[HN Gopher] Four years of sight reading practice
___________________________________________________________________
Four years of sight reading practice
Author : chthonicdaemon
Score : 131 points
Date : 2025-05-19 03:44 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (sandrock.co.za)
(TXT) w3m dump (sandrock.co.za)
| chthonicdaemon wrote:
| I've been tracking my sight reading practice for four years using
| an iPad app, storing the results and plotting them. I am still
| seeing progress even after four years.
| sherdil2022 wrote:
| Very commendable but I never got the hang of reading score and
| playing. Even if I could manage some bars, it never stuck. I
| will definitely try again.
|
| However, meanwhile I am learning the basic skills - starting
| with chord progressions in different keys (and as a side effect
| learning different scales) - and I am able to enjoy learning
| and playing music without the stress and anxiety of sight
| reading.
|
| I have found a teacher (online from London) who follows this
| harmony first approach - and it has really changed the game for
| me.
|
| Different approach and journey - but the destination is
| probably the same.
| chthonicdaemon wrote:
| I have found being able to sight read relatively easily to
| unlock a vast trove of music I'd like to be able to play
| which would have been harder to pick up purely by ear. It's
| definitely worth learning the things you're talking about. I
| found the surest way to get good at that kind of playing is
| to play with other people. The time dependence of having to
| keep up with everyone makes the feedback really tight.
|
| Playing with other people also highlights other perhaps
| unexpected skills. I played in a band for a while and I still
| retain the skill of reading chords off other player's hands.
| You also need to be able to respond to someone just shouting
| "OK, let's go to C minor" in ways that only matter in that
| context. When you're listening or sight reading, you don't
| need names.
| sherdil2022 wrote:
| I agree. Sight reading does open up avenues - and my
| ultimate goal is improvization. I love to analyze various
| pieces and understand the functional aspects of tunes - so
| that I don't need to rely on reading or remembering.
|
| That is why JazzSkills.com really worked for me. You can
| find several free videos on their YouTube channel -
| https://m.youtube.com/@JazzSkills
|
| I almost gave up on learning and playing music after
| struggling for years / decades - and by happenstance came
| across JazzSkills few years ago. And since then every
| single day I get joy in learning and playing music.
| apercu wrote:
| For me it's less about melody and harmony than it is about
| rhythm, I often need to see or notate a syncopated rhythm
| in order to "get" it. Though that might just mean I haven't
| internalized a lot of syncopated rhythms.
| brusselssprouts wrote:
| If you're ever looking to learn sight-reading of lead sheets
| that use chord symbols, take a look at:
| https://mikebwilliams.com/chords/
|
| You can do the same thing where you configure it to just one
| key, start with the basic triads, etc.
| djtango wrote:
| Sight reading never really ends - I tested a friend
| (professional virtuoso) when he was drunk at a noisy party and
| he sight read one of the Chopin song transcriptions by Liszt (I
| deliberately chose something a bit obscure).
|
| Nothing quite as crushing as seeing people sight read things
| that would take you months/years to learn with the score... :)
|
| Thanks for sharing your journey!
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| It's the HORSE (basketball) equivalent of piano.
| criddell wrote:
| The charts are neat. Are you using any insights gained from the
| data collection to guide your practice?
|
| I'm not tracking my music practice (maybe I should) but I've
| been wearing a health tracker for years and have collected a
| ton of data. None of it seems very actionable because there
| have been no surprises.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I played horn for 4 years in middle and high school. Never got
| good at sight reading. But never really enjoyed playing either,
| practice was always a drudgery . Finally admitted to myself
| that I just didn't like it and quit.
| bluGill wrote:
| There is the problem with music - it is many 'man-months' of
| sounding bad and not having fun before you are good enough to
| sound good and have fun.
| brudgers wrote:
| _I have been using the same M-Audio Axiom 49 key MIDI keyboard
| for years_
|
| Used these can be found for cheap, and short of MPE, hammer
| action, and a build for touring these might have everything a
| MIDI controller needs.
