How to practice sight reading

What sight reading practice is

Learning a piece means playing the same bars until they are right. Sight reading practice is the opposite: you read something once, keep the beat, let the mistakes go and move on to something new. The second time through, you are already partly playing from memory, which is a different skill.

So the two things that matter most are a steady supply of new music and the habit of not stopping. Everything below serves one or the other.

Ten minutes a day

We suggest ten minutes every day rather than an hour once a week. Each session goes like this:

1. Pick music that is a little too easy. A level below what you would choose to learn as a piece. If you stop more than once or twice, it is too hard.
2. Look at it for half a minute before you play. The checklist is in the next section.
3. Set a slow tempo and count in. One bar of counting, out loud or with a metronome, sets the beat before the first note.
4. Play it once without stopping. Keep the beat, whatever happens. Leave out a note rather than go back for it.
5. Check, then move on. Listen to how it should have gone, or play it a second time, then take something new. Don't polish it.
6. Write down what stopped you. One line, such as "dotted rhythms in 3/4" or "the leaps in bar 6". That is tomorrow's focus.

What to look at before you play

Thirty seconds, in this order:

• Key signature. Which sharps or flats, and is it major or minor? Say the key out loud.
• Time signature. How many beats in a bar, and which note gets the beat.
• Range. Find the highest and the lowest note, so neither surprises you.
• Rhythms. Find the bar you would have to think about, and count it once in your head.
• Accidentals. Sharps, flats and naturals that aren't in the key signature.
• Patterns. Scales, broken chords, a rhythm that repeats. You read a pattern faster than single notes.

Keep going, whatever happens

Not stopping is the skill. A wrong note in time sounds like music; a stop breaks it for everyone playing with you. Three habits help:

• Count all the way through, out loud if you can, at a tempo you can hold.
• Keep your eyes a little ahead of what you are playing, half a bar at first, then more.
• If you get lost, find beat one of the next bar and come back in there.

Read rhythm first

Rhythm is what keeps you going. Before you play a new line, tap or clap its rhythm once while you count. If a bar falls apart, it is usually its rhythm, and that is the part worth practicing on its own.

In our generator you can make rhythm the only new thing: under More settings, keep Notes on "Steps 1, 4 and 5 of the scale" and move Rhythm up one step at a time.

Know your notes without thinking

If you have to work out which line is which, you fall behind. Learn a few landmarks cold (the C's, the G line of the treble clef, the F line of the bass clef) and read the rest as steps and skips from them: a step goes from a line to the next space, a skip from a line to the next line.

Every key, major and minor

Start in the keys you know and add one sharp or one flat at a time. Before you play, say the key and play or sing its scale once: the notes you are about to read are all in it.

Don't leave minor keys for later. Harmonic minor raises the 7th step of the scale and melodic minor the 6th and the 7th, so they bring accidentals the key signature doesn't show. Our generator has every major key up to six sharps or flats and minor keys from four sharps to six flats, in all three forms.

Hear it before you play it

Before you start, try to hear the first bar in your head. It gets easier with practice, and singers need it most. To check what you heard, listen: our generator plays every exercise back, and the sight singing tools below play the key first.

Read real music too

Exercises give you a lot of new music quickly. Real pieces add what exercises lack: phrases, style and the conventions of your instrument. Read easy pieces a level or two below what you play: the method book you finished last year, hymns, folk songs. Duets are the best of all, because your partner won't wait for you.

Free public-domain scores are on IMSLP, and for choirs on CPDL; our guide Free practice tools for choir singers has both.

If you sing

Find the key note first and sing the scale. Then sing the melody on solfège syllables (do, re, mi) or on scale numbers, whichever your choir or teacher uses, and keep the beat as an instrumentalist would. The guide Free practice tools for choir singers has more.

If you teach

Sight reading works best as a few minutes in every lesson or rehearsal, not as a test. With our generator you can give a whole class the same exercise without accounts: make one, press Copy link and send the link, or print it. Embed puts it on your own website, with Play.

How to tell you are improving

Keep a short log: the date, the level, the tempo, the key and how many times you stopped. Change one thing at a time. When you get through three new exercises in a row without stopping, raise the tempo; when that is easy too, go up a level or add a key. Every few weeks, read something you would have found hard when you started.

More free tools

The best free sight reading websites lists every free tool we tested, and what each one asks of you.