# Is It Ever Too Late to Learn Sight Reading?



## Christine

Began playing piano at age 5. Never picked up sight reading and ended up learning by memory and being told where to place my fingers. I know only rudimentary "reading," at the level of a five-year-old who's just learning how to read words. The analogy is, if you see CAT, you immediately recognize it as "CAT." A first-grader just learning to read sees C-A-T, the components, and sounds them out as "Ca, aah, Tttt," and may or may NOT then see "CAT."

I see only the components rather than a whole when I look at sheet music. If I know how the song sounds -- if I can play or hear it in my head -- I can painstakingly figure it out on the keyboard by looking at the sheet music -- LOOKING at it, not reading it.

My hands and fingers are trained, but I cannot read music, not even a beginner's single-note bar. I know the F-A-C-E and "every good boy does fine," and that's how I can figure things out (if I can already play the piece in my head). I can recognize an octave. I recognize patterns or the same chords repeated. I know the sharp, flat and natural symbols.

I CANNOT play the piano without looking at the keyboard.

Throughout my life I've taught myself songs without sheet music, such as the piano in the original TV series "Incredible Hulk." I taught myself (with a lot of help from the commercial on YouTube) a waltz that's played on a Cymbalta commercial. I taught myself "Nadia's Theme" (no sheet music) as a child. 

I was playing Bach's Invention at around 8, and learned Little Fugue at 5 or 6. Nailed Debussey's Fireworks at around 12 -- with my mother telling me where to place my fingers and demonstrating. 

With all that said, to give you an idea of my music skills...

I'm 58. I'm wondering, with my background, I can ever learn fluid sight reading such that I could look at any Debussey piece and peel it off on the first try, or at least, "work it" like a rock climber works a new route, but after several re-climbs, has it linked.

Second question: Anyone familiar with the "Alfred Method"?


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## Taggart

There seem to be two sorts of music learner - those who are more comfortable by ear and those with music. Each has difficulty understanding the problems of the other.

I'm happy with music but have trouble (massive problems!) trying to play by ear.

One step is to sight sing the melody line. If you can "hear" what the composer intends then you should be able to play it back.

Everybody has to look at the keyboard at some stage - big jumps or awkward chords - but that should be minimal. If you need to look at the keyboard, then you need to have a feel for the keyboard. That comes with scales and lots of practice.

Think about reading aloud in public. You want to see your audience, your head needs to be up to project properly, so you look at the text and remember a phrase or two, say it and look down for the next.

When you play, you should look ahead and memorise the next few notes so you can look down if you need to, then back to the music. As you play more and do lots of scales and finger exercises, then you will feel better about the keyboard and look down less. Work at consistent fingering, that brings in muscle memory. Scale patterns help to teach you finger patterns for keys and arpeggios.

I started early, gave up for many years. Came back at 30, played for two or three years. Came back at 61 and am still playing. It's never too late to learn, it just takes effort.

No idea about the Alfred Method though. I've used Joining the Dots from ABRSM which concentrates on tonality and also the Paul Harris sight reading books.


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## Festus

As Taggart says," As you play more and do lots of scales and finger exercises, then you will feel better about the keyboard and look down less. Work at consistent fingering, that brings in muscle memory. Scale patterns help to teach you finger patterns for keys and arpeggios."
He is 100 % spot on. You may not be able to do everything you want at first, but over time you will see improvement.
Practice scales until you can play them without looking at the keyboard or with your eyes closed.

Here is the key: " It's never too late to learn, it just takes effort." Remember, the turtle always wins the race!


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## Heck148

It's interesting - I can play several instruments, all woodwinds, bassoon at long-time professional level....