|
| Layers, splits, onboard programmability, plenty of controls, DIN
| ports, USB, and afterfouch (but like the author's keyboard, the
| faders are always missing the custom keycaps for the non-standard
| size fader stems).
|
| They are a plastic fantastic in gorgeous oughties silver.
| chthonicdaemon wrote:
| I was intrigued by your mention of custom keycaps, so for the
| first time since I bought the keyboard I pulled off one of the
| caps to find a kind of usable fader still left there with a
| little red mark for the center. Now I'm googling for custom
| keycap options. So much for avoiding GAS.
| brudgers wrote:
| I don't think there are any readily available keycaps for
| your Axiom because M-Audio used faders with an odd size of
| stem and probably made custom moulds for the ones you have.
|
| What I meant is that used Axioms are usually missing keycaps.
|
| But they can be found cheap and have many great features.
| Plus the keybed is ok'ish.
| gabrielsroka wrote:
| Gear Acquisition Syndrome (GAS)
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| Thank you, there was absolutely no clue in the article for
| what that jargon/meme meant, and googling for gas obviously
| didn't help.
| lucas_codes wrote:
| I love data visualizations like these.
|
| OP if you want to improve sight reading faster, I would recommend
| using non-random notes - context is very important when sight
| reading and if you get a professional pianist to sight read
| random notes they will be much, much slower.
|
| Sight reading factory is one site I know that does this a bit
| better
| tarentel wrote:
| This is the first thing I noticed when I saw a sample of music.
| How useful could sight reading random notes actually be? I
| can't imagine it's completely useless but a lot of music is
| remarkably similar and quite predictable. I'd imagine
| practicing sight reading music with real structure would be far
| more useful for understanding those patterns and helping learn
| new and more complex pieces.
| yayitswei wrote:
| I agree. Reminds me of that story about chess grandmasters
| having incredible memory for valid chess positions but
| performing no better than average when remembering random piece
| arrangements. There's likely some efficient compression you can
| achieve by playing real-world music patterns rather than random
| notes. And it sounds better!
|
| An interesting middle ground might be using LLMs to generate
| plausible melodies based on real-world music patterns and
| emphasizing the unfamiliar patterns, but if the goal is to play
| real music fluently, nothing beats practicing with actual
| pieces from the repertoire you want to play.
| vunderba wrote:
| +1 for SRF. The generated pieces tend to be a bit more
| "musical" in nature as well and it also supports other
| instruments (guitar, violin, etc.)
| perlgeek wrote:
| Doesn't practicing with random notes become very boring?
|
| I imagine it would be far more engaging (but also far more
| complicated) to tap into an archive of songs and present those
| randomly, either selected by or transposed into the key that you
| want to practice.
| tianshuo wrote:
| There is an app called Piano Maestro that makes it much more
| fun, a large pool of pop songs, and increasing difficulty. We
| use multiple apps at home with our Yamaha piano that has a
| Bluetooth midi connected to it, including Notequest, Notevision
| and recently Piano Maestro.
| alnwlsn wrote:
| I feel like learning random notes would be the musical
| equivalent of the Chinese Room. You would be good at sight
| reading, but not be 'musical'.
|
| A bit like when people tell you to learn Morse code, not to
| learn it letter by letter.
| perlgeek wrote:
| > A bit like when people tell you to learn Morse code, not to
| learn it letter by letter.
|
| Fun fact, during WW2 there were lots of encrypted
| transmissions over Morse code, and lots of folk (often women,
| in the UK at least) had the job to transcribe them. They
| would then be passed on to the cryptoanalytics specialists in
| Bletchley Park. I guess other countries had similar
| arrangements.
|
| So they would sit 8h+ a day and transcribe what looked like
| garbage to them.
| mbeavitt wrote:
| You mention you are looking for a good resource for training
| listening - have you tried https://tonedear.com/?
| xanth wrote:
| Seems to have had the hug of death
| https://web.archive.org/web/20250522125504/https://sandrock....
| krosaen wrote:
| After researching a few apps, I have found Piano Marvel to be
| pretty good for automating practice of both scales, arpeggios and
| ear training as well as having a bank of songs. I use the web
| version, and the interface is clunky, but it's the closest I have
| found to a math academy like took for piano.
