Sight Reading Methods

by Achilles
(Malta)

Question: What do you think is the best method for training students for sight reading? Somebody said that one of the methods is practicing sight reading... do you have other methods? Thanks.

Albert's reply: By far the best way to learn to sight read is to sight read; there's no substitute for doing it. Still, there are numerous tips and exercises that can help.

I put together a list of tips for reading piano music, as well as introduced a sight reading exercise for training the eye.

Another thing that helps greatly is to associate "anchor" notes for each clef to their respective keys on the piano. For the treble clef, these anchors are all the G's and C's:



... and for the bass clef, the anchor notes are F and C:



The hands can be trained to go to these keys, and neighboring notes can then more easily be found. This is a very powerful method of training the eye to learn to sight read piano music!