As a guitar player, the secret to make me stop playing is giving me sheet music. This video is helping me a lot!!

1. Rhythmic divisions - The trick is to get fast at finding the division points in each measure. - Train your eyes to look for the large beats. [...] You can sort of eyeball where the midpoint is, for example, for each measure. 2. Interval faces - The trick is to pay attention to the lines and spaces. >> If two notes are both on lines or both on spaces, then those are odd number intervals (1, 3, 5, 7, 9...). >> If two notes are one on a line and one on a space, then those are even number intervals (2, 4, 6, 8, 10...). - Once you master this, you can really monkey-branch from note to note. If you have a starting point, you can read the notes by intervals. - This is particular useful when you have a lot of ledger lines. >> If a note is on a high ledger line, you can make an educated guess of what note it is by thinking in terms of odd or even intervals from your reference note. >> You can also think backwards: Your reference note can be several notes ahead of the one you're trying to guess. 3. Tiering - An important extension on the topic of intervals is to layer your reading: if a phrase of music has two layers (some notes much lower, some notes much higher), divide your reference notes, one for each layer. - The important thing is that, by monkey-branching and tiering, you're combining different types of information: absolute information (your knowledge of what a note is upon first glance) and relative information (using reference notes and intervals). 4. Key signatures - For sharps, look at the last sharp to the right: that will be a half step below your major key signature. - For flats, look at the second to last flat to the right: that will be your major key signature. 5. Clumping - Clumping is looking at a larger pool of notes and information instead of reading note by note. - Some common ways to clump notes together are to recognize scales, intervals and chords.

As a kid I thought pianists just read the music and they just play it perfectly. I did not know they practiced a lot to achieve perfection.

Also if you want to improve your sight reading... try composing! It will give you a new perspective!

Piano teacher here. That's almost exactly how I teach reading music. Of course I do it differently at the very start, when students just learn what keys to press when, but I always point out: follow the notation for reference. The number of notes each key stroke, the values, melody contour. I also teach tricky 16th note jazz/funk/latin phrases as "words". One doesn't read each single letter, but recognizes patterns and translates these into sounds. Excellent video as always!

OMG! This video was so incredibly helpful. I’ve studied piano for years and never learned these reading techniques. There is a difference between being encouraged to read more, to actually being shown HOW to read better. Thank you! You are brilliant!!!

I studied music at university level and no one ever taught me any of your tricks! This is life changing!

A lot of these I have been doing naturally but sort of forced myself to stop because I thought it wasn’t the “proper” way to sight read. Thanks for giving these a name and letting me know this is even what the pros do!

What she said was just the first step after visually checking a sheet of music. After playing and reading music for a long time, I found out which finger should play what note is more important. Most of the sheet muiscs have fingering which sometimes do not fit with someone's hand size. However most of the time sheet musics do not have fingering and i have play many times to find out which fingers work better. Pianists are lucky that there is one for each key. But sometimes you have to figured out which hand is better to play a note. The bad thing is we have 10 fingers and we can be expected to play 10 notes simultaneously! e.g Chopin's Prelude #20. For string instruments, you have to add which strings you should hit and which bow direction you should use. These are what you cannot find in any books.

As a violinist I’m always amazed by how great pianists sight-reading skills are. There are tips and this skill takes time to be practiced - we only have 1 staff usually… no excuse if even pianists (2+ staffs) can do it!

I’m a lifelong pianist but always have trouble the first time I look at sheet music. These are great tips!

Another method of determining interval notes is there is a pattern for all lines or all spaces which is F,A,C,E,G,B,D and then it repeats. So on the treble clef the first line is an E note. then all the staff lines going up would be G,B,D, and F would be the top line. And you can continue with notes that are above the top line F which would go A,C,E,G for each note with a line through it. Spaces would be done in the same fashion. Pretty slick way to figure out notes above the normal staff lines.