| exchemist wrote:
| This is cool, though the notes in your example look pretty
| random? Are they actually randomly or is it just too modern for
| me to hear it without playing it?
|
| I'm a fairly average pianist, but sight reading is a (relative)
| strength. Being able to play random notes is definitely part of
| it, but I think for me sight-reading is more about getting a
| sense of the gist of the music (a lot of pattern matching of
| common phrases, cadences, hand positions etc) - this is kind of
| subconcious, then my focus is on keeping my internal version
| aligned with what's on the page (spotting where the written music
| is doing something different or interesting and making sure you
| hit those notes). The latter part would definitley improve by
| practicing random notes, but the first bit is more akin to
| improvisation - you've got some lossy, distilled version of the
| music in your head (from memory or from your first mental parse
| of the full manuscript) and you're trying to recreate it (or
| expound on it).
|
| I think what really helped my reading was having lots of
| cheap/free sheet music on hand and just trying to play it
| (simplifying massively if needed, but trying to get the sense of
| it, even if only playing 20% of the notes)
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Yes, that's the problem with this approach. You don't learn
| random notes, you learn note patterns.
|
| It's the difference between learning to recognise letters and
| learning to read words. Music is made of words - scale-specific
| gestures, of which there are hundreds, perhaps thousands,
| typically arranged in some kind of harmonic context so you can
| make reasonable guesses about what's coming next.
|
| This matters because finger positions have to be optimised for
| the smoothest and fastest motion. Piano sheet music usually
| includes this information, but random note sequences won't.
|
| All of it contributes to look-ahead, where you're reading a bar
| or two ahead of the music to give your brain time to assemble
| the finger movements it's going to need.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| > Music is made of words - scale-specific gestures, of which
| there are hundreds, perhaps thousands...
|
| This made me think of typing tutor programs that just prompt
| for random letters. I type like shit on those-- slow and
| inaccurate.
|
| On the other hand, I'm quick and reasonably accurate when
| typing English words and frequently-used command lines.
|
| The analogy would surely hold true with musical instruments.
| Even with my limited experience playing musical instruments I
| can't imagine trying to practice random notes and rhythms. On
| the face of it I would think it would have little to no
| value. (Effectively practicing to play unlistenable music...)
| vishnugupta wrote:
| > typing tutor programs that just prompt for random letters
|
| I learnt touch typing on a physical mechanical typewriter.
| The syllabus that I followed did seem random but as I kept
| at it I could see there was a method to the madness.
|
| I checked out a few software tutorials and they seemed OK.
| Maybe there are some not good ones.
| klodolph wrote:
| I remember typing tutors that started with the home row and
| slowly expanded. There aren't a lot of words that use the
| home row exclusively, so you end up with nonsense.
|
| (You said "typing tutors programs" but my memory is of
| actual tutors, as in, people.)
|
| You may not like practicing random notes but maybe you want
| to play Schonberg or Bartok?
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Bartok... >shudder< You have a point.
| Hunpeter wrote:
| I mean, Bartok is really not that random: polytonality,
| pentatonic and octatonic stuff, whole-tone scales etc.
| are all things you can practice and put into work in his
| music. (You can argue that Schonberg is even less random,
| cause serialism, but that probably doesn't help too much
| when playing the piano).
| castillar76 wrote:
| Whoof -- this brought back memories of endlessly typing
| things like...
|
| kkk kik kik k,k k,k jjj juj juj jmj jmj hhh hyh hyh hnh
| hnh
|
| ...on a lovely, bangy, ink-scented IBM Selectric in
| typing class. Which at the time felt like a meaningless
| exercise, but absolutely strengthened the ability of my
| fingers to find the right keys in a hurry without looking
| at the keyboard.
| jlbooker wrote:
| I remember a lot of, 'a sad lad had glad fad'. And then
| yes, it descended into nonsense from there on out.
