Everyone who takes piano lessons has heard at some point that you are supposed to practice sight reading. But how are you supposed to actually get better at it, and at what point does it become fun instead of a painful process of deciphering notes one at a time? I personally remember trying to play through a reduction of a Mozart symphony for piano four hands with another pianist and getting totally left in the dust. Yet I have found that steadily working on the following strategies over the years has helped sight reading become something I find incredibly enjoyable. Here are three tips that have helped me move from confused to competent enough to enjoy the process.
1. Never look down at your hands.
This one might seem obvious but honestly makes such a big difference once you really commit to it. It is simplistic to underestimate how important it is for sight reading that you are able to play without looking at your hands. If you haven't seen the music before, you need your eyes to be looking at the music 100% of the time. At first this will mean going very slowly and probably ignoring the rhythm in order to build your knowledge of the keyboard by feel alone. If you need to start with just one hand alone, go for it, because pianists have an extra challenge in using two hands at the same time that other instrumentalists don't face in the same way. Only once you are feeling more comfortable finding your way around the keyboard without looking down should you move on to the next tip.
2. Establish a pulse, no matter how slow.
The pulse can come from many different places: you can use your foot to tap on the ground, you can use one hand tapping on your leg while the other hand plays, you can count out loud, you can use a metronome. Pick one that works for you for right now. The point is that your pulse will keep you accountable to playing not just the correct pitches like in the first tip, but also the correct rhythm. Now, many people try this and instantly crash and burn because their tempo is WAY too fast. So they try and slow down their speed more and more until it is so slow that they can't even keep track of the pulse anymore. Then they give up and say that they will never learn how to sight read and their rhythm is too poor. The secret here is that once your metronome speed dips below 60 beats per minute, it is hard even for a well-trained musician to stick to it. Instead, you have to double the speed of your pulse, in this case to 120, but keep using it as if it were at 60. In other words, if 60 was the quarter note, 120 is now the eighth note. Then you can slow down from 120 until you find a tempo you can use. Let's say you finally can manage it at eighth note equals 70. You probably wouldn't have been able to do it at quarter note equals 35, but eighth note equals 70 is much easier to follow.
3. Read good music, especially with other musicians.
My love for sight reading really began when I started reading through music I actually liked. I spent a whole summer spending two hours a day dedicated to reading through new pieces VERY slowly. I went through Mozart Piano Sonatas, Beethoven variations, Bach suites, the Well-Tempered Clavier. Now, at first this was a pretty arduous process, and I will freely admit that my rhythmic accuracy was pretty subpar and tempo consistency almost non-existent. But getting a chance to look through this music on my own was enough to convince me that it was worthwhile to develop this skill further. The next step was to go through more music with other pianist and string player friends to convince me that I also needed to develop the consistency of my pulse. Its all well and good to have a teacher tell you that you should observe the dynamics and articulations when you are sight reading, or that you should work with a metronome, or that you should always be counting, but a lot of those things will fall naturally into place if you are trying it out on genuinely good music you are interested in with other musicians who can play well. The music and the musicians will help hold you to it. For me, that felt like falling on my face quite a few times at first but it helped motivate me to keep going to the point where I spend time almost every day reading new music just because its fun and my kids will start dancing around.
Everyone knows working on sight reading will at least theoretically benefit their playing. Most music examinations like the Royal Conservatory of Music exam require a sight playing section which includes both rhythm and playing. Yet slogging through the process can feel arduous without some key strategies and a clear goal. For me, the goal was to be able to play on my own or with others in a way that I enjoyed the process and liked what came out, even if it wasn't perfect. Those three tips helped get me a long way and over time took me from pretty confused to quite comfortable. Above all, being able to play music I actually enjoyed and not just some exercise took it from being something imposed on me to something I wanted to be able to do for myself, and I hope that you find the same thing to be true.