How To Practice the Piano
3 Part Series
There are 3 separate skills in learning to play the piano:
• Memorizing
• Sight Reading
• Improvising
You can become quite proficient in one or two of these skills and be completely deficient in others. It is necessary to take a unique approach to develop each of these skills. The biggest mistake you can make is to not be clear as to which skill you are working on!
- How To Sight Read Almost Anything
The piano presents tremendous challenges in sight reading. While basic tone production on the piano is easier than almost any instrument, (Just try to get a sound out of a flute!) composers make up for it by writing incredibly complex scores.
The secret is to keep your eyes on the music no matter what. If you look down at your hands, you will stop reading. You must count and keep your eyes moving to each measure without ever correcting mistakes. This is very unnatural since practice requires exactly the opposite approach.
If you count and keep moving, your hands will hit many right notes. The more reading you do, the more right notes you will get!
4 thoughts on “How to Practice the Piano Part 2 – Sight Read Almost Anything”
I want to find the video you did on improvising. I can’t figure out how to do that. Can you provide a link? Thanks!
Here are a couple of resources for you for improvising on the piano: https://livingpianos.com/video-how-to-improvise-on-the-piano/ and https://livingpianos.com/basics-of-improvisation/
I hope this helps you!
Thank you! I will certainly follow up on this! You know how much I want to learn this skill!
Dear Robert,
Thank you for your kind answer and suggestions.
It is a great pleasure to watch you and hear your wonderful stories and adventures. I do hope very much that one day you will find the time to produce some Sheet Music Reading DVDs,which will greatly help people like me.
Thank you again.
With my admiration and best regards,
Christine