Sight Reading Solutions for Pianists

               One of the biggest issues facing sight-readers is having enough sheet music on hand to develop sight-reading skills. If you constantly buy new sheet music just to have something to sight-read, you will find this quickly becomes expensive. Fortunately, in the digital age options for freely available sheet music are abundant, especially on the well-known IMSLP website.             However, outside of the larger public domain sites, more contemporary composers sometimes offer free sheet music on their websites. One such person is Arden Wilken. Her music is unique in that she writes music for therapeutic purposes. This music facilitates transforming the listener’s emotions into beneficial states of well-being.             Arden’s website, https://www.innersoundonline.com/albums , offers a free PDF download of sheet musi...

               As someone who is classically trained in piano, my piano lessons almost always covered classical pieces once I had finished studying the method books. My teachers may have had no training or experience exploring other styles of music so I never studied them. Additionally, I mostly never expressed interest in popular music or listened to it very much.   I suppose you could say that my music teachers and I were for the most part classical snobs. While being on the search for more music to sight-read, I came across multiple books at the public library containing sheet music of popular music. One of these books was even labeled by the publisher as a “simplified version.” I thought well there might be the possibility that this book may be levels below my sight-reading ability. Well, it turns out that I was completely wrong. I found this simplified book challenging not because of reading the notes or technical issues were di...

               Recently, I checked out a book at the library called The Bach Fake Book . In case you do not know what a fake book is, it consists of music notated with single line melodies in the treble clef with chords symbols above the staff. The chord symbols are often letter names suggesting major chords, slash marks like F/A, which indicate chord inversions, abbreviations for minor, diminished, and other chord types, and numbers representing extended chords such as sevenths and ninths. In contrast to normal piano music with two staves and full notation of complete harmonies and bass lines, a fake book only provides the bare minimum notation for the performer to improvise an arrangement of the piece without being confined to playing every single note a composer has written. For popular music, playing from a fake book is common practice. Many classical musicians often struggle with fake books because of the lack of training in this aspec...

            Over the past couple of months, I have been reading a stack of around two dozen articles on piano sight-reading I found through databases in the public library. With a highlighter in hand, I marked the main points that I found helpful, interesting, and even unexpected for future reference. Then I typed up these sentences on a word document and later categorized the research into various subjects such as visual perception, chunking patterns, and rhythms. Now I can see what the research says about a particular topic as a whole. Some comments in the research are consistent across many different articles. In other cases, experts disagree and even present contradictory viewpoints. I have summarized the research in each category to make sense of all, as I initially found the conflicting findings quite confusing. One conclusion from this research investigation is that there is definitely no overreaching consensus on the best practices to learn s...