| brudgers wrote:
| _Music is made of words - scale-specific gestures, of which
| there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, typically arranged in
| some kind of harmonic context so you can make reasonable
| guesses about what 's coming next_
|
| Some genres of music are that way. Other genres have
| different conventions, ethics, and aesthetics. Even within
| harmonically oriented Euro-traditions, great weight is given
| to a musician's ability to play what does not easily "fall
| under the fingers."
|
| There's nothing wrong with _Smoke on the Water_ but it is
| totally played.
| eitally wrote:
| I was going to make the same comment as the PP, but I
| disagree with your point about "note patterns". When you're
| sight reading real music (melodies, harmonies and chords),
| _that 's_ when you start grokking note patterns and can reach
| real mastery. Sufficiently good sight readers often don't
| even need to read every individual note to anticipate what
| will "happen next" because in many cases chord progressions,
| rhythms and harmonies are fairly predictable (especially,
| _especially_ in pop /rock music, religious music and a lot of
| early classical.
|
| I think the OP would have benefitted more from programming an
| interface to project Hanon's exercises[1] to practice than
| randomized notes.
|
| [1] https://www.hanon-online.com/ <-- perhaps the most
| popular fingering practice for pianists. It's boring and
| tedious, but it 100% works!
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| > good sight readers often don't even need to read
|
| That would suggest they aren't good at reading, but good at
| playing. If you are practicing reading, then not reading
| and making stuff up is against what you are trying to do.
| mianos wrote:
| They are not anticipating the next phrase from memory.
| Music has a structure that often repeats or relates to
| earlier patterns. Like reading, you look forward and
| recognise the patterns in the score and their relative
| position. While I am partially agreeing with you, I
| disagree about 'reading' individual notes. You see _every_
| note, you just don 't need to convert them to a letter or
| key, because your hand is playing the whole phrase by
| interpreting the structure.
| tarentel wrote:
| > I was not learning to name the key signatures
|
| It was mentioned the person was trying to memorize all these with
| anki or something. There's actually no need. You only need to
| memorize 2 key signatures and the rest follow a pattern.
|
| C major has 0 sharps/flats F major has 1 flat
|
| Every sharp key is a half step up from the last sharp shown. G
| major has 1 sharp F#. G is a half step up from F#. In A major the
| last sharp is G#, etc.
|
| In flat keys, it's the second flat to the right. Bb has two flats
| in the signature. Bb and Eb. Ab has 4 where Ab is the 3rd.
|
| All minor keys are a minor third down from their major key. Of
| course, you have to look at more of the music to determine if it
| is a in major or minor key.
|
| If you can remember that you can tell what any key signature is
| pretty quickly.
| tgv wrote:
| It's simpler: in the major scale, every fifth down removes a #
| or adds a b, every quint up removes b or adds a #, and it's the
| 7th degree. Other church modes can be derived from a major
| scale. But that doesn't help you while playing. You have to
| know the key and scale you're in, and read the accidentals (and
| what op didn't mention: naturals and double #/b).
| tarentel wrote:
| There are definitely other ways to derive all this but with a
| quick glance you don't really need to do any computation
| involving intervals. The key is either the second to last
| flat, a half step up from the last sharp, C, or F. To me this
| is much simpler than seeing 3 sharps and going, C->G->D->A.
| It's definitely good to know the latter but definitely not
| necessary for ascertaining the key.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| _> I am mostly counting the number of sharps and flats and
| translating that to the keyboard through a pattern I figured out
| early on. The sharps "activate" from left to right across the
| groups of black notes, starting with F#, alternating between the
| two groups of black notes. This is easier to get into your
| fingers than any other memorisation technique. The order for
| flats is mechanically symmetrical - you just start from the right
| and move left, again from the "first" note in the group of three,
| which in that case is B. I am still not quite sure how other
| people are learning this, since most of the materials I've seen
| have focused on learning the actual names by rote, using
| mnemonics like "Father Charles Goes Down And Ends Battle"_
|
| Is this what self-taught looks like? I have never heard of that
| mnemonic and it was never hard to learn the order of sharps/flats
| in a key signature. You just look at the way it's written on the
| staff - two lines of sharps a 4th apart going up progressively,
| two lines of flats a 4th apart going down progressively.
