I'm a fairly average pianist, but sight reading is a (relative) strength. Being able to play random notes is definitely part of it, but I think for me sight-reading is more about getting a sense of the gist of the music (a lot of pattern matching of common phrases, cadences, hand positions etc) - this is kind of subconcious, then my focus is on keeping my internal version aligned with what's on the page (spotting where the written music is doing something different or interesting and making sure you hit those notes). The latter part would definitley improve by practicing random notes, but the first bit is more akin to improvisation - you've got some lossy, distilled version of the music in your head (from memory or from your first mental parse of the full manuscript) and you're trying to recreate it (or expound on it).
I think what really helped my reading was having lots of cheap/free sheet music on hand and just trying to play it (simplifying massively if needed, but trying to get the sense of it, even if only playing 20% of the notes)
It's the difference between learning to recognise letters and learning to read words. Music is made of words - scale-specific gestures, of which there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, typically arranged in some kind of harmonic context so you can make reasonable guesses about what's coming next.
This matters because finger positions have to be optimised for the smoothest and fastest motion. Piano sheet music usually includes this information, but random note sequences won't.
All of it contributes to look-ahead, where you're reading a bar or two ahead of the music to give your brain time to assemble the finger movements it's going to need.
I think the OP would have benefitted more from programming an interface to project Hanon's exercises[1] to practice than randomized notes.
[1] https://www.hanon-online.com/ <-- perhaps the most popular fingering practice for pianists. It's boring and tedious, but it 100% works!
This made me think of typing tutor programs that just prompt for random letters. I type like shit on those-- slow and inaccurate.
On the other hand, I'm quick and reasonably accurate when typing English words and frequently-used command lines.
The analogy would surely hold true with musical instruments. Even with my limited experience playing musical instruments I can't imagine trying to practice random notes and rhythms. On the face of it I would think it would have little to no value. (Effectively practicing to play unlistenable music...)
Some genres of music are that way. Other genres have different conventions, ethics, and aesthetics. Even within harmonically oriented Euro-traditions, great weight is given to a musician’s ability to play what does not easily “fall under the fingers.”
There’s nothing wrong with Smoke on the Water but it is totally played.
Bebop is the best example of this for me in music. When I first started listening to Charlie Parker as a teenager, I heard only a series of notes. But it sounded great so I kept listening (a lot!) and then I heard phrases, sentences, an actual language.
Then I bought Giant Steps and again heard only a scramble of notes. It was a new language, which took some time to learn. But now listening to Coltrane and listening to someone talk, feels exactly the same.
I have gone through various phases in how it feels to play these random notes. Right at the beginning there is obviously the mechanical skill of just being able to put your fingers in the right place. This is less pronounced on piano than guitar, since single notes on the piano are obviously pretty easy for anyone. But when I switched to chords, I definitely felt the feeling I remember from learning the guitar, where the campfire chord shapes seemed to be just impossible to achieve with my fingers.
Keep in mind that this is not the only thing I'm doing to learn - I am also learning pieces, playing arpeggios and scales and studying music theory. Lately I've been gaining speed on the random notes by identifying runs and reading ahead a bit like you're describing.
I am quite proficient at guitar, played in a band and did a lot of pop music playing where you're handed a lyric sheet with chords and you have to just play. I can do that pretty much without prep. I can also "sight read" tablature for reasonably simple finger picking for novel songs quite a bit faster than I am able to do it on piano at the moment. I could never quite get there for traditional notation although I tried. I struggled to improve because once I knew the piece, I could play it without reading the music. So I would laboriously figure out the fingerings, then just play the piece from memory once I had done that. This was all happening in the early 1990s so I also didn't have the glut of music we would have now. Tablature was much more available for the pieces I wante to learn than traditional notation. I guess there is a mode where you force yourself to only learn new pieces all the time, but I found that pretty frustrating coming from zero.
I'm finding with piano, now that I have the notes in my fingers, that first step is much less frustrating and I can focus on building the mechanical dexterity to execute the phrases and remember the music.
Is this what self-taught looks like? I have never heard of that mnemonic and it was never hard to learn the order of sharps/flats in a key signature. You just look at the way it's written on the staff - two lines of sharps a 4th apart going up progressively, two lines of flats a 4th apart going down progressively.
I don't want to discourage the guy, but practicing every day for 4 years straight and he's only gotten to 60bpm... there are better methods to learn piano sight reading.
