Take private lessons online with me! Trumpet, brass, theory, composition & arranging, improvisation, or whatever musical/life coaching you’d like to work on. More information at www.bradharrison.ca/lessons

I’m a piano/organ player that has played by ear for about 20 years. I absolutely regret not taking more time learning how to read music when I first started playing. I have had to learn more about reading music since the church I play at sings a hymn every Sunday. I know some of the fundamentals, but I’m working towards being more competent.

I always loved sight reading because I would get bored playing the same music over and over again. Now, I can read almost anything you put in front of me and it has greatly helped with my flexibility as a performer. If my church wants to try a new song, all I need is the music or even just a lead sheet and I can go from having never heard the music before to playing it for the service the day I received the music.

Also, scales people!!! A tip I got from my director was to practice scales by playing them in different rhythms and/or with accent marks. It also helps you be more confident playing in different keys 💪

For winds (especially woodwinds), know your scales like the back of your hand. Once you’ve got the scales down, do key studies! Thirds, technical studies, and broken chords are just some of the really great exercises that will help you get better at sight reading because realistically things like runs are just parts of scales

1 thing has massively helped my piano sight reading: developing my feel for the keyboard without looking down. Now I teach my students this and it REALLY helps. But yes -- they need to actually practice it, haha! Great video, thanks so much.

I purchased a year's subscription of the Sight Reading Factory. The price was very reasonable and I think that the Sight Reading Factory is an outstanding program for choral singers. I like the fact that it gives you the option to ear train using one part or multiple parts (SATB). Sight singing is challenging but very rewarding. I am very satisfied with the product and highly recommend it for choral singers. Thank you Brad Harrison 🤗

The most important thing about sight reading (as a pianist) is to not look at your hands. It takes discipline, but you can figure out intervals by feeling the black keys, since they’re asymmetric. With time, you can very quickly get to where you need by feel, without taking your eyes off the page. Also crucially important, also arguably the most important thing, is to look ahead. The same thing is true if you want to be good at reading a book audibly. You look ahead to give you brain time to decipher unexpected or difficult words and to think about expression. The same thing is true in music. If you can develop these two skills, with practice, you can learn to sight read very well. Finally, not as crucial, but a nice to have, is you peripheral vision can see where your hands are. This is more of an advanced skill, and not as important as the other two, but it’s a cool skill to have, and not so difficult, the most difficult part being to develop the discipline to not look at your hands.

I have the opposite problem, I’m a visual learner and find sight reading very easy, but I believe this has created another problem for me, because the route between music notes and my finger has become some sort of a reflex, my brain doesn’t work “hard” enough in this process, which makes memorizing music almost impossible for me. I can not play without the music score😅. It feels like it has bypassed some part of my brain…

At my school, the choir sight-reads from hymnals. It's difficult but it's worth it because it helps a lot. Thanks for the video! May God bless

This is why we have sight singing classes lol. I'm awful at sight reading piano but I'm pretty good at sight singing lol

The best supportive, revealing, and helpful, video on sight reading I've ever come across.

I personally just set out to learn the pieces of music that mean the most to me. I find that really helps in my piano progress. If you're not motivated by the songs you're learning then I believe you'll end up quitting without intending to quit.

I can sight read! ... At about 6bpm

Great timing, I just started sight reading 2 days ago.

Amazing video, was looking for a video like this everywhere, thanks !!!

I paused the video along the way and read through all the examples on electric guitar, first treble staff at written pitch, then bass as written, then treble as guitar clef (played an octave below written), then both clefs in harmony. Intriguing, challenging. About to investigate further. I read well enough to teach the classes I'm assigned in spite of having inadequate training, but learning parts in preparation for teaching does take much longer than I'd like. Thank you for this video!

