Playing from the page

Playing one note at a time already works for you. In chapter 10 you played tunes from the staff, and the course waited patiently: the next note lit up only once you had found the one before. In chapter 12 you played with two hands the same way, note by note. Then the metronome comes on and everything falls apart. While the eye looks for the note, the hand stands still. While the hand looks for the key, the metronome has moved two beats on. You make a mistake, stop and correct it, and the tune is gone. What is left is a set of right notes with holes between them.

This is the chapter's wall: knowing the notes and reading at sight are different skills. Sight-reading is playing unfamiliar music from notation at first sight, at tempo and without stopping. Musicians sometimes call it by its Italian name, a prima vista, "at first sight". You learn to sight-read the way you learnt to read a book: first letter by letter, then word by word, and then the eye runs on by itself, half a phrase ahead along the line.

A rehearsal in three passes

A new piece is rarely played at tempo straight away. You take it in several passes, and each pass removes one difficulty. This chapter has three, the same for every piece:

1. No tempo. The note waits for you. You work out where the hand goes and which finger takes each note. Mistakes here cost nothing.
2. With a metronome, slowly. The metronome is set to a tempo at which you have time to think. Each note lights up on its beat, and now the course scores two things: whether you pressed the right key, and whether you pressed it on time.
3. At tempo, with the playhead. A thin line travels across the notes: the playhead, as in a DAW. It does not wait. If you make a mistake, play the next note on its beat.

A pass counts at 70%. In the passes with a metronome that is the average of two scores: right notes and timing. All nine passes, three pieces times three, are collected in the log. It remembers your best result for each one and is kept in this browser.

The first piece is the French song "Au clair de la lune", "By the Light of the Moon". It is more than two hundred years old, and nobody knows who wrote it. The whole tune fits under three fingers: C, D and E. Start with the first pass, then press "2" and "3" above the staff.

Most likely the first pass went cleanly and the third did not, though the notes are the same. Look at the strip under the result: each dot is one note, above the line means early, below it late. The dots often drift downwards, most of all right after the half notes. While the hand rests, the eye doesn't get the next note ready, and the note comes late. The hand would have made it. The eye didn't.

Before going on, warm up on a piece you have certainly never seen: it was written for this chapter. Read it with your eyes before the count-in. Where is the highest note, where are the repeats, where does the tune go down?

Numbers above the notes

In chapter 4 you learnt the finger numbers: from the thumb (1) to the little finger (5), the same on both hands. You also met the five-finger position: five fingers on five neighbouring white keys. In printed music these numbers appear as small figures above or below the notes. Which fingers you play a piece with is its fingering.

The numbers save reading. A glance at the first number tells you where to put your hand. After that, as long as the tune stays inside the position, you needn't name the notes: a step up the staff is the next finger, a skip is one finger further. In the rehearsal above there were five numbered circles over the row of keys: that is the hand. The filled circle is the finger for the next note.

Five fingers make five keys, but a scale has eight notes. Below is the C major scale up and down in eighths. Choose what the hand does, listen, and then play it yourself.

There are three ways. If you keep the hand still, A, B and the upper C are out of reach: on the staff they are red, with a cross instead of a number. You can play the first five notes, then lift the hand and put it down higher up. That is a position shift made by moving the hand. You will do this often, especially at a bar line or after a rest, but in a fast scale it breaks the sound. Push the tempo up to 160 BPM and see how many milliseconds are left for the flight.

The third way is for scales and long runs. The thumb is shorter than the other fingers and bends under the palm. While the third finger holds E, the thumb passes under it and takes F, and the hand is in a new position without ever leaving the keys. This is called passing the thumb under, or thumb under for short. Going down it works the other way round: the third finger crosses over the thumb. For the C major scale in the right hand this gives 1-2-3-1-2-3-4-5 going up, and the same in reverse coming down.

The course can't see your fingers and checks only the notes. Watch your fingers yourself: the thumb passes under the third finger between E and F, and on the way back the third finger crosses over the thumb between F and E. On a computer keyboard there is nothing to pass under, since every note already sits under a finger, so this exercise is better played on a MIDI keyboard or on screen.

How do you choose a fingering for an unfamiliar piece when there are no numbers? Find the lowest and the highest note of the phrase. If they span no more than five white keys, put your hand so that they fall under 1 and 5, and keep it there until the phrase ends. If they span more, look for a place to move the hand: a rest, a long note, a bar line. Passing the thumb under makes sense where the notes run up or down in a row and the sound has to carry on without a seam.

