Developing your sight reading on the ocarina

Sight reading is the ability to play any sheet music you see on first sight, to be able to look at some notation that is new to you and instinctually know what to do to perform it.

It's possible that you've tried this before and that goal feels unachievable, but I think that the difficulties people encounter are caused by the traditional teaching methods.

Music reading has mostly been taught in a conscious and analytical way, by recognising note positions, decoding them to note letters, and figuring out rhythms by consciously counting them. It puts a great deal of work on the conscious mind.

Sight reading is considerably easier when you instead practice in a way that makes the process completely subconscious.

There are two key steps in reading music, first you need to be able to recognise what the notation is telling you to do, and second, you need to be able to perform that on your instrument.

It is quite straightforward to make those tasks automatic using muscle memory and visual pattern recognition, and the previous articles in this section have already been guiding you along that path:

• Develop muscle memory for every possible finger transition.
• Learn to audiate rhythm notation.
• How to associate the visual patterns of notation with their equivalent muscle memory the instrument.

If you have followed through these, you are already well on your way to becoming a competent sight reader. Developing your skill from there entails finding out what you can / can't read, and practising the things you find difficult.

Finding and working with your limit

Everyone has a limit to the complexity of notation they can sight read. To improve your sight reading it is essential to know what this limit is, because practising with music that is too easy won't lead to meaningful progress, but things that are too hard will be overwhelming and feel intractable.

Finding your limit

The process of reading sheet music is in many ways the same as reading English. While reading English, your subconscious mind recognises the visual patterns of words, and pronounces them to you. Likewise, when reading music, your subconscious identifies melodic and rhythmic figures within the notation, and associates them to the equivalent muscle memory on the instrument.

Your ability to read English is constrained by the number of words that you know, so your ability to read music is the same as asking 'what patterns have I internalised'?

It is straightforward to answer that question by attempting to read a variety of music and notice what causes you to stall. One option is to simply get a large amount of sheet music of varying complexity, and make notes about the things that you can and can't read.

It is also possible to explore your reading limit using a systematic approach. The idea is to start by writing out some very simple music, and then gradually create more complex examples.

To begin, write out a simple example on manuscript paper. Use one pitch, with rhythms using only quarter notes and half notes. Can you read through this from start to finish at a steady tempo without errors?

If you can read this easily, that's great. If not, it just means that you've found your limit, and need to spend some more time practising at this level. More exercises can be created easily by taking the same notes, and writing them in different orders.

Once reading a given exercise becomes easy, the next step is to make the notation progressively more complex, which can be done as follows:

Increase the variation in rhythmic patterns

Music that has less variety in its rhythmic patterns is easier to read, and music that is more varied is harder to read. You could start with something using only a few types of note, then introduce shorter or longer notes, rests, ties, syncopations, tuplets, and other time signatures.

Increase the range of pitches

Music is easier to read if it only has a range of two or three distinct notes, and harder if it uses a wider range. Possibly start with a range of two or three notes, and gradually increase the range by introducing one more note at a time.

Use larger intervals

Notation that just moves between adjacent notes (such as C to D), is easier to read than notation that moves by larger leaps. Gradually introducing larger intervals is one way of controllably raising the difficulty of reading.

In the example below the left case uses only seconds, and larger intervals are included towards the right.

And more

• Introduce other key signatures.
• Introduce accidentals.
• Introduce other time signatures.
• Change the time signature and / or key signature in the body of the music.

I'd recommend varying only one of the above mentioned factors at a time, such as range or rhythmic complexity, and as you do so take note of what things you can and can't read easily. There are many examples of how these things vary in real music.

Working with your limit

By following through with this process, you'll get an idea of the things that you can and can't read. For instance, you may find that:

• You can read music that uses small intervals without difficulty, but music that includes large leaps causes you to trip.
• Possibly you find that rhythms including tuplets or sixteenth notes causes you to trip.

Improving your sight reading is a matter of practising the things that cause you trouble one at a time. Is it a rhythmic or melodic pattern that is causing you trouble, or possibly both? In either case, it can be made into a figure, and practised by itself.

As noted, music reading is a two-step process of recognising what the notation is telling you to do, and second, having the muscle memory to perform that on your instrument, you may also find it helpful to consider which of the steps is causing you trouble.

Say that you are struggling with a rhythm pattern, is that because you are struggling to recognise the patterns in the notation, or do you need to stop and think 'what does this rhythm sound like?

