The Piano Sight Reading Tricks That Make Reading Music 100% Easier

So maybe at some point you took formal lessons and gave up because it seemed too difficult or maybe you're taking lessons now and you're struggling a little with the

sight

reading

aspect or trying to figure out what's on the page. Um, maybe you play a lot of things by ear and with chords and you feel a little stuck and would like to move on to more complex things, but it feels too difficult to take on. Well, I've got your back. All you need to do is subscribe and sit back and watch and I promise you at the end of this video.

Sight

reading

will be much

easier

. Hi, I'm Leah from Licuela Music. I have been teaching

piano

for over 15 years and in that time I have discovered a lot about how to

make

learning

piano

easier

and faster for my students. Today I want to look at

sight

reading and remove some of the mystery around us and hopefully open up a lot of new possibilities for you. I created this to help piano students, but if you play a different instrument, I'd be very interested to hear if any of this is helpful to you. Let me know in the comments if that's the case.

Okay, so let's start our presentation, so basically this is going to be all you need to know to finally be able to sight read

music

that you've had trouble with before, essentially okay, so if you've learned how to do it, if you've taken

music

. lessons in the past and you've had trouble with sight reading and never mastered it, you know, it's an obstacle in your way that's probably because you were only taught one of the skills involved in sight reading there. There are two skills involved in sight reading and you need to have both to really feel comfortable reading off the page, so the first is the one you were taught to identify notes and you probably learned phrases like every good boy deserves fun and The Good Guys Guys always drive fast and all the cows eat grass and I wish you would forget about those.

It's a two-step process if you look at a note and remember "OK", each "good good guy" and then the first letter guy. It's b, even if you do it quickly, it's still a two-step process, you don't need to have two steps, one is enough and I'll show you that in a moment and the other skill involved is interval recognition, which sounds very complicated but It's actually very easy and that's just being able to see the pattern on the page and play the pattern instead of identifying all the notes and we'll see that in a moment, okay, real quick before we start.

I want to show you something really simple to get you started. Do you see the letter g here? Can you see a g there? It's not by accident, this whole treble clef is just a fancy big g that got out of control over the years. It's more, more elaborate, but it's actually also called treble clef. The tribal key is always called the treble clef and you can see that the G there goes, it sits on that line and this note is the G in the left hand on the bass. this thing that always looks like an ear or something is actually an f if you connect the dots to the curly part here, that's just a fancy f.

Okay, the bass clef is also called the bass clef because that's the line where the f is on the staff. there's a middle c which is very useful for you to know if you're trying to look up historical notes, that's g, that's f, there's your c and you can find it there if you're wondering what that noise is behind me, it's uh Daisy growling. into something she can hear outside, quiet, okay, so let's look at an easy way to identify notes on things. I'm not trying to remember sentences like nice guys always drive fast or something, let's get straight to finding out what the grade is right away.

The more ridiculous something is, the easier it is to remember, so this looks pretty ridiculous, isn't it Jupity's face? I want you to try to remember jibbity's face, maybe imagine what a Djibouti face would look like. gbd face so that jbd is actually just gbd. your keyboard every second note, if you find the lowest G, you can um and just skip every second note jits g b d f a c e g e d f a c e which just repeats all the way up if you start on the f just one step down from the g and do the same thing face c e g b d f a c e g e d etc. all the way to the top so you can see that every letter of the musical alphabet is covered here a b c d e f g so that a phrase gbd face or gbd face whatever way you want to remember will help you name each note on the staff here is a g b d f a c e etc g b if I start one below and I'm going with face g bd face face f a c e g b d f a c etc so you can see it covers each note okay here's our base staff um clef and here are our notes gbd face okay we skip all the line notes g b d f a c e and starting one below that um face e g bd in the treble clef g b d face e face e g bd lines here spaces so you might notice if I go back one here is our face here is our face online here we have them on the face of spaces and here we have the face again in the lines, so every time it repeats, it repeats in whatever it wasn't the moment before, so if it's in spaces here, the next octave up will be in the lines, if we wrote it here, it would continue up and the face then appear in the spaces again, um, but the face is useful to remember, we all remember the face for these spaces, but you may not realize that the face is also present here just to