You don't have to learn music theory yourself, so long as theory is something someone knew in the past to design how you learn. What matters is that you learn the useful patterns, why those patterns are useful is not something you need to know (except if you are trying to break the rules - understanding the rules means you understand what happens when you break them and thus can come up with good breakages instead of unmusical noise)
We practice our scales through the circle of fifths. I don't really follow what they mean by "activates" at F#.
If this is getting the author to play and they're having fun, then that's great. But having a great teacher is invaluable, particularly when you're trying to lay down the fundamentals. It's going to be more difficult to unlearn bad habits in the future.
By this time I must admit that the random note playing is just an activity that I enjoy improving at independently, while I do think it's also making it easier for me to pick up new pieces quickly.
>> This is easier to get
>> into your fingers than
>> any other memorisation
>> technique.
Four years playing the piano is still a beginner level of experience against an adult standard of piano playing. Even if it is a lot for an eight year old child.
OP if you want to improve sight reading faster, I would recommend using non-random notes - context is very important when sight reading and if you get a professional pianist to sight read random notes they will be much, much slower.
Sight reading factory is one site I know that does this a bit better
An interesting middle ground might be using LLMs to generate plausible melodies based on real-world music patterns and emphasizing the unfamiliar patterns, but if the goal is to play real music fluently, nothing beats practicing with actual pieces from the repertoire you want to play.
I got to music college without really being able to read at all and turned it into a real strength to the extent that by my final year I was by far the best sight reader in the college on my instrument (I was a bass player so it's a relatively low bar, but I was even a good reader compared to many folks on other instruments). How I learned (and what I would recommend) is get yourself a truly massive pile of music for your instrument and get a metronome or drum machine app on your preferred device.
Then, every day (will take a few months to get good) pick a piece up from the pile, allow yourself a few seconds to check out the key and time signature, check for repeats etc so you know the basic structure and look for anything funky (odd bars, key changes etc). Set the metronome a little below the indicated tempo on the music (you can work up to sightreading fully up to speed), then start the metronome and immediately play it through without stopping as though you were doing a performance. Then put the music on the done pile, pick up the next piece and go back to the start.
So: Use real music. Play each piece once as though it was a performance. With a metronome/drum machine to keep you honest tempo-wise. In a few months you will get good at sightreading.
Once you're good start doing transcriptions of things you like. Doesn't need to be your instrument. Obviously this helps your ear but I found it also helped my sightreading. But it's not really worth doing until your basic sightreading chops are solid.
In the case of playing a random piece of music, if you don't know it, again, how do you know how well you've done? I've been contemplating a similar thing with my repertoire playing, choosing a random bar for revision or learning via Anki.
Another thing - it sounded like you already played your instrument well, but wanted sight read, when you were doing this learning. So perhaps you already had a lot of the phrases in your fingers so to speak and this was just allowing you to connect the notation to what you already knew how to play. Do you think this would have worked well in my case where I could play a different instrument but didn't have any mechanical memory of chord shapes, arpeggios and so on in my fingers?
Even though I could read sheet music, I mostly played piano by ear until around high school when I decided to properly learn to sight-read. At the time, my access to musical resources was limited, so I borrowed the Episcopal Church hymnal from our church.
The great thing about hymnals is that they are choral in nature, usually with four voices, but at the same time, they are rhythmically simple in nature since they are intended to be sung, allowing you to purely concentrate on the notes themselves.
I ran through it sequentially for months and found that my sight-reading capabilities measurably improved.
I always try to avoid learning by pattern, because it would make me less flexible when composing.
It's important to know the notes on the keyboard, but it's far more important to know how they work together in harmonious patterns. Composing entirely by ear is an option, but you still need to transliterate what your mind is hearing into notes on a page (preferably more complex than just a single note melody).
I 100% get where you're coming from, but I think a grounding in theory helps a ton with composition (even if you don't know how to play a specific instrument).
Additionally let me call out that sight reading and composition are completely different objectives.
I also sincerely doubt playing random notes on the piano as part of a sight reading process would make you a better composer unless you're aiming to be the next Karlheinz Stockhausen.
Used these can be found for cheap, and short of MPE, hammer action, and a build for touring these might have everything a MIDI controller needs.
Layers, splits, onboard programmability, plenty of controls, DIN ports, USB, and afterfouch (but like the author's keyboard, the faders are always missing the custom keycaps for the non-standard size fader stems).
