Fluent enough in C and G to read simple pieces at tempo. Put three or four flats in front of me and I stop dead, and I can feel myself spelling out each note by name and then translating it to a key. I have been reading for about eighteen months. Flats are worse than sharps for me, which I assume is not meaningful but it is consistent.
Where to get endless easy material: hymn books are excellent for this, four parts, predictable harmony, and they cover every key including all the flat ones. Lead sheets are good too. Old graded exam books from a charity shop cost almost nothing and give you a hundred short pieces you have never seen, which is exactly what the skill requires.
Duet books are even better if you can find anyone to play with, because you physically cannot stop when someone else is playing.
Say the flats out loud before you start, in order, B E A D. Once you notice that four flats is always B E A D and you are not choosing individually, the key signature stops being four separate warnings and becomes one fact.
Flats being harder than sharps is common and not imaginary. Most beginner material lives in sharp keys, so you have simply had far more exposure. It evens out with practice in the flat keys.
@etym_elliot · 10mo ago · 3 replies
You are describing letter by letter reading, which works until the accidentals stack and then collapses. The fix is to change what you are reading rather than to read harder.
Three things, all of which are boring and all of which work.
Before you read anything, play the scale and the arpeggio of the key for sixty seconds. Your hand then already knows where the flats live and you stop making decisions about individual notes. This one change is worth more than everything else on the list.
Read intervals, not notes. Once you have found the first note, everything after it is a third up, a step down, a repeat. Distances are visual and immediate; letter names have to be decoded. Cover the page and quiz yourself on shapes for two minutes a day and it moves fast.
Read material that is far too easy, and never stop. Three grades below what you can play, hands together, and if you make a mistake you keep going. A wrong note in time is a sight reading success. Stopping to fix it is practising stopping.
Fifteen minutes a day of new easy material beats an hour a week of struggling with something hard, and it will look like nothing is happening for about six weeks.
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@chapter_cass · 10mo ago
The never stop rule is the one people resist hardest. Sight reading is a separate skill from learning a piece, and mixing them ruins both.
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@circadian_cass · 10mo ago
Sixty seconds of the scale first has already made a difference this week. It feels like cheating and I suspect that is the point.
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