• Issues relating to knowledge of what a rhythm sounds like can be addressed by spending more time listening and clapping a the figures of that rhythm, until it is automated by audiation and muscle memory.
• Likewise issues related to fingering can be addressed by practising the problematic finger transitions until automated by muscle memory.
• Issues related to parsing notation, recognising the visual patterns, can be addressed by reading more notation that uses those patterns.

Reading ahead

When you read something from notation it is not necessary to immediately play it on your instrument, you can hold it as an instruction in your memory, leaving you free to play it when you wish. The skill of reading ahead helps a lot with achieving smooth sight reading because it gives you much more time to process the upcoming notation.

If you consider what needs to happen when you are reading and immediately performing, you need to be able to process the notation and connect that to what you need to do on the instrument in a tiny fraction of a second. By reading ahead you decouple those processes, letting you read what you are going to play next leisurely, while you are playing the previously read notes.

A good way to begin to develop this skill is to start out practising reading and remembering chunks of notes, without worrying about maintaining the rhythm between chunks. Write out some simple notation like the following example, I'd suggest making the first part have only one note per bar.

Then:

• Take a look at the first bar and notice what note it is telling you to play.
• Without naming the note, imagine how you would perform it on your instrument, but do not do so yet.
• Look away from the notation, and play the note, holding it for the specified duration.

Repeat that process for the other bars in the music. When there are multiple notes in the bar, remember all of them, and how you would perform them on your instrument, then look away and play it.

See the article Utilising common patterns in sheet music, if you need some help with doing so.

Reading ahead in real time

Once you can read some simple music one bar at a time, looking away before performing, try applying the same idea to reading the music and playing each chunk you read at the correct rhythmic time:

• Take a look at the music, and remember as many notes as you can.
• Start playing these notes.
• While you are playing and before you run out of notes to play, look forward to the notes that you are about to play.

Start doing this with simple notation and gradually increase the complexity over time. You may need to spend a few days or weeks on the first step (memorising and looking away) before doing it in real time starts to be possible.

As previously mentioned, practising melodic figures and other common sequences will help because it allows your subconscious to perform a sequence of notes as a unit, removing the need for you to process the notation 'one note at a time'.

Finding and making exercises

One of the challenges of learning to sight read is the need for a lot of notation. Each piece can only be used a few times before you start to memorise it, at which point you won't be reading any more.

On top of that, the notation needs to be organised by what rhythmic and melodic figures it makes use of, so you can find things relevant to what you are trying to practice, which also don't overwhelm you.

There are a few options:

• Crafted exercises. There are books of hand-crafted exercises, and real world music that have been arranged by difficulty, for ocarina and similar instruments. This is also the role that many instrument 'method books' try to fill.
• Compose!. Get some manuscript paper and make your own exercises. If you have a friend learning with you, making exercises to challenge each other can be fun.
• Random generation. There are tools online that generate random sheet music. They let you specify the key, range, and rhythms to use. It won't sound very musical but it's a great way of making a lot of exercises with low effort.

A challenge that arises from pre-crafted exercises, and linier method books is that they are impossible to balance to the needs of all learners. Different people will find different things more or less difficult, and need to spend much more time on some things than others.

This is not a problem, and is not an indicator of ability, but should you find that some thing is a sticking point and you need more exercises, using pre-crafted exercises as a basis to vary from to make additional exercises is an option Take patterns in the rhythms and melodies, reorder them, and change the pitches.

Developing your reading speed

When you're new to sight reading you may find that it takes a long time to process the notation, leading you to only be able to read music at a low tempo. This is normal, and you'll find that your tempo naturally increases with experience.

If you would like to practice this deliberately, it can be done like this:

• Use a metronome, starting initially at a low tempo, and read music in time with it. Gradually increase the tempo until you start to make mistakes.
• Slow down the metronome a bit, and practice reading music of similar complexity at this tempo for a while, changing the music regularly.
• Increase the tempo by 5 to 10 BPM, and keep reading music.

By doing this regularly your reading speed will gradually improve.

Closing

learning to sight read is a process of developing muscle memory for all of the note transitions on your instrument, and learning to audiate many rhythms, then creating a subconscious association between those things and visual patterns used to represent them in notation.

By paying attention to what you can and can't read easily, you may practice your weak points to improve over time. And by learning to read ahead, your playing will become smoother.

This process pays off big time in the long term as you will be able to effortlessly play any music you encounter that fits in the range of your ocarina. Stick with it and before long you'll be easily reading notation you thought was impossible.