Demonstrate The Importance Of Rhythm, Pulse And Not Stopping!

If you put a piece of music down in front of your average student and say, “play this” (try it and see what happens!), they’ll probably take a look at the first notes and immediately start playing.

Without guidance, students often begin playing without any sense of pulse, without looking past the first bar, without considering the key signature and they’ll definitely stop and start as they struggle through each bar. In other words, without proper teaching, sight reading will generally be a disaster.

I often ask my students, what is the most important consideration when sight reading something effectively?

The most common response, in my experience, is “getting the notes right”. While playing the right notes is preferable, it is not the most important aspect by far. The most important aspect of sight reading (and music reading in general) is keeping a sense of the rhythm.

To clarify why this is so important, try this with your students, take any famous tune that the student knows well (eg. Happy Birthday, a nursery rhyme like 3 Blind Mice, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, etc.) and play it on the piano with perfect rhythm but with all the wrong notes. Try it out next lesson and see what happens.

If they don’t get it the first time, play it again but this time keep a sense of the high and low notes (ie. preserve some of the intervallic structure but still play all the wrong notes).

Nine times out of ten, students will be able to pick the tune.

Why? Because rhythm is vital to getting a ‘sense’ of a piece of music and often more important than notes.

This is why I teach my students that once they begin their sight reading, “Whatever you do, don’t stop!”.

Here are some sight reading tips to help students get used to this:

• Use the Wessar SightRead4Piano iPad app which removes bars once they have been played, forcing students to look ahead and not go back. Alternatively, simply cover up the bars when they’ve played them (only useful in lessons).

• Sight read duets together in lessons. For beginner students, sight read method book pieces that have the teacher accompaniment below. Eg: I tend to use Accelerated Piano Adventures for my teenage students, but any method book will do. I have a shelf of method books that I can pick and play anytime in a lesson anything will do as long as it’s at the right level and has an accompaniment. I’ve previously blogged about the freely downloadable Diabelli Duets, these are fantastic for intermediate to advanced level students, even if they just sight read one hand at a time (and they are musically interesting enough to keep teachers happy).

• If you can lend students method books with CDs that they can rip to their iPhones/iPods, they can play along to the backing tracks at home, forcing them to keep going.

• If students are more advanced, they can download and sight read the free previews of pieces available on Notestar for iPad which includes lots of pop, rock and even classical pieces with great backing tracks and vocals.