From Zero to Mozart
Stage 8Sight-reading & ear trainingLesson 9 of 44 · Reading

The never-stop rule

There is one rule in sight-reading that matters more than all the others, and it's the one beginners break every time: once you start, you don't stop.

Why

You hit a wrong note. Every instinct says: go back, fix it, get it right. In sight-reading, that instinct is wrong, and here's why:

  • In every real setting the music keeps moving. An accompanist, an orchestra, a quartet, an audition panel — none of them wait while you correct bar 3. If your practice trains you to stop, you'll stop when it counts.
  • A wrong note costs nothing if you play through it. You played it, it's gone, nobody remembers. A stop costs the whole line — the pulse breaks, you lose your place, and now you're not reading, you're rescuing.
  • The pulse is the thread. Lose a note, you've lost a note. Lose the pulse, you've lost the piece. Hold the beat from the first note to the last, mistakes and all, and you're still reading.

What "keep going" feels like

66 bpm

How to play it

Slow, steady pulse. Do not go back. If you fluff a note, land the next downbeat correctly and carry on. A line played through with one wrong note is a success. A line played correctly with two stops is a failure.

Play this slowly with the metronome, once, through. Somewhere in bar 2 or 3, DELIBERATELY play a wrong note — and keep going anyway, in time, to the end. That feeling — 'that was wrong, but I'm still moving' — is the whole skill.

The practice discipline that comes with it

If you never stop, then you also can't replay a card to get it right — that's just practising the wrong thing. The routine (how-sight-reading-cards-work): play the card once, through, no going back; then diagnose what broke (the-four-layer-rescue); then tomorrow, a new card. You improve by reading a large volume of fresh easy material fluently, not by grinding one line clean.

Try it

Try

Pick any easy line. Turn the metronome to a slow, comfortable click. Play the line beginning to end, and make it a game: no matter what happens, the bow does not stop and the beat does not break. Do this with five different lines. Notice how much less lost you get when you stop trying to fix things.

The usual mistake

The instinct to correct. It's a good instinct when you're learning a piece to perform — but sight-reading is a different skill, and here the instinct is poison. Train the split: when you're working up a piece, fix everything; when you're sight-reading, fix nothing, keep the pulse, move on.