As a professional classical violinist, this is exactly how I read! Sometimes we have to play old editions that looks almost hand written. It makes the interval spacing not perfectly consistent which makes reading a lot harder haha

I found myself doing things like this years ago when I was taking various music lessons with piano, clarinet, and saxophone.... I ended up getting the idea that because I wasn't playing the notes from a base of absolute knowledge, that my playing was "bad" and/or "inferior". I think I actually have strong musical instincts and this video you made helped me revisit those damaging assumptions I allowed to choke out my willingness to practice and play music. Thank you very, very much for making and sharing this video. You've earned a subscriber, a like, and have made a happier person as a product of your efforts. :)

For a struggling intermediate adult learner, Nahre's skill, ability, her patience and well-thought-out; ingeniously presented explanations are a blessing beyond compare. I love each video and wish her all the success she deserves.❤

As a guitarist, this is the most helpful video for sheet music reading ive come across. I feel like sight reading is actually possible now with practise

As one who easily get intimidated at the thought of reading music, this was absolutely brilliant. Thanks for the tips Nahre! Now to be less lazy and get to reading more 😅

Bach is extremely good for training your sight-reading skills, because (basically) everything he writes contains extremely complex counterpoint. I know sight-reading fugues and contrapuntal stuff may seem very intimidating (and it is), but I can promise that playing through stuff like the WTC and the two-part/three-part inventions are good ways to improve your sight-reading skills (as well as your technique and musicality) significantly. It trains your mind to process all of these different lines at the same time, which extends to all sorts of other music you might want to play.

This was great for me as a teacher. I do all these things, but it's hard to remember I'm doing them when I'm teaching students. It's always good to be reminded of what I'm actually doing so I can teach it to my students.

Wish I’d had a teacher like you when I was 9 years old! Oh well, never too late to learn now. Thank you for this brilliant video.

Fantastic tips! Reading music is very intimidating for beginners, it's much better if you start using these techniques right away... wish I had been taught these when I was a kid, because I haaaated reading music, and didn't get very far. Because of that, I've been playing only by ear since then. But for the last 5 days I've been actually sitting down and just doing it, and employing techniques like these, and it's very fun and rewarding.

Thank you for this video! As a child, I was always an “intuitive” player, and my teachers seemed to think I didn’t need to learn the fundamentals of theory. That ended up hurting me in the long run - I had to drop out of being a piano major because I got to college and realized I knew nothing about theory. I felt so embarrassed around all of these people who had been trained in theory for 10 years. So buying your book was an easy decision. I can’t wait to dive in. Thank you!

This was FASCINATING. SUBSCRIBED. After watching this, I realize my school training in music decades ago only taught me to PARSE music notation. One NOTE at a time, one PITCH at a time. This explanation describes how people can fluently READ music notation to quickly understand what is required to play it without essentially trying to memorize what was manually (painfully) parsed. As an example, the idea of conditioning your brain to realize any two notes both appearing in a "space" are GOING to be odd intervals while two notes -- one on space, one on line -- are GOING to be an even interval makes a first scan so much more informative. Odd / strange that I've never seen anyone explain these techniques.

I got your book. Not only because I’ve been playing for 3 years now and still suck at sight reading, but also because I think you’re a great teacher. Cheers.

🙏🏼 When I play from sheet music, even when I get it right, I very often get stuck on a bar, and am having trouble moving on to the next. I'll reference this video from now on. Thank you!

I always had a blast doing sight reading as a kid when learning (maybe because I didn't love practicing so used it as a crutch to do well enough at lessons). I didn't realize I had internalized a lot of these ideas and never gave them names. So even for an experienced player, it's really neat to see this laid out. Great work!

For anyone interested, her book is great. update : holy molly, why do i have all these likes ?

I am a music teacher and I like to watch your videos to pick up some new tricks. This video was succinct, and I thank you. I'd like to add from my 25 years of teaching piano that it is important to sightread every day, or at least to recognize that if you don't, your language skills in music land will deteriorate. If you spend most all the time you practice working on tough pieces or your repertoire your reading will suffer. The same is true of improvisation - do a little every practice. Thanks again for your insights!

As a really slow reader (Even after learning various Chopin pieces like Ballade No. 1 and Liszt's Liebestraum, still counting "every good boy does fine" and FACE), I think your #3 tip will revolutionize things for me. I can't believe something as simple as that is so... enlightening. Thank you very much! I do wonder why this is so difficult in the first place. Because I've been a guitarist longer than I've been a pianist, and I only play from tab (tablature) for guitar and I do that INSTANTLY. Like ZERO lag for me from reading into playing. Yes, tab really shows you the one spot to play a note, but so does standard notation for piano. That one note in notation will only correspond to one key on the piano, unlike notation for guitar, which can be interpreted at multiple locations on a guitar. Really weird.