Bro I love your videos. They're seriously so well done. Keep up the great work 👏🤘

I love the timing of this series as I just signed up this year to sight reading factory and wanted to learn sight reading

I just finished the Hal Leonard sight reading for bass guitar book and was looking for the something to consolidate what I'd learnt. This is exactly what I wanted so I've signed up, thanks for the link and the discount. I just do half an hour or so every morning. For any bass players I really recommend learning to sight read, I've come at it later in life and wish I learnt earlier.

Thanks, just started getting used to reading music, I learnt it like an year back but being a guitar player, the most tempting thing, while being self taught, tabs are the worst temptation. I'm glad I made that choice. Sight reading for guitar is such a pain in the back. This video of yours is appreciated! ❤ from India.

amazing resource, thank you!

I use SRF, worth every cent. This video is also extremely helpful.

I play both the piano and the violin, but my relationship with sight-reading is slightly different between the two. I love sight-reading with the violin, and it's so much easier and intuitive, and everything flows and pairs easily with the fingering, grouping notes etc. I find it more difficult to memorise pieces because of how I gotten used to sight-reading on the violin, particularly orchestral parts versus solo repertoire, because I don't commit the parts to memory With the piano, because of reading two staves, I do make more mistakes, and as a result, a lot more repetition, and therefore, I memorise things quickly. Also, having the melody and the baseline also helps to put the notes in context. I can play things better by memory on the piano. Very interesting that I can play complex pieces on the piano by memory, but I can't memorise simple parts on the violin!

The Sight Reading Factory is useful. Besides sight reading I also used for fretless guitar intonation. Thank you for the share.

Ofc it's practice.... Thanks for reminding 🙂

This was the best informercial I have ever witnessed. I’m actually subscribing to SRF!

This tutorial is not only wonderfully helpful, it is also hysterical. Thank you 🙂

Every video are amazing you deserve more view and subs🎉

Learning to read music after playing by ear improved my rhythm

Sight reading is easy because I don't have time to wait

Lovely video, thanks

I started reading again in February this year, 2023. Its almost December, and I can read pretty much anywhere on the guitar at this point Currently working with a book called classical studies for Pic style guitar I have other books that cover all the positions on the guitar. Book one is up to position seven and book 2 is up to position 12. And then I went through Ted greens, jazz guitar, single note, soloing, volume one book I just keep reading and reading every day and then I go back through the position books By the time I get finished with book two, that covers position eight through 12, it is usually a few weeks before I get back to book one, so I don't remember anything that I read So at the same time, it's like your training, running through all of these progressive lines It does get easier and it's not as difficult as you might think to do it on the guitar

Joining a community ensemble as an adult student was a great way to get in sight reading reps

That little screen on keyboards, staff and virtual keyboard that show note for note has helped me learn very complex music in a very small amount of time

Super information

Good morning. I just wanted to thank you for introducing me to something that I didn’t know about. Today is the first time that I heard about SRF. I am going to look into this to see if it could help with my sight reading. Plus I am going to try to follow your videos for more helpful information about improvements for reading music better. Thank again and have a wonderful day. One last thing. I wish you continued success with your videos and even more success financially as well.

the fart nuggets text got me😭😭😭😭 5:10

I play drums and have always played by ear. Most drummers work this way and it has served me well for decades…. Until I tried to play big band jazz. I attended one ‘try out’ and someone dropped the “pad” on the wooden floor next to me as I was setting up. It hit the floor with a loud ‘Thump’ and had 125 drum charts in it. The conductor said “we are going to play everything exactly as written”. And I thought “Oh no you’re not!”. I’ve been trying to learn ever since… so I am looking forward to this series.

Perfect timing. I have a thing in 6 days.

i learned how to play songs by synthesia, its a game changer you can learn songs twice as fast, usually i just look up videos on how to play a certain song, and just play what shows on screen since they show the note names which is easier, and it usually takes me about 30 seconds to learn a complex measure sight reading, but with synthesia i can learn it in less than 10 seconds

I’ve started playing trumpet again and this will definitely be helpful 👍

I've always been sick at sight-reading because I rarely actually practised, so every lesson I had to basically sight-read everything every lesson and do so slightly better in each lesson than in the previous

Fl'vr'tw'n 🤣 Your videos are so great! I use them in my teaching all the time!

