about the topic that we all love to hate - sight reading, but the reality is that sight reading,

no matter where you are up to in sight reading on the piano, sight reading is something that

is not only just a critically important musical skill to have, but sight reading, even just

making the smallest improvements on your sight reading, getting it to be 5, 10, 15, 20% better,

is gonna have a huge positive impact on your playing, on your speed of learning pieces,

comprehending music, and just generally moving your musical progression forward. So let's

dive in and talk about this all important topic sight reading. And if you like our work

at the London Contemporary School of Piano feel free to click the bell button and subscribe

to our channel, and therefore you're not missing out on the quality videos and content that

we have to offer for you. So sight reading. Now, today's video, I want

to help you master your sight reading. I want to be a little bit ambitious here. I don't

just want to get you sight reading 10 or 20% better. I want you to have a little bit of

a sight reading revolution in your head. And I want to unblock a few things for you because

there's some wider concepts here. So today we're looking at ways to master our sight

reading, and not just to master our sight reading, but to master the way we practice

sight reading. And the thing about sight reading is it's not just about sitting down with a

score in front of us and reading note by note by wrote verbatim, looking up and down the

music and playing one note at a time. That's a very mechanical process and it's very unmusical,

and that's not how we want to sightread. And the reason why most people struggle reading

music is that's the way they do it. Now, you wouldn't read a book like that, wouldn't you?

You wouldn't just pick up a book and read word by word and not have a comprehension

to what the bigger picture is, what it is you are actually reading about the comprehension

of what it is you are reading. And the big problem with musical literacy, it isn't actually

the fact that people don't know where notes on the stave are. It's the problem is the

comprehension - they don't understand what's behind the notes and that's the real problem.

You know, some of the best sight readers I've ever come across have actually been conductors,

conductors that conduct symphony orchestras, and they have the ability quite often, and

I've seen this before in rehearsal to sightread an entire orchestral score, you know, with

all of the instruments of the orchestra on this massive score and be able to walk up

to a piano and play it. And that's because they have a wider conception

and understanding of the music in a harmonic way, in a polyphonic way, in a structural

way. And music is a language, and we wanna think of it like a language. And often the

reason why people struggle and can't read music very well is because they're not treating

it like a language. And that's what we're going to do today. Now, there's no one magic

formula to crack your sight reading, but I'm gonna say that there are three, and I'm gonna

show you three formulas. And if you tackle sight reading from these angles, I guarantee

you you're gonna make a big result and you're gonna see some big changes in your reading

of music. So the first tip, and this first one is more of a, a conceptual understanding,

but it will make a big difference to many of you.

So this is looking at sight reading from the keyboard angle, and this is so, so important.

So look at the keyboard down here and look at the notes. You know the notes of the keyboard

and you are playing it and you are learning pieces of music. Well, I want you to imagine

something about the keyboard right now. I want you to flip the keyboard, literally flip

it so the top notes in the air, are up in the sky and the low notes are down on the

floor. So imagine that these, this is the top notes up in the sky and the low notes

down on the floor. Now that is exactly what a musical stave is. A musical stave is basically

a keyboard and it's a keyboard where the top notes are higher up here and the low notes

are lower. Sort of makes sense. It's the verticalisation of the keyboard because

harmonies and music of a harmonic nature of a note given nature is vertical. And what's

horizontal is the rhythm, the movement of rhythm and scales. So that's why we have this

notation system designed the way it is, well, the western notation system. And for most

part it's very effective. It's a very effective way of looking at it. So I have put together

a special crib sheet to help you. And if you'd like to get a copy of this crib sheet, please

head on over to our website, contemporaryschoolofpiano.com. We will gladly send you this special sight

reading crib sheet. Let's have a look at it. So if you remember your first ever piano lesson

or if you remember the first time you learned anything about a piano, I think for many of

us we just learnt where all the Cs were or we learnt where middle C was.

So if we play all of the Cs on the piano and on the keyboard, they belong in certain positions

on the notation. So for instance, this is your middle C, this is your C above middle

C, this is your C above that. And notation tends to only work in three to four octave

ranges in both hands. And the reason for that is that you just get too many ledger lines

otherwise, and it just gets unreadable. So we have this octave sign. So the charm of

the notation system is that we actually only really need to read a few octaves. We're not

actually reading every 88 note on the keyboard. Things are then just repeated with the use

of the octave up sign and the octave down sign. So if I play this, I get this.

And of course, we're not going to be using that many ledger lines very often. And when

a composer does that, they almost don't need to do it. They can use the octave sign to

save the many, many ledger lines. So it's a real priority really just to know this range.

And it's actually good if you go to our website and ask for this sheet, it's the sight reading

strategy sheet. You can actually as a little bit of homework just fill in the gaps and

notate the notes in between. And that's a really useful thing to do. It just gives you

that wider concept. But this is what it looks like. This is when you notate all of the white

keys on the piano, by the way. That's what it looks like. You get all of these, all of

these ledger lines. So these are the notes in between these C octaves and beyond.