I absolutely stink at piano - at school I barely passed the secondary piano requirement....I hated it and never practiced....I always had to look at the keyboard which meant i was terrible at sight-reading on piano...
With wind instruments, you have no such issue - you can't look at your hands, they are out of sight.....you quickly learn to associate the written notes with the hand position, fingerings, etc....
you practice and memorize scales and arpeggios, intervals of all shapes and sizes. these become programmed in, so when you see those note configurations you automatically know what the fingering pattern is....you read whole groups of notes at one time...
Christine - a possible suggestion - it seems that the keyboard itself is creating a distraction for you.....see if you can latch onto a recorder. learn the different notes, and try reading some basic simple tunes....you won't be looking at your fingers, you'll be looking at the music, and feeling the correct position and combination...that should help you focus on the music you are reading....start with simple tunes....of course, your ear will tell you what pitches you should be producing as well....


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## Krummhorn

It's never too late to begin learning to sight read. In fact, it may be required for most organist positions in a church as part of the audition process ... every church position I've applied for in the past 59 years has required me to sight read hymns and/or choral anthem accompaniments. 

I learned sight reading in my first two years of organ lessons ... has been very valuable for me over the years.


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## ulrichburke

Dear Christine.

Going to give you a bunch of stuff to try to demystify it for you. So first of all, forget all you've seen regarding clefs, Italian words, funny signs that look like hairgrips, the lot. Here's what to do.

Get a sheet of lined paper. Ordinary lines, not music lines. Helps if they're quite wide-ruled, but it doesn't really matter. On the bottom line, with the line going THROUGH the letter, write G. Then A in the space between the bottom and the next line, then B with the next line going through it, then C in the space above that and so on. If you do that so it lists TWICE - you'll discover that on the first set of lines, which of course are the lower set, the letters on the lines are G, B, D, F, A and the letters in the spaces are A, C, E, G. The second time around, of course the HIGHER set going up the page, the letters ON the lines are E, G, B, D, F and the letters in the spaces are F, A, C, E! 

Didn't need any curly shapes to define that, it's just how they fall naturally going up the page. And that's how it all started. They're called 'ledger lines' because the whole system was invented by monks, who used to do a LOT of book-keeping because, being men of God, the rich guys of the time could trust their total honesty. 

Hopefully! 

And these men of God used to go to Morning Service chanting plainsong. Now Fred, one of the overtly more devout, was proud of his plainsong - but he wasn't good at remembering what he sang. So he got an old ledger book, looked at the lines in it and thought 'Hmm... I started about HERE - blob - then I went up a bit to about HERE - higher blob - then back down to HERE - lower blob...' And he had a way to remember what he'd sung for the next day. 

Of course, the other people who had to remember tunes were troubadour bands (if I've got the name right, travelling bands of the time.) They had to remember loads of folk tunes for areas and that, of course, was a problem. So when they saw what Fred had done they thought 'Ooh!' And got a few ledger books of their own and did the same thing, blobs on lines as mnemonics. 

Thing IS, blobs on lines only tell you the level of the notes, not the speed or anything else. (Incidentally - wanna know why there's TEN lines - 2 sets of 5 - in manuscript but an octave's got 8 notes? Flute players! Although you've got 10 fingers, if you're playing a flute, your thumbs are usually supporting the flute. So you've only got 8 fingers left!) So they started redesigning the Basic Blob to give out more information. And the one and only rule to remember here is 'The More Tails, the Faster they Wag!' 

Basic note - a Breve. (I know people say semibreve but think of the SEMI part!) A breve, still used in organ music, is square. Being square, of course it can't roll too quickly! So it takes a lo-o-ng time to finish. 

Next note - Semibreve. It's oval, which means it can roll a bit faster than a Breve but of course not TOO much faster because it's oval and not round! So it takes half the time of a Breve to get anywhere. And all the others have One Rule going for them. 'The More Tails, the Faster they Wag'. 