|
| I don't want to discourage the guy, but practicing every day for
| 4 years straight and he's only gotten to 60bpm... there are
| better methods to learn piano sight reading.
| bluGill wrote:
| When you don't start with music theory (which took many
| centuries to develop) you end up with lots of things that work
| but not as well.
|
| You don't have to learn music theory yourself, so long as
| theory is something someone knew in the past to design how you
| learn. What matters is that you learn the useful patterns, why
| those patterns are useful is not something you need to know
| (except if you are trying to break the rules - understanding
| the rules means you understand what happens when you break them
| and thus can come up with good breakages instead of unmusical
| noise)
| smus wrote:
| 60bpm of random notes!
| brudgers wrote:
| >> This is easier to get >> into your fingers than
| >> any other memorisation >> technique.
|
| Getting the sharps and flats under your hands is an entirely
| different process than answering a quiz question in Music
| Theory 101.
|
| Four years playing the piano is still a beginner level of
| experience against an _adult_ standard of piano playing. Even
| if it is a lot for an eight year old child.
| mtalantikite wrote:
| "I am still not quite sure how other people are learning
| this..."
|
| We practice our scales through the circle of fifths. I don't
| really follow what they mean by "activates" at F#.
|
| If this is getting the author to play and they're having fun,
| then that's great. But having a great teacher is invaluable,
| particularly when you're trying to lay down the fundamentals.
| It's going to be more difficult to unlearn bad habits in the
| future.
| pier25 wrote:
| The best ear training is really solfege. It's been used for
| centuries. You basically learn to "sing" to create an internal
| "muscle memory" of the intervals, chords, etc much faster than
| the typical ear training app.
|
| Edit:
|
| I used singing in quotes because you only really intonate
| (generate an accurate pitch with your voice). You don't learn
| actual singing technique.
| ziofill wrote:
| I've been playing the piano for 30 years, and although I'm pretty
| good at sight reading I don't think I would manage well on random
| notes. Music is generally not random (even jazz): there is
| structure, there is alternating tension and resolution, lots of
| patterns etc... However, I can see the appeal of just getting
| good at translating symbols into sound, I'm pretty sure that if I
| practiced with random notes I would _also_ get better with
| patterns.
| -__---____-ZXyw wrote:
| a. Why not get piano lessons? If you are more interested in the
| technical fun of messing with software, this approach makes
| sense, sure. But if you're interested in sight-reading, it seems
| a bit wild. Sight-reading involves ear training, chunking
| patterns, etc etc.
|
| b. What does GAS mean?
| jedimastert wrote:
| > b. What does GAS mean?
|
| "Gear Acquisition Syndrome", a common meme particularly among
| online musician communities around the desire for more gear
| whether or not you actually need it just to have it
| -__---____-ZXyw wrote:
| Oh, I suppose it makes sense that we'd need a word like that.
| Thanks!
| skybrian wrote:
| Having started with traditional piano lessons, being able to
| sight-read notes without knowing what they are is something I've
| picked up, but not what I want. I think of this as "player piano
| mode."
|
| I want to sight-read chords, chord progressions, and other
| patterns, and get better at playing those.
| eitally wrote:
| It becomes easier, especially once you have anchors for your 1
| & 5 fingers on your left hand and know how to fill the space
| between.
|
| One way to practice this is to pick up a hymnal (I recommend
| Methodist or Episcopal). Simple songs, usually in four part
| harmony, and will straightforward and obvious chord
| progressions.
| mtalantikite wrote:
| A good jazz teacher would be able to lead you through this, or
| a classical teacher that has a composition background.
|
| You'll need to learn all your chords of course. Take a few keys
| every day and just practice your four triads for each (major,
| minor, diminished, augmented) with their inversions up and
| down. Use a metronome and increase the speed weekly until
| you've got all of them going at a decent pace. When you can do
| that, then you can move to the four part chords and do the
| same. Everyone teaches it differently, but my teacher had me
| doing 10 of them -- maj6, min6, dim7, maj7, dom7, min7, min7b5,
| minmaj7, augmaj7, aug7, in that order, with their inversions,
| in closed and then open position, in all 12 keys. It takes
| years honestly.