make

sure We have covered all our possible patterns here. they are in the middle so starting on g there g b d f a c e and starting on f remember f letter key f a c e g b d okay so gbd face and face gbd is all you need to know to remember the notes you really just need to get used to knowing where g and f are uh we already know two of them from our energy key in key of f and we have g on the line down here f in the space below um and then up here f in the first space and with g we know that's okay so let's see The intervals of this is where it gets really interesting because this is what people often don't realize they can do when reading music, they think they have to identify each note, that's what I used to do, until I started recognize automatically, you'll get to the point where you're just automatically recognizing things, but knowing how to see patterns makes everything a lot easier, so an interval is the distance between two notes, for example, if I play c and there's a, the The interval between them is the distance from here to here. or from here to here are from here to here let's see how to recognize intervals on the staff and on the keyboard, so the first thing worth knowing about what we call seconds are the steps, so when you see notes that are following one of the another line space line space there is no room for any other note between these two one is on this line one is on this space are you repeating a note here or repeating a note there um but there is nowhere else to put a note so they're side notes since our first note here is g we don't have to go that's a g and there's an f a and that's a g b and that's c and that's b we can just recognize, we can figure out what this is and then we can just recognize that we're taking a step forward and here we are changing direction, we are going backwards so g a b c are side notes when you see two notes together in a stem, they are played at the same time, you can tell I have two repeated notes here, people often don't know realize that they're reading and they don't realize that they don't trust, especially if a note is, for example, here it's a quarter note or a quarter note.

Please note that the next note can be a dotted minimum or a dotted chord, dotted half note, sorry, and sometimes people don't recognize that they are still in the same space or on the same line, so it is Same note, sometimes we also get a little surprised by the bar line, but they are still one step away. If you're having trouble with that, you can imagine it sliding closer and you'll be able to see it more clearly, so seconds are steps, so you're going up, down, okay, so thirds are jumps, um or where you're jumping on a note c to e It's a third a third because there are three notes involved, the first note we play, the second note we play and the notes that jump in between, so one, two, three are more commonly known as jumps, they are very easy to recognize because they will go from one line to another, you are basically jumping over the note that would be in the middle space or from one space to a space jumping over the note that could be in the line and here we have thirds played at the same time because they share a root when you get something like this, there are eight notes here, but you only really need to read one. this one because then you know you're stepping up and you're playing in thirds, okay, so you're reading vertically and horizontally, okay, that reduces a lot of work and here we're just jumping down again, I'd say 90 percent.

Music in written music is made up of jumps and steps, so if you can train your eye to recognize when you are taking a step or jumping, that's a big part of the work done. Quarters are also pretty easy as a place because it just seems unbalanced one note is in space and the other is on a line or vice versa, the number itself is even and when you have an even number you will have what looks like an odd interval on the staff, so it just looks like you're jumping over two notes, one, two, three, four, so it's a fourth and then fab.

If you are a fan of Joe Hisayishi's music, he uses a lot of force, so if you are reading his music. you can spot patterns where it just uses forts and again it makes things much quicker to read if you know that's what's happening so line to space here and space to align here again is easy to spot when playing at the same time. useful when you play chords because a lot of chords, if you play chords with your left hand, would use fourths in inverted chords, which is very, very common, and then we have our fifths, so the fifth is an odd number, from the looks of it.

Even on the staff we have a line to a line, um with the line in the middle or spaced in a space with an empty space in the middle, which is often seen in the left accompaniment. Now you will have fifths for if anyone is watching this. and you're a music theorist or a purist in this sense you know this is a big no what I have here are parallel fifths I'm just putting them there to illustrate fifths um it just doesn't sound Well, you would never do it with one exception. I don't know if you're familiar with the children's Horrible Stories series.