Looking ahead

Now for the reader's main skill. A good reader does not look at the note being played: it has already been read, and the hands remember it on their own. At that moment the eyes are on the notes that follow. The distance between what the eye sees and what the hand plays is called the eye–hand span.

This span has been measured. In 1999 Sally Furneaux and Michael Land published an experiment in which they recorded the eye movements of pianists sight-reading. In professionals the eyes ran on average four notes ahead of the hands, in amateurs two. Measured in time, though, the span was almost the same for everyone: about a second. At a fast tempo it shrank to about 0.7 s, at a slow one it grew to 1.3 s. An experienced reader looks ahead by the same amount of time as a beginner, but reads more notes in that second.

Try it yourself. In this widget a note appears on the staff only when it is as many beats away as you have set, and the notes you have played disappear. The tune always stays in C position, and the "New tune" button gives you another one. Start with a window of two beats, then shrink it to half a beat: that is how someone reads who looks only at the current note.

With a half-beat window a note appears just when it is time to play it, and the eye is forever catching up with the hand. With two or three beats the playing evens out: you see the note in advance, and all the hand has to do is press. The widget shows the window in seconds under the slider. At 76 BPM two beats are about 1.6 s, a little more than the second measured in the pianists.

A professional pianist and a beginner sight-read the same piece at the same tempo. What will a recording of their eye movements show?

Both look about a second ahead, but the professional fits more notes into that second The professional looks a whole line ahead, the beginner one note The professional looks only at the note being played and remembers the rest

Measured in time, the span was about a second for both, and it depended more on the tempo than on experience. The difference is how many notes the eye takes in during that second: in Furneaux and Land's study, about four for the professionals and about two for the amateurs.

The eye gets ahead of the hand when it sees a shape rather than separate notes: "three steps up", "a repeat", "a skip and back again". You practised this in chapter 10. The bigger the chunk the eye recognises at once, the less reading each note takes, and the further ahead the eye can run.

The second piece is wider than the first: the German children's song "Hänschen klein", "Little Hans". In English-speaking countries the same tune is known as "Lightly Row". It covers the whole C position, from thumb to little finger, and skips: G to E, F to D. The numbers above the notes tell you which finger takes the first note of each phrase. After that, follow the shape.

Don't stop

The hardest habit in sight-reading is leaving mistakes alone. All our lives we have been taught the opposite: if you get it wrong, put it right. In writing that is exactly what you should do. In music a stop breaks the thing a listener notices first, the rhythm. A wrong note in a fast phrase often goes unnoticed, but everyone hears a gap in the middle of a bar. If you are playing with someone else, a bass player, a drummer or a track in a DAW, after a stop you simply fall out of step with them.

Below is "Au clair de la lune" again, now with a bass and a metronome. In "The teacher waits" mode the music freezes at every mistake, like a patient teacher, and waits for the right note. In "The music does not wait" mode the bass carries on whatever happens. Play in both modes and compare how long the piece took and how many stops there were.

Even two or three stops stretch the piece by a few seconds, and all that time the bass stands still. Without stops the piece lasts exactly as long as written, and the mistakes stay as separate dots. If you get completely lost, don't look for the place where you went wrong. Find the nearest strong beat, the first note of the next bar, and come in there. Skipping half a bar is better than stopping everyone.

Third pass, the playhead is moving. At the start of a bar you press the wrong key. What do you do?

Play the next note on its beat and leave the mistake behind Quickly press the right note, then carry on Start the bar again so that it comes out clean

The playhead does not wait: the right note pressed late is a mistake too, a timing one, and the next note will slip along with it. Starting the bar again means stopping. One wrong note is one dot on the strip, while a stop throws out every note that comes after it.

One more study at tempo, this time with eighths. The eighths come in pairs within a beat: read each pair as a single picture, "a step down" or "a step up". If you slip, look for the next quarter note.

Accuracy and tempo

How does the course decide that a note was played "on time"? It knows the beat of every note. It turns the moment of your press into audio time, takes off the delay from the calibration in chapter 0 and compares the result with the beat. The tolerance is 0.2 s, or about a third of a beat at a fast tempo. A press exactly on the beat earns a full point for timing, one at the edge of the tolerance half a point, one outside it nothing, and an extra press costs half a point. On the staff a note turns green if you were off by less than 60% of the tolerance, and orange otherwise. A note more than half a beat away from its place doesn't count at all. Pitch is checked separately: the key pressed closest to the beat must be the right note, in any octave.