Thanks for the gentle and kind teaching method. You truly understand your customer (us beginners)

Tip no2 just let me speechless! I you made my ability to read intervals 10 times easier THANK YOU

FINALLY someone has explained how to do it! Just lean in and squint. Music teachers have been overcomplicating it for hundreds of years. Priceless. And I can't stop laughing. Thanks, Nahre.

that "like=odd, different=even" insight, so useful!

As a musician that struggles with reading music at first sight, I value these hacks. Thanks!

Thank you SO much! As an oboe major in college who has switched to harp later in life, I am so used to reading horizontally, and thinking vertically is a challenge. I used your reference note tip when I had to read (a single line) in tenor clef for my piano proficiency exam, but your tips on finding the beats, tiers, and "same or different" intervals is immediately helpful! This is a video I'll be returning to this video again and again!

This is the best collection of good sight reading tips that I've seen online. There are surprisingly few resources providing useful tools for this part of the musical process which so many of us find frustrating and daunting! 🎵🎶🎵

The space + line breakdown is great to hear someone talk about. Such a simple + effective explanation.

this video could not have been made in a better timing! like for the past few weeks I've just been having strokes trying to read sheet so this is quite literally a lifesaver

Hi Nahre, just wanted to ask if you could make a video on how you maintain your instruments, could be on how you clean your keys or good practices on an acoustic instrument, etc. since I’ve seen you play on both digital and acoustic pianos. This would be very beneficial to know from your perspective. Having said that, your videos are the best. Keep them coming! 😊🤍

Very useful and well-produced! As a side note, getting stronger glasses doesn’t mitigate lean-and-squint.

#1 strategy for sightreading: lean in and squint

For large intervals above the staff with a lot of lines I imagine another staff stacked on top of the normal one, where the first line above the staff (A) is the top line on the bass clef, kind of hard to describe but once you get it in your head it’s completely second nature to read large jumps above the staff

your videos are really really awesome; as a self-taught piano player that never really got too good at reading sheet music, this is really inspiring me to dive into it and practice more!!! thank you so much!!

I’ve been trying to improve my sight reading with Bach and some Bartok. I can usually cheat my way through with the melodic line, but I just hope for the best when it comes to rhythms and chords with weird intervals… so these tips are super helpful! Thanks!

Nahre, your musical choices for this video have inspired me as a sight reader - I began piano at 43 and can now sight read pretty decently. I've never heard these pieces before but they're very beautiful. Though I truly enjoy sight-reading at my current level (3), I'm now very inspired to sight-read at your level !! "Hmmmm . . . what magic spell shall I cast this afternoon? Gershwin!" 🧙✨What an amazing skill to have 😄👍

I love how you illustrated the dominate beats in each measure with color. You should create an App that does that! It's a great way to visualize the piece! In copyright and design (invention) law, there's a type of copyright that is a letter of intent. You find a company that has a product you can improve upon - in this case an electronic sheet music reader - and you file a Letter of Intent to Copyright that basically informs the company you are going to copyright the feature. Then they cannot develop that feature and you can strike a deal with them to buy it from you. I have never looked at any electronic sheet music readers, but I see musicians like at piano bars using iPads to read. Maybe the iPad music readers needs that feature! It's a great idea. Everything is going electronic. Paper sheet music is almost a "thing of the past". On electronic devices, it would tell you the key (even transpose for you, if you wanted to change the key), and it would highlight each measure as it becomes the 'active' measure. So adding a muaic calculator that added note timings together from the start of the measure to find and highlight each beat within the measure would not be a difficult feature to create code for! Great idea!

Piece of cake... if you started reading at age 4. 🙂 Your insightful yet humble presentation gives me hope that I may one day be able to read at least one staff of a simple melody in real time.

Up until now, I've done my best to avoid the anxiety and stress that I've always associated with sight reading. The way you approach it and break it down here has me reassessing my earlier doubts. Perhaps it is time to give it another go.

Great video! i'm a piano teacher and i've been unconsciously teaching students these types of score reading techniques. it's interesting to see them systematized like this!