This video is amazing!! Also, a tip that I find very useful for me! Get familiar with chords, also, if you can write them in the measure It's gonna be fantastic. But write them analyzing the notes and chord progression. Meaning, try to write the chord like C7 not only looking at the accompainment but also the melody, because more often than not, the melody is built around chords. Jazz pianists oftentimes use this as a tool for improvising, but It's also super useful for sight-reading if you take a little bit of time. Needless to say, you'll have to get familiar with scales/keys. Hope it helps ☺️

I went to the site and the free exercises were challenging but playable, since I chose my own level. On Monday I'm going to check with our band and choir teachers to find out if we've tried anything like this in the past, whether we can get it for our students, etc (I'm an old teacher in my first year as a String Orchestra and Introduction to Guitar teacher at two high schools in the same district). I'm guessing it's a bit late to get a 2 schoolwide subscriptions for this year, unless they can pro-rate the subscriptions. If I don't get it through our school district I'll get an individual subscription. For me the price point of just under $3 per month is an excellent deal.

Thanks, that was inspiring and helplul, as a guitarist, having the same pitch some times in as many as 5 different spots on the fretboard, sight reading is a bit of a tongue twister! You know how the saying goes: "If you want a guitarist to keep quiet, put a score in front of him!" 😀

Super underrated skill! 😅

Amazingly thoughtful video, conveying lots of insight in an impressively short time. I'm looking forward to subsequent videos in this series, and I'll definitely check out the site. As a guitarist, I hope some of your content covers some of the challenges specific to guitar. One way the analogy to spoken language breaks down is in regard to reading an unknown piece, like, say, the etudes you mention or the SBF content, specifically made to be new to the sight reader. With text, because vocabulary is limited, and we are exposed to spoken words all the time, when we read a new text, it's mostly pretty obvious to know when we've misread it-a word will be unrecognizable, or a phrase will be ungrammatical. If I'm reading an etude that I've never heard, just to practice sight-reading something new, I'm likely not to know I've made a mistake unless I've already heard the piece (or listen to a correct performance as soon as I've attempted reading it). Put differently, there's a different level of contextual familiarity for reading new text vs. reading new music. But I suppose your point about learning by ear vs. sight reading being equally important speaks to this. When we learn by ear, we build up a "vocabulary" of rhythmic/melodic/harmonic themes specific to a genre, and that forms the context in which we read new pieces. Etude books are often in a particular style, providing some context for the sight reader. It would be great if a site or tool like SRF could produce genre-specific new content, drawing from musical vocabularies for a genre. -Tom

3:15 all the TIMES! Ha!

thanks!

SRF $35 a year is pretty good, i thought it would be a lot more. I looked at flowkey and simplypiano but they are a lot more expensive and not what i'm looking for. I'm learning the piano now and sight reading too, the biggest improvement was NOT to write the notes on the sheet. It seemed like a good idea first, but then i was looking at my note letters instead of the actual signs, and this way i'd never learn to read, just play.

When i learned to not look at hands, sheet reading became much easier. Though pieces with lots of accidentals still drive me mad