So you get a white note with 1 tail (the stick!) That can wag it along quite fast, twice the speed of the oval note below it. And its filled-in black brother, though looking the same apart from being filled-in, can wag its one tail a bit faster - pushing it along twice as fast as its white brother. Spotting a progression here? Every tail makes the note twice as fast as the one below it. So 8 beats - breve. 4 beats - semibreve. 2 beats - minim (white oval with one tail) 1 beat - quaver (black oval with one tail) Then semiquaver (2 tails, the quaver's tail with another tail curling off the top!) demisemiquaver (2 tails curling off the main one) semidemisemiquaver (wow!! 4 tails in total!) and so on with adding the semis and demis. 

All this Italian stuff? Just logic, really. I mean if you've got a pile of 4-tailed dogs between two bar lines, going from what I put above you're not going to play them slowly, are you. 2-tailed dogs, not as fast as 4-tailed dogs but faster than 1-tailed dogs. If the notes are sitting on wheels (dots underneath them) they're on unicycles, bouncing along (staccato) if the wheels are behind them (dots) they're idling along a LEETLE slower than usual! But not much. 

So all this clef and bar-lines (upright) business? Decoration. That's all it ever was. The bottom-hand clef's an F, purely because that's the lowest note on whatever instrument they were using (probably an organ but I'm not sure and it doesn't matter!) And the top-hand clef's a G. Taken from a very ornate typefont (which you can actually get, it's called the Mozart typefont and it's a freebie everywhere.) But as I showed you, the letters naturally fall into the right places as you go up the lines and spaces (I'm a poet and I didn't know it!) so the F and G ARE decoration, they're not forcing the notes to be in particular places. 

Manuscript paper lines are in bunches of 5 purely because you've got 5 fingers (but remember why there's only 8 notes in an octave.) The other lines ARE there - if you see a tall note with little lines on its stick (going upwards or downwards) that's the missing lines, put back in so you can work out what the note is. If you're counting above the top line of the top hand, you'll notice the letters have gone back to the bottom-hand sets. Again this is just natural, it's how the sets alternate, if you got a 20-foot piece of lined paper you'd discover that's how they lined up all the way up! 

And the reason for them being given letters for names? Just to unify sounds in a band. If you just had 'a little bit lower here', everyone's 'little bit lower' would be different and you'd get cacophony. Or a John Cage piece. Same thing. If you gave them a name and everyone used the same name for the same sound, but referred to the manuscript paper to know if it was the higher or lower blob-version of that sound, then you'd get unity. Hopefully. It took a century or so to get Universal Tuning but the idea was there! 

Honestly, all this Rallentando, Adagio, Osolemio (sorry!) stuff - forget it. If you're focusing on the tails (or lack thereof) you should get the piece down pretty well. When you're starting off practicing sight reading, I wouldn't even bother with the tails. I'd just practice playing the correct pairs of notes with both hands, very slowly, not bothering about anything else at all. Once you get so it's dead obvious how to play pairs of notes, you can see and hit them straight off (it's a LOT like learning to type, this!) THEN start looking at tails. If you've got (for example) 8 notes in a bar for the top hand and only 2 notes for the bottom hand, you don't need to worry about tails. Just play 8 notes with your right hand and 2 notes with your left hand. When the notes are in the right places with regard to eachother - you can see how they're lined up on the page - the bar will sound right. if it sounds like a car-crash and it's not written by Harrison Birtwistle, chances are you've paired top and bottom hand notes up wrong. 

When you're practicing, pick a piece with no sharps or flats in. Sticking to the white notes at first makes life a lot simpler. The only reason black notes are there is because if they weren't, a piano would be about 30 feet wide!! But I'd stick to no sharps or flats till you were confident in pairing top and bottom hand together - and remember to forget tails at first! And have patience. Start slowly. Speed will come through slowness. Sounds odd but you'll find it's true. 

Hope the above helps. Feel free to ask me anything else you want, don't worry if the question sounds silly to you, I promise it won't to me. I'm happy to go into scales, Circles of Fifths or anything else you want but the above's the basics. 

Yours respectfully


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