Playing Piano - Sight Reading 4

Take a closer look, try and figure out how that sound, and look how it feels with your fingers, and how the rhythm will go. When you start, you will start slow. You will start counting and then as you play this, you will be looking ahead, like driving a car. (Demonstration) Everyone knows that if you are driving here—if you have driven a car before—you know that you do not look right down the center of the hood. You do not look right down the front of your hood or right in front of your headlights and look at the pavement. You start weaving in and out. What you do is look into the distance, look way ahead and then you can see everything ahead of you. It is the same idea here. You will be driving this way. Wherever you are playing is like where your car is. Start playing the D, and then drive into the G. Before you even start, you should look ahead of the first few bars. That way, it is like you have parked here and you have figured out, “I am going to play this” and as you start driving, you will be looking ahead into these notes. When you are here driving along (Demonstration), you are actually looking here, so you have already figured out what you are going to play after this. That way, you always stay ahead of the music and that way, you are not caught off-guard. How you determine how fast you can site-read is how fast you can read the notes and figure them out because if you are driving faster than you can read the notes, then obviously, your car is going to go farther ahead than you can see. That is when you crash. Try to develop your site reading technique. What you can even do is you do not even have to play. Just take a book and say, “Hey, I am will do a quick check in my head here.” It does pay off. It is not always Treble Base. It is Treble Clef. That just means that all of these notes are way there, and then all of these notes, they would be on the Treble clef. That would be an E on the Treble clef. (Demonstration) This is the middle C right here. (Demonstration) You will just go along, feel the music, and then you try what you can do. Just open the book and then try to read and go through it. Also, whenever you see a space to another space, (Demonstration) this space to this space is called the 3rd. You skip a space and then you go to the next space, that is called the 5th. It is the same thing if you went from line to line, that is the 3rd. (Demonstration) A 5th is basically (Demonstration). That is a 5th, and this is the 3rd. (Demonstration) Does that sound familiar? It is C major. It is like a chord. You will just go along and read through the music. Try to get your mind to think of two at once. (Demonstration) You can think of it, and just reading the music will get you faster when you try to play it. I hope everything helps there. Just remember to look ahead, do not let the car get ahead of where you are looking. Practice hard on that. This is an extremely important scale that I have neglected quite a bit, and I regret it. I do remember one time I focused a lot on site reading and I was trying to get out of it. Eventually, if you look at notes, they are not hard to play. They are just telling you what to do, and you can play it as fast as you can see it. There you go, Piano Lesson #17. For 18, I have decided—this may be the same, but we should actually teach the lesson on how to develop or learn new hard pieces and how to practice them. I will probably be posting that video up shortly. I might even record it right now. If not, I will record it maybe tomorrow or something like that. I hope that site reading helped. Somehow, I think I was all over the map with that. My earlier lessons were more planned because I have them all written out and I have my point mode. I had everything organized and I had more time that I do right now. But I hope that helps. I hope you are getting better at piano, too. Take care. Happy practicing.