Hilarious presentation! I grew up playing piano and guitar, but like many people, only played by ear. At some point I really wanted to learn classical repertoire on piano, and I found watching tutorials (note by note) or the trial by error method by ear was so tedious, that I decided to learn to read, maybe just 5 years ago. Now I can sight read bass & treble clef with relative ease, and have even been learning C clefs like tenor/alto so I can study orchestral scores. No, I can't sit down and sight read Chopin immediately, but point is, I went from not having any idea what I was looking at to being able to read a lot of works quickly in a short amount of time. One of the things that has helped me get here is noticing patterns across so many works, as well as using intervals to guide me so I'm often able to take in a lot more information at a glance rather than reading one note at a time. Taking your language reading analogy a step further, it's a bit like how we read words - we are able to scan and absorb full words and sentences at a time, and use context clues and patterns to make sense of it, rather than slowly reading o-n-e-l-e-t-t-e-r-a-t-a-t-i-m-e. Here's a few additional things which helped me: - Bach Chorales (keyboard edition). They're great because they are very short and you also learn a lot about counterpoint and voice leading at the same time. You also start to observe patterns which helps you read them faster and faster. - Church Hymnals - even if you're not religious, find an old hymnal book and practice. They're short, simple, predictable, as they were written for public audiences to sing along. Oftentimes church pianists and organists would have to play a random song from a large book of hymns, so it wouldn't be possible to have every song memorized and rehearsed in advance - so the part writing is usually simple too, often 4-part harmonies. All of this makes them great for sight reading practice. - Studying intervals & basic triads - like I mentioned above, just learning to see the contour of melodies or harmonies by seeing if notes are by step or leap, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th etc. For example if I see a C, and then the next two notes are a third apart, and my key signature is Eb, I know immediately I have a C minor chord (C, Eb, G), without having to think about reading each note. - Lastly, and this has helped me so much - WRITING! Even if you're not interesting in composing, simply transcribing something by ear onto a page by hand, or using notation software, you learn to read even that much better. Again with the language analogy - as children, we usually learn to write hand-in-hand with reading, and I believe the skills inform one another. The proof is in the pudding - since I've begun to write and transcribe, I've noticed my reading skills have skyrocketed. Hope these suggestions help anyone cruising this comment section haha. Cheers!

ive been playing piano for about 7-8 years, and even though i do my sight reading tests from RCM i still suck at them, my teacher doesn't give enough attention to sight reading since it doesn't give u many marks to pass or to go to the next level.

I am using the adult level 1 Alfred book and work book , it has lessons to do and fill in etc , I’ve learned so much already only half thru the book , even though I’ve tried other books , I recommend , and looking forward to level 2

I like how 'my weekly social media intake' is pi. 😁 (and also true)

Just play lots and lots of easy pieces.

Came here after watching the twoset sight reading videos lol

The important thing is to key on rythem.I don,t subdivide I hear the rythems.Ii memorized all figures by sound.

I would prefer to start without reading music and having the feeling of it at the beginning, for example I know many classical musicians that I show 4 chords of a mainstream pop/rock song and they can't play it in rhythm, they are kind of stuck because the only information they have is C - Am - F - G, even if they know these chords super well, they don't know how to improvise or have the feeling of playing these chords with someone singing, but they can play a lot of complex classical pieces. So in my experience and looking at very classical musicians, my recomendation is two dedicate two years of learning the instrument, learning some songs by ear, get used to the scales an improvisation using scales, maybe start doing jazz and improvisation, and after you are confident with your playing, move on to learn to read (obviously you need to learn music theory for the first part) so after this you already have the skills to play, just need to practice the reading, you will get it very fast because you are just going to be praciticing one skill and you already know how to play by ear or feel the music and not stay to the music sheet

You had me at 'Fart nugget'.

I thought this video would be geared towards those who already can read music well but need some extra tips sight reading effectively especially in chamber or ensembles.

Perfect timing for me.. P.S. greetings to your Brazilian wife😬😅

When people say " you dont need theory or sigh reading to be a good musician" i say... It can only help.

See now why do I see this video right after I just had my MPA concert and I was very much worried about sight reading ( side note we got all ones if anybody was asking what are score with for MPA)

That site doesn't seem to have harps as an instrument you can select, do you know if they plan to add it? I suppose piano can proxy at early levels, since it uses the same clefs, but at higher levels, piano music might not work on a harp (and vice versa).

