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)
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.
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!
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.
> 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...)
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 Schönberg or Bartók?
...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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
>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.
"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.
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)
>> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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 different, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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... :)
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.
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.
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.
"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
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)
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.
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!
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.
> 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...)
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 Schönberg or Bartók?
I remember a lot of, 'a sad lad had glad fad'. And then yes, it descended into nonsense from there on out.
Bartók... >shudder< You have a point.
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.
> 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.
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
But isn't this a good thing?
I always try to avoid learning by pattern, because it would make me less flexible when composing.
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).
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
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.
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.
+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.)
>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.
"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.
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)
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.
60bpm of random notes!
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.
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.
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.
Gear Acquisition Syndrome (GAS)
Thank you, there was absolutely no clue in the article for what that jargon/meme meant, and googling for gas obviously didn't help.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
[dead]
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.
You mention you are looking for a good resource for training listening - have you tried https://tonedear.com/?
Seems to have had the hug of death https://web.archive.org/web/20250522125504/https://sandrock....
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
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 different, 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.
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.
I was using this free browser based app ( https://sightreading.training/ ), but the fact that there were random notes drove me crazy.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
It's the HORSE (basketball) equivalent of piano.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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
Oh, I suppose it makes sense that we'd need a word like that. Thanks!
Why not just grab a hymnal and go through that? Edit: Happy to be downvoted, but at least explain why you disagree with this.