult bit: play the music of the 1st bar/measure whilst simultaneously trying to temporarily memorise the music of the 2nd bar/measure.
Once you have got to the end of the 1st bar/measure, go straight on and play the 2nd bar/measure from your memory whilst simultaneously memorising the music of the 3rd bar/measure, and so on.
This is hard to do, and it doesn’t have to be perfect. I recommend starting to practice this exercise by using very simple music that would usually be too easy for you, and working up when you feel happy to.
Alternatively, practice this hands separately at first until you feel a bit more happy with it.
This skill is essentially what you need to be doing subconsciously any time you are sight-reading. If it’s a slow piece then you can probably get away with just reading each note as you get to it, but anything with many notes or that has a moderate or fast tempo will be made significantly easier to sight-read if you can be looking ahead to what is coming next.
You can also get various apps to help you practice this, where as soon as you start playing one bar, the music for that bar vanishes so you have to make sure that you have temporarily memorised it before you get to it.
9) Listen to Different Types of Music
Here is something you can do to improve your piano sight-reading even when you are away from the piano – listen to lots of different styles of music by different composers.
Often when we are sight reading, the overall style or feel of the music is the last thing we want to think about. We already have to think about the notes and the rhythm and maintaining the pulse etc. The good news is that the more music you listen to, the more you will be able to convey the style of an extract automatically.
Some styles of music have distinctive rhythmic patterns that you can become familiar with. Some have certain tempos that work well. Some have more accented articulation, and some require a more delicate touch. The more music you listen to, the easier it will be to subconsciously play in a stylistically-appropriate way whilst your brain can be mainly focusing on the notes.
10) Start/Continue Practising Scales and Arpeggios
This is probably the most boring tip, but an important one nonetheless.
When you are familiar with scales and arpeggios, it is not just that you are intellectually familiar with their key signatures and patterns, but your fingers are physically familiar with those note combinations and you begin to be able to play them automatically using muscle memory.
If your fingers are used to playing certain key signatures, then it follows that sight-reading in those keys will be easier. You may find that your fingers hover over the relevant sharps or flats automatically, without you having to consciously think about it.
Similarly, scalic passages and arpeggio or broken chord patterns are very common in many different styles of music. If the muscle memory is there, then you will just be able to look at a passage, think “oh that’s just a D minor scale” and off you go, with no more thought needed.
11) View It As “Playing” Rather Than “Practising”
This is my favourite tip out of all of them, and the one thing that helped my sight-reading improve the most.
When I was in school and doing piano grades, I first tried to practice sight-reading by using the official exam syllabus sight-reading exercises, but would get discouraged by how hard they were, and simultaneously how boring a lot of the exercises were. I mostly stopped using them, and thought that I had stopped practising sight-reading.
However, I really enjoyed playing the piano, and I used to spend hours and hours going through random music, whatever I could find, and having a go at stumbling through playing it. Sometimes it was tunes that I specifically wanted to be able to play, but were far too difficult for me. Sometimes it was just any music that I could get my hands on. I really enjoyed trying to play lots of different things.
I never viewed this as piano practice in my brain though – for me it was naïvely separate from my official piano practice for my lessons. I didn’t really think anything of it, until I got to grade 8 and suddenly realised that I was now finding the official sight-reading exercises quite easy.
This amazed me, because in the early grades, sight-reading had always been my weakest element, and as I mentioned, I had given up trying to officially practice sight-reading.
This point is the predominant sight-reading tip that I try to convey to my students now. You do not need any particular sight-reading book to get better at sight-reading, even if you are working towards an exam.
The exam board sight-reading books can be helpful to gauge the standard, and let you know the requirements for the sight-reading test of each grade e.g. which range of notes, which key signatures etc., but it is far more important to get into the habit of picking up different sheet music and just having a go at playing through it in a casual way.
Ultimately, there is nothing special about those sight-reading books. Sometimes teachers like them because they can set sight-reading exercises for homework, but really that can be done using any sheet music.
I have known people to only practice sight-reading using the exam board book of exercises, and then get thrown off because the font of the sight-reading test in the exam was slightly different from the only book that they have been using to practice.
It’s better for your overall piano skill, and frankly more enjoyable, to “practice” sight-reading by just doing your own playing for fun.
It’s also a good idea to pick a combination of tunes that you recognise, and music that is completely new. If you only play pieces that you have heard before, then you don’t have to think so much about reading the rhythm, which ultimately means you don’t push your ability to sight-read rhythms as much as you could.
As well as playing as many different types of music as possible, you will also be exposing yourself to different printing styles and fonts, and different sizes and qualities of printing.
I sometimes see people spend a long time only working on a small number of pieces (e.g. people working towards grades who only play those 3 grade pieces for a whole year). Yes this often means that they can play those few pieces to a high standard, but their sight-reading doesn’t really develop because they are reading the same music all the time.
If you are playing whole pieces every day (or as often as possible) rather than working on the same passages over and over again, then you can frame your sight-reading practice as simply playing rather than practising.
Sight-reading is one of those skills that can take some time to build up, where you are putting in the time and effort but not seeing immediate improvements, but then suddenly it will click – your efforts will have put you above a threshold where suddenly you will just be able to sight read most things confidently and with ease. Then you can have a go at playing through anything you like, and that is where the real enjoyment begins.