This gives you a rule for choosing a tempo. Pitch mistakes are a sign that the tempo is too fast for the eye: you don't have time to read. Steady lateness by the same amount is usually not the tempo but a habit of waiting for the sound. If the dots on the strip under the result jump up and down, you are playing by the notes, not by the metronome: pressing whenever you have found the key. That is why the second pass is slow. It is where you learn to find the note before its beat.

A good tempo for reading is one at which you make no more than one or two pitch mistakes per piece. Slow and even beats fast with stops. Speed will come by itself once the eye starts recognising shapes.

"Rhythm first" works here too. The third piece is a minuet in 3/4 (chapter 8), with eighths. Before you look for the notes, tap its rhythm on its own. Then in the first pass you can think about nothing but the keys.

The minuet: the hand travels

Almost everyone who has had piano lessons knows the Minuet in G, BWV Anh. 114. It was copied into the second notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach, the one begun in 1725, and for a long time it was taken to be by Johann Sebastian Bach. In the late 1970s the musicologist Hans-Joachim Schulze found the same piece in a suite by the Dresden organist Christian Petzold, and it is now credited to Petzold. Here are its first eight bars.

This is the hardest piece in the chapter: there is an F♯ in the key signature (chapter 11), the time is 3/4, there are eighths, and the hand doesn't fit into one position. Bars 1–2 lie in G position: thumb on G4, little finger on D5. In bar 3 the hand moves up into C5 position, and in bar 4 it comes back. At the bar line you have one quarter note to move the hand, so look at the next bar while you finish this one. At the start of bar 7 the second finger crosses over the thumb onto F♯, and the thumb at once passes under it onto G.

If the third pass won't come, go back to the second and play it two or three times in a row. There is no shame in marking time in a rehearsal: a slow pass played three times without mistakes brings you closer to tempo than ten fast ones that fell apart.

One more study in G major, also in 3/4, but in D position: thumb on D4, fourth finger on G4. Every F here is sharp, even though there is no sign next to the note. The key signature says so.

Two hands at sight

On the grand staff (chapter 12) there is twice as much to read, and the eye–hand span is split between two lines. It helps that in simple pieces the left hand has far fewer notes, one or two a bar. Read the left hand as the support, noting where it comes in, and keep your eyes mostly on the tune. Below is "Au clair de la lune" with a bass, then the opening of "Hänschen klein". Any tempo will do: the next notes light up once you have played the ones before.

A piece for every day

Three pieces read, and now they are no good for sight-reading: you know them. You can only learn to sight-read on music you don't know, and you need a lot of it. The generator writes a new four-bar piece every time you press "New piece". The piece always fits the positions its level promises, and every note has a finger above it. The piece number is shown alongside, and it tells you the level and the variant.

The levels build up like this. Level 1 has only steps in C position, in quarters and halves. Level 2 adds skips, and level 3 wider leaps, eighths and 3/4. At level 4 the hand moves between the C and G positions, and at level 5 the piece goes into G major, in the G and D positions, with F♯. A good daily amount is two or three new pieces at the level where the third pass works about every other time. When it starts working every time, go up a level.

For a warm-up there is the "Sight-reading" trainer on the trainers page: four levels, from five notes at your own pace to two hands.

Your tune over your own beat

The last pass is for music you wrote yourself. The widget takes the tune from the Notebook, shows it as notes and plays the Notebook's other tracks underneath: the drums from chapter 9, the bass from chapter 12 and the chords from chapter 15, if you have them. You play the tune, at the Notebook's tempo, with the playhead. If there are no drums, a metronome clicks instead.

Your own tune is odd to read: you remember it, and the eye wants to rest while the hand plays from memory. Try to read it anyway, looking a second ahead at the notes. It is a good check of what you recorded. If you stumble where you remember everything, the notes may not say what you meant. Then fix the tune in the Notebook's piano roll, and the notes here will update.

What's next

You can now rehearse an unfamiliar piece: take it with no tempo, then with a metronome, then at tempo. You read finger numbers, change position by moving the hand and by passing the thumb under, look ahead at the notes and don't stop for mistakes. You have a generator that gives you new music to read every day, and a log that shows your scores going up.

But there isn't always sheet music. More often it is the other way round: a tune is in your head or on a recording, and nobody has ever written it down. How to find it on the keys by ear, the first note, the direction, the steps and the rhythm, is the subject of chapter 17.

The Notebook's tune can now be played at tempo, with the playhead, over your own drums, bass and chords, and your best score is remembered. Below is the same exercise with just a metronome: "Play your tune in time". In chapter 17 you will work out tunes by ear and record them in the Notebook.