I took lessons for about six years when I was a child, then I didn't touch a keyboard for 30 years. I have just resumed, and I am fortunate, I still remember how to read music and can basically sight read. I still found this video very useful, many of the concepts you mentioned, and the ways of thinking about things are similar to what I have been attempting. It's nice to kind of know it's "ok."

I had never heard of the concept of tiering, but it totally makes sense! Will try to incorporate this into my sight reading efforts. Thank you for sharing this, Nahre! You're awesome!

Thanks for the generosity and clarity that you use to teach everything, Nahre!! A hug from Brazil!!

As someone who always seems to get dyslexic at reading music some of your tips are brilliant at keeping my mind on the task. Bought your book. Now to print it out!

As a (mostly) guitar player, I do mostly intervallic and key signature reading. I also hear the melody internally, and use that to aid my reading. It also helps that I've been writing and transcribing rhythms for years. If you can write it, you can read it. 😊

And to extend the idea even further, make sure to practice each strategy individually and incorporate it as a natural part of your sightreading. The whole point is to break down complex information into smaller, digestible pieces. If you try to learn all these strategies at once, you're likely to just get flustered. This is a skill that doesn't just apply to music either, but lots of areas of life. It's kind of like forming new habits. If you try to start a whole bunch of new habits all at once, you're not going to make much progress. But if you focus on one thing at a time, you can make incremental improvement, and eventually it will become second nature. The more 'second nature' tools you have in your musical arsenal, the better a musician you will be.

This is so easy to digest but feels very comprehensive, makes me feel very excited to grab some sheet music and go at it!

brilliant tips!!! I love playing piano, but always have struggled becoming fluent enough to be able to play without looking at each note.

Whaaat that key signature trick is a game changer ! Thanks Nahre! 😊

Good stuff. I'm getting back into notation after a decade focused on chord symbols and ear driven playing. I learned to read music on horns and use many of these strategies myself despite no one teaching them to me. Limitations from this are making reading piano music as a pianist for a big band challenging and expected a pianist specialist like yourself to have good strategies. I think I depend more on chords shapes and cadences than scales. I suppose the point of etudes is to learn integrated patterns to help anticipate the same way knowing scales and chords do on their own and however you can apply them together.

Hi Nahre, Thanks so much for making this video! Honestly, what I loved most about this video is that you had to pause and think to work through some of this sheet music. I'm just an amateur pianist. Yeah, I took lessons as a kid for some number of years. I own a piano. I can work through some easier classic music pieces and play them with some degree of proficiency to the point that they sound good to me. I can sight read very simple scores without pausing, but I would definitely have to pause a little bit to read and think through that Gershwin score, for example, before I could play it a second time with an even tempo. I've watched a bunch of your videos. I think you're a very talented pianist, and I love the way you think as a composer. I also enjoy your compositions. So I found it very comforting that you couldn't just sight read through this music and play it perfectly the first time. I also found it comforting that you had to stop and count when you saw those notes that have all those extra ledger lines. Once I see more than 3 ledger lines above or below the regular staff, I don't always remember immediately what the note is, and I have to count the lines for a second before i figure out the notes. So, again, I found it super comforting that even very talented, experienced and proficient pianists like you have to do this sometimes. Thanks for publishing this!

I love looking at your facial expression while sight-reading. Can really relate esp. for beginners. It's very authentic and learners can really feel what is happening during the process. Thanks, Nahre. I'm always a fan since you started this channel.

Wow, I've done many of these kinda implicitly but it really helps to articulate them. The interval faces tip, however, blew my mind! So good, such high quality, thoughtful content, as always

I'm self taught but have been playing for decades, and sight reading has always been one of my strong suits. I didn't think i would, but I learned a lot from this. Thanks!

This is the most useful thing I've found about sight reading. Usually most videos and teachers just tell you to read ahead and practice a lot, but this video is incredibly detailed and useful, thank you very much!!

One of the most helpful piano videos I ever saw huge thank you for making that freely viewable video 👏👍

This is really helpful. I have an astigmatism that blurs the lines and makes everything look messy and overlapping. It makes music hard to read and slows me down a lot. But I think I may be able to tell whether the notes are on a space or a line better than telling exactly which line they're on. I will definitely try this!