Piano marvel has a feature where granite it's at your own pace but it immediately tells you you hit the wrong note. Though would that be actually beneficial for sight reading maybe not.

Any chance you can make more videos about modes? They really interest me and I want to learn more about them and how to apply them, and how to find what mode a song is in.

Sir you made a great explanation. I actually would love to have someone like you as my music teacher. I have been watching your channel recently. Actually I started to learn piano. I am starting with basic chords and sharps and flats. But I wanted to learn by sight reading simultaneously. I will try the app first but is there some books you would recommend to a beginner for someone like me? That would really be helpful thank you.

... fart nuggets ... 🤣 I love the fact that I learn English and music theory at the same time

2:45 Brother John (Frère Jacques) 2:47 the licc 2:49 nyan cat

"If you want to get good at sight reading, you have to practice sight reading." It's sounds so obvious when you say it out loud, but I've never actively tried "practicing sight reading" in my 20 years of being a (non-professional) musician 🤯

Hmm. Not sure this is for me , I haven’t - FART NUGGETS - OK, I’m in.

Thanks, makes me much less anxious when it comes to learning new pieces. BTW, what on earth is a fart nugget😆

Lire les clefs séparément m’est plutôt accessible mais ça devient dramatique et décousu dès que je dois lire et jouer les deux clefs (sol et fa) en même temps. Est-ce que cela vient à force de s’entraîner (je n’ai pas l’impression de progresser) ou y a t’il une méthode particulière quand on lit deux lignes à la fois ?

Now I can finally fluke easy demons!

to pee or not to pee xD haha that got me, along with face expression of the infant.

i saw the L I C C in 12TET enharmonic equivalence followed by Nyan Cat underneath

On the website, is the sheet music autogenerated randomly, or is it some real music that sounds pleasantly?

How did you get so good at sight reading? Forgetting to practice. Oh.

I never learned to sight read because the vast majority of what I play (rock lead guitar) is not written, thus there was nothing for me to read. The better you can read the less you have to practice is stupid. Practice develops skills, performance skills, that you will not get if you're just sight reading stuff you've never practiced before. If you can't read at all you have to learn by ear.... All I can say is YEEESSSSS! That develops your ear. Trial and error is perhaps the best way to learn! Learning by ear does not exclude learning theory. You can do both. All you need to do is say ""Gee I just learned the part by ear. I love that part. Let me now examine why it sounds so cool"

I play horn. my sight reading, counting and rhythms are bad. Fantastic tone, one of the best, but technically awful. time to regroup. hope this works.

My problem is I can read it pretty easily, but hell if I can tell you what a given note sounds like without stopping to think about it. There are only a handful I can identify without buffering. Even those, though, I might not catch them if it's in a certain key.

Cool

I'm confused about the part about Cb not existing at 4:24 and the Gbmaj scale. Wouldn't it still be the same thing if instead of Cb we just called it B?

My laptop is folden on my music stand so when the flip animation happened I thought my laptop was falling off

How about a handy-dandy (useable) link to SRF?

C flat is a note that , I think, only brass players can seem to play, cause I’ve only seen on brass scores…

I read fart nuggets out loud and then all the sudden you said “I told you not to read it” 😂

my exam's tomorrow! wow, thank you

Starts at 2:30

I play trombone in band. I can sight read in choir no problem and I can sight read on piano. I think the trombone kills me cause I know what the notes are but they just dont translate to the trombone.

To pee or not to pee 😂

Sightreading practice: play the notes as you see them while trying to play correctly and in time, Killing your ability to sightread: analyzing the piece and figuring everything out ahead of time

I consider myself dyslexic in music notation.

PractiSe

Indeed. It is like any other language - many of which have terrible writing conventions - far from phonetically accurate… Pacific Ocean… the C in it… three sounds. Really?

NAH no way nobody noticed the l i c k at 2:48

Am I the only one that noticed the lick? Lol nice