[seanhunter]

This is a really terrible way to learn sightreading.

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.

[seanhunter]

The one additional thing I forgot to mention is that random notes as per TFA are almost entirely unrelated to the activity of sight reading but random rhythms are not. I made myself a bunch of flashcards with every conceivable combination of notes and rests adding up to a crotchet/quarter note on each card. Then I would scramble the deck , set the metronome and deal myself out say 4 bars of 4/4. Then sing or tap the rhythm in tempo. That helped a lot for reading more rhythmically intense stuff.

[chthonicdaemon]

I'm curious in both of these cases what you are using for feedback. Specifically in the rhythm case, how do you know if you nailed it or just played some other rhythm than was shown by your cards? Did you also generate the sound?

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?

[seanhunter]

Good questions. How I knew I was doing it right is the same as for the rest of my practice, which is I would often record myself and listen back. It’s pretty cringe inducing but you’ve got to do it if you want to get good and better to listen to yourself sounding bad on your practice recording than to hear yourself sounding bad on playback in a studio when there are a lot of other folks there and time is money. A lot of people who are serious also video themselves practicing tyo fix bad habits although I never really did that.

And then yes I was ok when I started to really focus on reading but I was very serious about getting good in general so was practicing a bunch of scales, arpeggios, learning other people’s lines, etc. on bass (and guitar) when you play a lot of scales you develop a lot of mechanical memory so you have like a plan in your mind of the entire fingerboard and you can decide where best to shift position etc. I used to come up with studies for myself to practice what to do if I wss in an awkward spot (eq starting low with the tonic on my little finger etc). That stuff ends up helping your reading a lot because you can get yourself our of any kind of jam generally.