|
| And of course you'll want to be playing songs from lead sheets
| -- over time you'll start picking up on the ii-V-Is, I-vi-ii-
| Vs, and I-IV-Vs, etc.
| 725686 wrote:
| I was using this free browser based app (
| https://sightreading.training/ ), but the fact that there were
| random notes drove me crazy.
| actinium226 wrote:
| I was going to make an app like this years ago but got lazy and
| didn't. Oh well, nice to know I had the right idea!
|
| Thanks for writing this up, I'm definitely going to incorporate
| this into my practice routine
| potbelly83 wrote:
| Why not just grab a hymnal and go through that? Edit: Happy to be
| downvoted, but at least explain why you disagree with this.
| vunderba wrote:
| As others have mentioned, I would not recommend learning to
| sight-read from randomly generated assortments of notes, simply
| because the runs/progressions are unlikely to be found in the
| "wild," so you aren't building up mental patterns for chunking
| groups.
|
| Even though I could read sheet music, I mostly played piano by
| ear until around high school when I decided to properly learn to
| sight-read. At the time, my access to musical resources was
| limited, so I borrowed the Episcopal Church hymnal from our
| church.
|
| The great thing about hymnals is that they are choral in nature,
| usually with four voices, but at the same time, they are
| rhythmically simple in nature since they are intended to be sung,
| allowing you to purely concentrate on the notes themselves.
|
| I ran through it sequentially for months and found that my sight-
| reading capabilities measurably improved.
|
| https://hymnary.org/hymnal/HPEC1940
| k__ wrote:
| But isn't this a good thing?
|
| I always try to avoid learning by pattern, because it would
| make me less flexible when composing.
| eitally wrote:
| No, not at all (imho), because if you're starting from
| scratch and don't even know which notes make up common chords
| or progressions, how in the world will you figure out how to
| compose something that sounds good / makes sense?
|
| It's important to know the notes on the keyboard, but it's
| far more important to know how they work together in
| harmonious patterns. Composing entirely by ear is an option,
| but you still need to transliterate what your mind is hearing
| into notes on a page (preferably more complex than just a
| single note melody).
|
| I 100% get where you're coming from, but I think a grounding
| in theory helps a ton with composition (even if you don't
| know how to play a specific instrument).
| vunderba wrote:
| Well everyone learns differently. My earliest "compositions"
| (if you can call them that) are from grade school whistling
| into an old tape recorder and then transcribing them on our
| upright piano. Many of my friends who are musicians could
| also compose based on their ability to sing _LONG_ before
| they had any working knowledge of music theory.
|
| Additionally let me call out that sight reading and
| composition are _completely different objectives_.
|
| I also sincerely doubt playing random notes on the piano as
| part of a sight reading process would make you a better
| composer unless you're aiming to be the next Karlheinz
| Stockhausen.
| thomascountz wrote:
| OT, this is the first time I've heard of Pythonista for iOS. It
| seems like an amazing app, though I can't find many use cases as
| interesting as this one and there hasn't been much discussion
| about in on HN over the years.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| > You don't need to name notes to play them
|
| I was playing piano as a child, and I was ok-ish. I started again
| a couple of years ago as a 'workout' for my
| brain/reflexes/speed/etc rather than to amaze the crowds (I never
| play in front of other people - 2-3 people know/have seen me
| play).
|
| The author wanted to 'learn how to play'. I wanted to re-learn
| 'playing music', and if you want to get the notes of a random
| song and play it half-decent, I'm sorry but you need to be able
| to read the bloody thing :)
|
| In case anyone wants to try their luck, I will suggest to buy a
| second-hand electric piano (I got a Yamaha), and for
| 'guide/teacher' I use SimplyPiano (not affiliated) and it has
| taken me from "play with one finger" to "play with two hands"
| (but I take it slow and easy - I will never reach Ryuichi
| Sakamoto level)
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