If you don't look it up on YouTube, they're absolutely hilarious, but this is their thing. you might recognize you might be wondering why there's technically a flat here, um, let me illustrate this, so here's a fifth, we're skipping three notes, so there's five notes involved if I count how many semitones or half steps I have. starting from here one two three four five six seven so a fifth is made up of a distance of seven semitones but if I go from B to F it still looks like a fifth on the keyboard and on the staff, but we actually have I just started here one, two , three, four, five, six, so technically it's not a fifth, so you have to sharpen the top note or flatten the bottom note in this case and that's what we have there, which is our fifth, sixth seventh. and octaves or octaves, um, you're not as likely to read them at sight as you are to just notice them when you're learning a piece of music and often you'll get a series of six just because they're they're very pleasing to the ear and in the end of a piece of music you will often find sevenths, well, very frequent, so if you are studying a piece of music, just notice where they are and then when you reach them, you will be able to remember by the interval, you will know what form you are playing on the piano.

Well, in practice, here are some tips that are very useful. You will often find something like this happening. it'll only be for two or three, this is a particularly good example, from a piece by Cuthbert Harris, Royal Procession, and here you have eight and eight, what 19 notes, you really only need to identify one of them if you're good. by reading your intervals you can see that okay, here's an f and we're just playing um a second a third a fourth a fifth a sixth a sixth a fifth a fourth a third and actually I have I should have two other notes here, but just for example, is what it should sound like, this prompt is incorrect, but you will often find it on either hand, left or right, and then no, you don't have to do anything. deciphering the notes except one, um, reading chords in the left hand, being able to record very quickly is a big advantage and if you can see the intervals, it takes a lot of the work off of you here, we have um c on the bottom. c on the base going down to b on the base and c and all you need to do once you've identified that note um is read the intervals above so you have a third and a third here you have a fourth and a third here you have a fifth and a second and um two thirds again sounds like this um so your chord reading will improve greatly if you apply intervals uh interval reading instead of trying to identify all the notes, that's a lot of work If you're playing something by Chopin or Beethoven,You have a lot of chords to deal with, so this will take a lot of work off of you.

Yes, don't forget to add sharps and flats as required by the key signature. find out your interval first and then you know if one of the notes has to be tuned or flattened, then add it, okay, so in practice here's a very sweet little piece that sounds like this, so you figure out your first note fa ac and then you jump up going down jumping up going down jumping jumping up there's a fifth so you're just going up here taking a step back down taking a step up and jumping down so again a piece like this if you're getting used to reading your intervals you really only have one note to identify and then you can calculate the rest per interval um another example many steps and jumps here okay um going down going up there is a jump going up going down one step up and there is a Jump so you have the same pattern on both compasses.

As you go up, there's another jump and then you go all the way down one step up and then you go all the way down, so again you can see it's just you. you are identifying the first note and then you don't need to identify anything else after that it is easy to detect the intervals here there is an octave in the left hand going down a step up a jump there is a fourth but in this case it is probably more likely to recognize c there an octave up a fifth down okay, so that's it, I hope that was it.

I have helped you. At this point, press the subscribe button. This is very important. Go on, here it is. Thank you, because I have many. of other videos to come let me know in the comments if that has helped you and what I would really like you to do is practice this a little bit over the next few days when you go to your next lesson with your teacher, see if they or see how long It takes them to realize that their sight reading has just moved forward. If you don't take lessons, just pull out a piece of music you'd like to play or something you think you could tackle and let me know. what it feels like to read intervals instead of identifying all the notes, you still have to identify some of the notes um and it's good to spend time on what I've mentioned in other videos are great practice apps uh tenuto's one um online the online version that's what musictheory.net is about, please go there, they have a lot of exercises, you can configure them to fit the parameters you need and use them, wow, just report the ID because that's still important, I'm not saying give it up. and you still need that, but you need both skills, um, so start practicing and tell me how it goes so far, so that's it, I'll see you next time, enjoy your practice and take care, bye.