Other than experience, what are ways to accellerate your piano playing and perfo

Question:Especially for sightreading. I know with experience I will continue to improve at it but are there any methods or tips that I should know about which will make it simpler?

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: Especially for sightreading. I know with experience I will continue to improve at it but are there any methods or tips that I should know about which will make it simpler?

Sight Reading - There are several ways to improve sight reading... the first is quite simple... Read music. Never look down at the keys. You have to get use to reading music and moving your hands and fingers accordingly. You can't sight read if you can't read music. But you're thinking "I can read music".... truthfully, you can't... Let me explain. You can read music as in read the notes, rhythms, dynamics. Sure, but when you read it is either hands separate or slow. Once you learn the music and begin to memorize people tend to look at their fingers. A way to test memory. When you have the music in front of you, you are not truly reading, you are looking at it while your fingers move due to muscle memory.

Reading music means actively telling yourself what to do. Commanding the fingers. Try it, put something in front of you and verbally tell yourself what to do. You will find it not so easy. Always be conscious about your practice. Constantly tell yourself notes, patterns, if you see scales, fingerings, countings... etc.

Second - read piano four hands or two piano four hands music with someone who is better than you. This way you will be forced to keep up with the other person. In sight reading we tend to go slowly and slow down when things get hard. Well when you read with someone who is better than you, you will be force do read faster and react quickly to what is going on. You can't stop... if you make a mistake, you have to learn to jump or if things get tricky, learn to reduce, leave out a hand until you can get it back in or play chords.

Third - recognize patterns. If you see a scale in sight reading, quickly glance the rhythm, starting/ending notes, any accidentals. If it is a C scale, then you know the fingering, just keep the rhythm and then focus on the other hand. Do this will all patterns you see

Four - Use your ear. Most of the time you can predict where the melody is going. Trust your ear. Music is about listening. Try to be proactive by listening for resolutions and predicting where the music will end up.

Five - Reduce - drop notes, drop a hand if you have to. It is more important to keep going than to stop and correct mistakes! You are sight reading. The goal is to always move forward. Leave out challenging parts if you have to and play the other hand. For example: You may see an alberti bass using tonic and dominant triad while the R.H. is doing some crazy runs. Focus on the R.H. runs by playing a solid tonic and dominant triad. You still keep the harmonic inflections, so you lose the pattern in the left, but at least you can keep going without stopping.

Again - practice reading! That is the most important thing. If the music is in front of you, don't look down. When you look down it takes time to look up, find the music and then look down to find the notes. Keeping your eyes on the music will also train your hands to learn the keyboard geography. And tell yourself what you are playing. Always be conscious and direct your hands to where they have to go.

Unfortuantely my friend, there is no short cut. Just as you might read novels and learn to read and comprehend and retain more over time, so does your brain accomodate the newness of new music.

I can tell you this, what makes music comprehension faster and easier is to read in chunks. Like reading language, you see words and do not have to spell them out. In your practice, look for patterns common elsewhere and analyze them. (Major, minor, diminished, dominan-fundtion?) etc.

Then, as you acquire more experience, you will sight read faster and faster. And this will be because you have a huge "vocabulary" of musical chunks.

Also, just make a habit of sight reading once a day. Buy some cheap books of silly stuff and try to read about 5-10% of your overall practice time.

In the end though, there is no substitute for experience and consistent practice.

Best wishes,

teej

Practice... practice and more practice... there is NO EASY WAY. you have to EARN your ability to perform

Listen, listen, listen to all types of piano music. Not just the classical stuff from classical pianists like Andre Watts or Alfred Brendel....but also the semi-classical stuff....from people like Billy Joel all the way to Yanni.

You can also get Music Minus One CDs that may have a piano part for any chamber music composition in classical music that requires a piano, like Brahms' Piano Quintet in F minor. Then, get the corresponding score or scores and try to listen to the CD and play along your piano part with the other instruments on your CD.

Also....get any fake book on pop music or jazz music and find any recognizable song you really know and read it (yea, sight read.)

But if you do that, you need to know the basic chords and chord progressions. If you do, you will be leaps ahead and you will get more gigs and performances if you know chords...not just the melodic lines.

My mom always used to hold a piece of paper just above my hands so I couldn't look at them.

If your trying to memorize a song, play the hands seperately by memory and start in different spots by memory.

easy source of sight reading. If you go to church, borrow a hymnal. lots of music there. also for experience, volunteer to play at nursing homes, church(if you go).
Brian

If you can't practice in reality, do it in your head. Visualization helps a lot.