How to Sight Read PERFECTLY Every Time 

would be interesting to put this in front of several different musicians to see how/if they do things differently, and analyse the vision after the fact.

seems like a personal attack

As a player in community bands, where I can often show up at a band with a hundred-piece repertoire that I'm only vaguely familiar with compared to the people who've been with the bands for 30 years, sight-reading is such an important skill. It's cool to see what parts you emphasized through the video, beyond just the simple key-time-roadmap-rhythm... order, but what you honed in on immediately. I don't remember how much time i had when sight reading for things like district and all-state bands, but if i had the skills I do now, I totally would have started by trying to sing/hum/tap the music as I looked it over before playing.

Thanks for sharing your unedited sight-reading. The fact that you are willing to put yourself out there by sharing less-than-polished recordings can help students and amateurs/hobbyists who might compare themselves to the perfection of your multi-track recordings. It's humanizing, and helps us all realize that we just human.

Please give us ALL KINDS of eye-tracker content! This was a really interesting video 😁

As an arranger myself, I would absolutely love to see your process of arranging.

Chris, thank you for doing such a wonderful video. I really like the eye tracker. This could be very useful for figuring out some things when teaching students or a great exercise tool for helping students. Thank you for doing such a very cool video and putting yourself on the spot.

Re: your comment on always prioritizing right rhythm over right notes - Our state/regional ensemble audition scoring sheets actually reflected this in their point calculations. I remember being mind-blown when my teacher pointed out that if you played the piece on a single note the entire time, you could actually still get a passing score as long as you performed everything else well (tempo, rhythm, articulations, form, etc.). I don't recall the exact numbers, but it was something like being perfectly in tune only accounted for 8-9 points out of 45-50. This absolutely saved me in my violin auditions senior year, when the sight reading piece ended up being 5-6 ledger lines above the staff. It threw a lot of people for a loop, but myself and others with the same teacher didn't get flustered, nailed the rhythms, and ended up doing well!

Hats off to you for demonstrating this!! For the last tune, I find that quickly identifying style helps me to accept patterns that seem difficult. In reality, this is a familiar style with simple patterns for the style. I always get tripped up when I don't listen to my style as I am playing to reduce the awkwardness. Geez you reminded me of so many little details of how to do and teach this well. Thanks for the quick lesson!!!

I love your covers, especially Fireflies! That's my favorite song!

this is actually a brilliant idea

That was very interesting to watch. Also enjoyed the video's quality

This is excellent. Thank you

Wow, excellent. As an old fart playing in a couple community bands, I tend to forget these fundamentals. The young girl sitting second chair next to me that's a senior going into college hasn't had a lot of this training so it's great I can text her the links to these videos and hopefully she'll be ready when auditions come around. You don't realize how many young aspiring musicians (and old amateurs that have been playing for years just for fun) you are helping and inspiring. Thank you so much.

i needed this, now i know how to organize myself when sight reading

That was cool! Would like to see you use the tracker with pieces you know very well. Especially when get in the zone/ flow and are not even thinking about the notes, but focused on the performance.

Love This

I think that the grondahl concerto would be really interesting, and maybe movement two of it would be more beneficial for me personally as I’m working on the second and third movements now

Drummer learning from this❤❤❤

I'd love to see you solo over unfamiliar changes with an eye tracker

I played that etude that you played first for district band last year and now that I watch you do it I see what all I done wrong, which wasn’t very much and yet I still didn’t make it into district band.

So cool!

21:49 bruh, I played this in front of my pianist friend and he fell in love with the piece. He then proceeded to play the chords the melody is spelling out and dude, this is really a great piece of music. The modulations are beautiful.

I would love to see where your eyes goes on your sheets or some sheets that you know, because that's something I play a lot, a lot of already known sheets that i need just to refresh my memory about the key/rithm etc

The conductor of the symfonic orchestra where I play, always said, even the first time you play a piece pay attention to the dynamics and phrasing, even if you don't know the notes. And I kinda get his point, because even if there are wrong notes when you play together it's still important to do the dynamics somewhat right. (He was talking more to the strings when he said that, because it always takes quite some time before they know their notes well, but still)

These are the very things I have been trying to get my band to put into action, without any great success I might add. It's a senior's community band so I figure the majority of the players consider it more of a social event than a musical rehearsal sadly. But nonetheless this is a very good video and should be reviewed many times. 👍

The font you used at 4:05 made me realize where the ampersand comes from! (It looks like) it comes from the Latin "et", which means "and". It's a digraph of a capital curvy E and a t. I never knew that before. Edit: Oop, it's a ligature, not a digraph. I must have been thinking of vim digraphs. Also, yeah, Wikipedia says that's where it comes from.

That was my middle school etude, I’m now a junior 😮‍💨

Hi Chris, what trombone are you using ?

cool idea

I haven’t been in a situation where I felt like I was playing again until today, not sure if I feel the anxiety or memories 😂

What is your advice for reading music? I am a terrible sight reader and had have a habit of writing the notes on the sheet music since I was playing in middle school band. I would copy the fingerings from my trumpet and trombone cheat sheets on the pieces of music. That didn’t really help me memorize the music. I see to more comfortable playing big band and church music cause it doesn’t require you know the script but to play by ear. It may be due my autism disability and adhd.

Would like to see this with keyboard music with two staves. Please?

Another thing to add, during my All State audition, I was given a minute to sight read. If you're sight reading something, you should take these tips into account and probably also take the piece a little slower, so you have time to process everything,

A really interesting exercise. Thanks! How much would you say being to recognise rhythms immediately contribute to successful sight reading? I'll confess I naively thought you would be looking further ahead in the unseen stuff. It would be really interesting also to see how a concert/professional pianist or organist sight-reads multiple notes on multiple staves. Was it Saint-Saens or Liszt who was able to sight-read an full orchestral score to the piano?!

I'm about to audition for DSA (Denver School of the Arts) and part of their audition requirements is that I sightread a piece of music that is handed to me at the audition. Does anyone know a good way to handle this sightreading technique while feeling major anxiety and nerves? Helpful video btw, I'll definitely use these tips for the audition

NO WAY AT 10:30 THAT WAS MY STATE ETUDE FOR MY SOPHOMORE YEAR HOW CRAZY. Music is such a small world

Ay, I have an experiment for u! Try letting your eyes rest on a single point on the page, and only let them drift between the middles of systems, using the edge of your vision and a sort-of visualization to keep track of where you are! Tbh, I haven’t tried this, except maybe on accident when memorizing music or something, but I wonder what would happen 😄😄

What was that Grandioso doing in that Scherzo piece?

What do you think about the Pbone?

Can you learn me reading sheet music?

Is it sight reading if you scan more than key and time sigs before though? True you've still never played it, but seems like something in-between. Really good playing, regardless!

Am I the only one from Texas wondering why the technical looks like our lyrical😭

On the fourth bar the A is flat. Did you notice that? I like your approach for sight reading but I’m surprised you didn’t notice. I see it often that players aren’t aware of key signatures or accidentals. Also bad copy work or cumbersome transcriptions don’t help.

GOD is with you guys always and will never leave you or forsake you guys, please repent and turn from your sins

The last etude did not seem so much nonsensical to me, I fancied some kind of early 20th century accompanyment...

Лажа в конце)))

Define "poorly written" in a scoring program, then look at a Thelonius Monk chart... 😜

thats a cool cursor, how get. me want.