You can see how middle C is not entirely in the middle of the piano there. And then when

you go down to here - this is the same thing. I've written it out exactly the same notes,

but I've used an octave sign just to make it a little bit more accessible to read. So

it continues moving through all of the white keys on the keyboard. Now there are many variations

you can conceptualise with this as well. You could actually notate all of the notes on

the keyboard in different scales. So this is like a C major scale, but you could do

the same thing for D major and you can find all of the Ds on the musical staff with the

notes in between following the D major scale. You could do the same thing for the E major

scale, the F major scale and so forth. The purpose of this exercise, the reason why

we are doing this, is to translate the keyboard conception into the notation conception. So

if you'd like to have a copy of that crib sheet, it's just a nice thing to hang up on

your wall, put near your piano. It just gives you that conception of the way you need to

readdress your thinking in comparison to the keyboard, the vertical concept of the harmony

and of the notes written on the musical stave. And so that is one little angle - it's a conceptual

angle that can make a huge difference to your understanding of reading musical notation

on the piano. Here's the second one. And this is, I'm going to use a very useful piano method

book to demonstrate this sight reading method. And this method is the Bartok Mikrokosmos

method. And it's a lovely bunch of books that the composer Bela Bartok put together.

But I'm not just talking about these books, I'm talking about the approach. It's the approach

that really, really matters. And so this method works really, really well, but it only works

well again, if it's in combination with some, some of the other methods that I'm going to

be talking about. And it is a very powerful method. And for those of you who particularly

have a good ear but you don't read music so well, this is a very good method because you

can't really rely on your ear to do some of the cover up work for you. You actually have

to read everything. So the purpose of this method is to not think about individual notes,

is not to look at the score here and go - that's a C, or that's a D, that's an E and so on.

The purpose of this method is to think about patterns and shapes.

And really that's what good sight reading is about. It's about thinking in patterns

and shapes. So for instance, the only note we have to think about is the starting note.

And in the right hand I'm playing a C above middle C with my thumb, and I can use that

c axium handout to figure out where all the Cs are in these notation examples. And the

left hand, I'm using the C below middle C, and these are unison melodies. So that means

both hands are doing the same thing. So the thing I need to think about now is not C D

E F G, I just need to think about two things - up or down. Now, later on, when the more

advanced patterns turn up in this book, I need to think about other things like skipped

notes and repeated notes and different things happening in both hands. But let's just do

this as a starting point. Let's think of the notes going up or down because that's what

happens in musical melodic phrases. Notes either go up or down or repeat or jump around

a little bit inside the scale often as well. So let's have a look at this exercise and

not think about individual notes, but think about patterns and shapes. So we have the

first note. And let's do the next one. Next one has more

quarter notes, so it goes a little bit faster. It starts in the same hand position.

So if you are to practice through a method book such as the Bartok Mikrokosmos, you are

not guided by knowing what the melodies meant to sound like. The only thing you have to

go by are the patterns. And a really important tip when you play through this repertoire

is don't look at your hands. At all costs avoid looking at your hands. Just get your

hands into the right position to start with first. So you can, you know, you can write

down on the music the starting note, you can give yourself a bit of a clue, but once you've

got that starting note, what you are meant to do is you're meant to see the melody as

as shape, as a pattern, as notes that ascend and descend and that repeat or skip that are

creating musical patterns. Because that's what a melody does. And I think actually singers

seem to understand this better often than pianists.

Pianists can often can get too abstract about notes and think of notes as, you know, individual

entities that don't have a connection to other notes. And that's a real risk if that's the

way you think it's gonna make reading very, very hard. Now, if you're still on this video,

if you're still with me you are about to be super rewarded by the third approach I'm going

to show you because when you put the first and the second approach with the third approach,

some real magic can start to begin. And it goes back to what I was talking about with

conductors being such great sight readers, often understanding the deeper concepts of

what's happening in the music. And the piece of music I'm going to refer to is the famous

C Major Prelude by JS Bach. Now, sight reading again, as I said before,

is not about note after note after note after note after note going, C E G C E G C E and

reading like that, I mean it's just impossible to sound musical if that's how you see sight

reading. So what is the deeper concept behind the music? Well, one of the most important

things to consider on the piano is chords and harmony because all of the music we listen

to on piano is built on chords and harmony. And if you have a deeper understanding of

what is happening harmonically with the music, reading the notes becomes much more palatable.

So for instance, if I even just analyze what's happening in this piece, in every bar in the

left hand, we only have two notes. And it repeats - I am just playing the left

hand and the right hand consists of three notes, which forms more of this chord, the

first bar being a C major chord, the second bar being a D minor chord, the third bar being

a G seven chord. When you add the left hand, it turns into a chord. So if I play this piece

entirely by putting all the notes together and treating it like a chord, the whole piece

is really just a collection of chords. So by understanding a little bit about the chord

system, even if it's just the bare minimum, knowing our major and minor triads for instance,

and using our reading skills just to understand the starting and ending point of the chords

or the intervals between them, all of a sudden reading turns into something like this

as opposed to this - note, note, note, note, note. I'm now just thinking C Major, I can

even write it on the music. This is not a test, right? Great concert pianists and great

musicians when they're practicing, they scribble on their music, they write this down, they

write above the stave the fingerings they want to use, but they also write down things

like what are the harmonies that are taking place? Things to just give them that assistance,

that understanding to confirm that deeper understanding. On the first bar we have a

C major chord, Second bar - a D minor seven with a C in the

base, then a G seven with a B in the base, Then

a C major, then an A minor starting on a C, then a D seven with a C in the base, then

a G major with a B in the base, then a C major seven with a B in the base,

Then an A minor seven, then a D seven, then a G

major chord, then a G diminished chord. And if you are