They are a plastic fantastic in gorgeous oughties silver.
What I meant is that used Axioms are usually missing keycaps.
But they can be found cheap and have many great features. Plus the keybed is ok’ish.
Edit:
I used singing in quotes because you only really intonate (generate an accurate pitch with your voice). You don't learn actual singing technique.
I imagine it would be far more engaging (but also far more complicated) to tap into an archive of songs and present those randomly, either selected by or transposed into the key that you want to practice.
A bit like when people tell you to learn Morse code, not to learn it letter by letter.
Fun fact, during WW2 there were lots of encrypted transmissions over Morse code, and lots of folk (often women, in the UK at least) had the job to transcribe them. They would then be passed on to the cryptoanalytics specialists in Bletchley Park. I guess other countries had similar arrangements.
So they would sit 8h+ a day and transcribe what looked like garbage to them.
I was playing piano as a child, and I was ok-ish. I started again a couple of years ago as a 'workout' for my brain/reflexes/speed/etc rather than to amaze the crowds (I never play in front of other people - 2-3 people know/have seen me play).
The author wanted to 'learn how to play'. I wanted to re-learn 'playing music', and if you want to get the notes of a random song and play it half-decent, I'm sorry but you need to be able to read the bloody thing :)
In case anyone wants to try their luck, I will suggest to buy a second-hand electric piano (I got a Yamaha), and for 'guide/teacher' I use SimplyPiano (not affiliated) and it has taken me from "play with one finger" to "play with two hands" (but I take it slow and easy - I will never reach Ryuichi Sakamoto level)
It was mentioned the person was trying to memorize all these with anki or something. There's actually no need. You only need to memorize 2 key signatures and the rest follow a pattern.
C major has 0 sharps/flats F major has 1 flat
Every sharp key is a half step up from the last sharp shown. G major has 1 sharp F#. G is a half step up from F#. In A major the last sharp is G#, etc.
In flat keys, it's the second flat to the right. Bb has two flats in the signature. Bb and Eb. Ab has 4 where Ab is the 3rd.
All minor keys are a minor third down from their major key. Of course, you have to look at more of the music to determine if it is a in major or minor key.
If you can remember that you can tell what any key signature is pretty quickly.
You can do the same thing where you configure it to just one key, start with the basic triads, etc.
However, meanwhile I am learning the basic skills - starting with chord progressions in different keys (and as a side effect learning different scales) - and I am able to enjoy learning and playing music without the stress and anxiety of sight reading.
I have found a teacher (online from London) who follows this harmony first approach - and it has really changed the game for me.
Different approach and journey - but the destination is probably the same.
Playing with other people also highlights other perhaps unexpected skills. I played in a band for a while and I still retain the skill of reading chords off other player's hands. You also need to be able to respond to someone just shouting "OK, let's go to C minor" in ways that only matter in that context. When you're listening or sight reading, you don't need names.
Nothing quite as crushing as seeing people sight read things that would take you months/years to learn with the score... :)
Thanks for sharing your journey!
I'm not tracking my music practice (maybe I should) but I've been wearing a health tracker for years and have collected a ton of data. None of it seems very actionable because there have been no surprises.
I want to sight-read chords, chord progressions, and other patterns, and get better at playing those.
You'll need to learn all your chords of course. Take a few keys every day and just practice your four triads for each (major, minor, diminished, augmented) with their inversions up and down. Use a metronome and increase the speed weekly until you've got all of them going at a decent pace. When you can do that, then you can move to the four part chords and do the same. Everyone teaches it differently, but my teacher had me doing 10 of them -- maj6, min6, dim7, maj7, dom7, min7, min7b5, minmaj7, augmaj7, aug7, in that order, with their inversions, in closed and then open position, in all 12 keys. It takes years honestly.
And of course you'll want to be playing songs from lead sheets -- over time you'll start picking up on the ii-V-Is, I-vi-ii-Vs, and I-IV-Vs, etc.
One way to practice this is to pick up a hymnal (I recommend Methodist or Episcopal). Simple songs, usually in four part harmony, and will straightforward and obvious chord progressions.
b. What does GAS mean?
"Gear Acquisition Syndrome", a common meme particularly among online musician communities around the desire for more gear whether or not you actually need it just to have it
Thanks for writing this up, I'm definitely going to incorporate this into my practice routine