How to sight read?

Question:I've been playing the clarinet for approximately 6 months, i just bought Rubank's Intermediate Method and it says "students are required to sight read blah blah" but I don't know how. Sure I can play the songs and memorize the melody etc. but I don't know hot it'll sound like before i play it.
My teacher my not require it but I want to learn it nevertheless. Plz help, how do I sight read?

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: I've been playing the clarinet for approximately 6 months, i just bought Rubank's Intermediate Method and it says "students are required to sight read blah blah" but I don't know how. Sure I can play the songs and memorize the melody etc. but I don't know hot it'll sound like before i play it.
My teacher my not require it but I want to learn it nevertheless. Plz help, how do I sight read?

Real musical literacy is when you know how it will sound before you pick up an instrument. One can train rhythm (Dalcroze, Starer, etc) and pitch (solfege, interval recognition) separately. this is something you take lessons in, away from your instrument.

Sight-reading on an instrument is easier but doesn't necessarily involve "knowing how it will sound". You need to know the fingering for each note on a muscular level so that when you see C, your fingers know where to go. You also need to know what each note is on the staff and what its rhythm is, without thinking about it. Given all that, the way to learn to sight read well is to do it. Take your piece and run through the rhythms mentally, moving your fingers. Try to imagine what it will sound like, where it goes higher or lower. You may not get it exactly right, but every attempt brings the skill closer to you. Now play it, at a moderate tempo. If you miss a note, keep on going...do not stop the beat for anything. You can't do that in an ensemble so don't do it at home.
Read as much music as you can. Read music you don't know and then listen to the music. Imagine and practice!

i play the flute, and there isn't really a certain way to sight read, i think.
just take a few minutes to look over the music and get the notes and rhythms in your head.
you could try singing it, that helps me, even though i can't sing at all, but my band teacher makes us do stuff like that.
i hope i helped. :]

Sight reading is nothing to be afraid of, honestly. It's quite simple.

You're given a piece of music (normally one you've never played before, but you don't usually get to pick) and you can't look at it until you're told to. You quickly scan the music, looking at key signatures, repeats, codas, etc, but you can't play. Finally, when you do play, you're judged on how well you did on your first time playing that piece.

Sometimes the pieces are easy, sometimes not. It's just to see how well you play the first time reading a piece

Good luck, hope this helped you =D

Sight reading is just like reading words. How do you read a newspaper, an article , or whatever ?
You can read the words without stopping . Music is the same. You learn to read the notes (like words). Take it slowly at first and speed up a little at a time.
Eventually, you will sight read faster than reading words from a book.

If you can read sheet music well enough to be able to play a piece -- something that's well within your current skill level -- up to tempo or close to it, without having heard it first, and play it well enough that people listening can recognize what it is -- that's sight reading.

There are people who can read music but not sight read -- if you can read notes but only very slowly, not up to tempo, because you have to keep stopping to figure stuff out -- that's reading but not sight-reading.

If you can sight read, you can look at the music and quickly mentally translate that to the correct hand and finger positions to play what you see on the page. You may not be able to look at a piece of music and hear it in your mind's ear, to know how it will sound before you play it. That's part of a different skill, called "audiation".

I'm a music teacher- it's a little scary at first but remember to look for the patterns in your music. Up and down by steps is easy (line/space alternating), then move onto memorizing the look of intervals- (space to space is a skip of a third, etc) If you can combine your knowledge of directional movement of notes, intervals and correctly use the key signature you will be well on your way. Good luck. Practice makes perfect.

There is no single way to learn how to sight read. I learned how to read from piano lessons aged 9 - i.e., I learned what notes corresponded to what bars and spaces on the stave, and I learned what symbols meant single-note, half-note etc. I then forgot much of it before taking up guitar aged 14. Learning rock, you don't need to be able to read but when I picked up a fiddle aged 25, I realised that a lot of traditional tunes were beyond me unless I could read them. Traditional tunes have standard rhythms so it was easy to figure out the pitches.

Since then, I've been learning jazz and, with a backgorund like mine, if you know how the tune goes anyway it's not hard to figure out how to read the sheet music, so as to check if you're playing any of it wrong. My main problem as a reader these days is not pitch but rhythm.

Sight-reading can only be learned through hard practice, I'm afraid. Next time you listen to a tune that you know you have the music for, try reading the music while you listen. It will probably interfere with your enjoyment of the piece, but it may well improve your ability to sight-read.