I think what does and has always tripped me up the most is intuitively knowing how long certain values of note lengths should be held for when they are interwoven amongst so many other notes with their lengths - and reading and then playing that in real-time. I can read notes and understand meter and the subdivisions of notes but in practice it always seems to boggle my mind for the reasons I've mentioned unless I've heard a recording of how the overall speed and tempo feels. Hard for me to build from the ground up I guess, or I haven't been shown how to well enough. Even with a metronome, syncopation always gets me.

This is a timely video for me, as I have been working on piano for a few months. Sight reading is very slow for me at this time, and it is great to hear your well articulated guidance for improving this essential skill. Thanks for posting!

This is so damn cool and mind blowing✨ Beginner sight reader here, and you just made my piano experience much more fun as I applied your tips into practice over the past few days. Thank you so much!🥺

Absolutely love such content. Thank you Nahre!

This is a great summary of what I try to teach my students once they have gained confidence in co-ordinating their hands to play simple melodies!

Wonderful plan of attack for sight reading!!!!!

That makes so mich sense, thank you for clearing so much

This is such a fantastic video! So many of these techniques are just ingrained into my sightreading over the years. Having you explain them like this is going to really help my teaching and express these concepts to my students!

I used to show my guitar students that aside from accidentals, notes were simply scale degrees. And by taking a scale position on the fretboard, their fingers already knew where the notes were. This was a great tool for beginning readers.

Sol in my language , portuguese, is our star!

This is fantastic! I love the way you format stuff. Very clear and very approachable.

Great stuff, thanks once again. I read through Classical material, slowly and clumsily, but some things have become easier. Also, when i was in a rut, i picked up some real easy sheet music, big notes, more space. I do the same with languages - i'm learning Spanish, i read childrens books... ✌

This video will be very useful for my pupils. Thank you to sharing this !

Thank you for making this! So great that you are able to crystallise decades of insights into a short video that we get to benefit from. Really valuable stuff, subscribed.

One of the best videos I’ve seen on sight reading! Thanks Nahre, love your channel!

This was so useful! Thanks!

Thanks! The tips I was desperately looking for!

Thank you Nahre!!! your contributions are appreciated by many.❤

Awesome! Improv has been my thing for many years (playing by ear), and I appreciate this greatly as I have not paid much attention to reading music, but now I am needing to.

Thank You for this. I love this kung fu. :) Btw. I've changed the tuning standard to 432 hz over 10 years ago. Massive change of everything in hearing sounds and music but also in the body. Thank You. All the best to You. 🙏

Great video Nahre! I'm a long time french horn player, but I started practicing piano a few months ago. It's been a ton of fun, but reading bass clef and treble clef simultaneously is really difficult for me. These tips should help. 🙃

These are excellent tips! I've been playing piano and reading music now for about fifty years, and it was interesting to observe that almost everything you covered were things I know I do already without really thinking about it - you tend to learn these tricks as you progress, I think. Hilariously, the one thing you mentioned that was a complete surprise to me was the key signature thing! Nobody has ever taught me that :) With small key signatures I know what they are at a glance but when I'm confronted with larger numbers of flats or sharps I admit I have to pause for a few seconds to think. This will help speed up that process, so thank you very much.

This is brilliant, the looking back thing and layering, so obvious now but never seen it explained so clearly. Thanks for these insights Nahre, will be buying your book for sure.

Just bought your book I am super excited. I love the way you teach in your videos. I have always wanted to learn to read music (I play by ear) and I hope it can be the thing to finally teach me!

Thank you Nahre! This is a game changer. You're an amazing teacher!

Your channel is such a great find! Very relatable topics, much appreciated. Thank you!

Hi Nahre! Thank you for the video 💖

This is enlightening, Nahre! It helps me with not only my piano sight reading, but also helps me with my drum chart reading and writing! Thank you!!

Amazing content for being truly straight forward and very informative in a manner only Nahre can deliver!

One of your most informative lessons, Nahre. Very helpful. I'm thrilled to hear you play just a bit of Gershwin as well! What a treat!

This is really helpful. Thank you for this information

Showing this to my students. You have such a way of condensing and simplifying information!!

I love composing and improvising on my piano but I just CANNOT sight read! Thanks for this video!

I love your work Nahre😊 Concepts and approaches to music become lucid. As simple as a pearl is profound. The work you put in prods me to keep reaching. 🙏