sight reading

[Suki2]

Help! My 9 year old DS is taking grade 3 piano next session. He's fine with his pieces and sometimes good with his sight reading, but then he has days when he reads the treble clef as the bass clef and vice versa!

He's very inconsistent.
; sometimes his sight reading is perfect. He practices from the Improve your sight-reading books by Paul Harris but he doesn't stop making this particular mistake.

Any ideas?

I was a primary TA and taught 'informal' music groups for recorder, keyboard and percussion, over a twenty year period.

My main instrument was drums, and for forty years I played in amateur bands and stage shows. In addition, I learnt electronic organ in the 1980s.

One of the problems, I think, with learning music, rather like Numeracy at school, children are told and shown what to do to make progress, but aren't really told how to UNDERSTAND WHAT IS REALLY GOING ON.

Music is governed by the laws of Physics and Maths, not by things dreamed up in Italy in the twelfth century!

The Treble and Bass Clefs are NOT two different things, they are both part of The Grand Staff:

www.essential-music-theory.com/grand-staff.html

If you, and he, can study the above link, and try to understand as much of it as you can that should get you started.

DRAW the two staves on plain paper, with a RED line between them; this red line is the ledger line on which sits the note C, BELOW the stave in Treble, and ABOVE the stave in Bass. Now try and mark the positions of all the other C notes on both staves, and you should see they make a pattern, balanced about this red line.

As for doing the reading practice, I guess do 5 or 10 minutes of Treble, then 5 or 10 minutes of Bass, until it starts to become (hopefully!) automatic.

Also, don't worry TOO much about the names of the notes; the important thing is for the fingers to be able to go to correct place on the keys.

[I'll come back in a few days and see if any of this has made any sense to you both, and see how he is getting on.]

Sight reading is a skill that needs practice-a lot more than people realise! IMHO it can become something kids believe they can't do because its not taught properly.

You ds ideally needs to practice a couple if sight readings every practice session. Can you help him? Get him to look at the piece, tap the rhythm, check key signature and look for patterns . Then identify tricky bars, have a quick play through those and look at start and end. The aim is to get all this down to 30 seconds.

Otherwise you have excellent advice above. After the exam make it a regular part of practice and get some fun stuff he might enjoy dipping in to. Good luck!

Thanks for the advice; I've started systematically practicing by tapping the rhythm, checking key signature, looking for patterns etc. I guess that ultimately he needs to do a lot more playing of any kind... I wish there were an online quick fire recognition of notes; definite gap in the market...he's fantastic at learning pieces, he knows the theoretical difference between the clefs but still if he's tired will mix them up.

As I said earlier, don't concentrate on the NAMES of notes, but try and get the fingers to instinctively go straight to the note on the keyboard. (Kinetic learning, I think it's called, or 'muscle memory'.)

Like an adult learning to drive a car, at first you feel you will never remember which gear to use, or which you are in; eventually, you do it without any concious thought.

Maybe get cheap sheet music from charity shops or car boot sales; doesn't matter what sort, anything to get some different reading going.

I'd second the idea that sight reading is much less about note names and much more about muscle memory, as it is definitely instrument-specific. My daughter is an accomplished sight reader on sax and guitar, but pretty useless on piano - she's just not been playing long enough for her brain to have established an automatic connection between seeing a note written down and fingers going automatically to the right place.

For me it's the other way round - I'm still good at sightreading piano music (I haven't really played for 35 years but these brain connections appear to be made for life) but terrible at sightreading guitar music even though it's written in "tab" which is supposedly easier to read.

The answer is playing lots and lots of music... You can practice specific sight reading skills which may hasten the process, but ultimately what works is playing a lot of new pieces. My daughter has never specifically practiced sightreading recorder/ sax/ guitar music and she seems to be rather good at it - yet she has done specific piano sightreading practice using the ABRSM app and still struggles.