Have you ever spent so long looking for the right way to do something that you never got around to doing it at all? Many of us have. Perhaps you want to lose weight but are overwhelmed by the number of diets out there, all of them different!
"Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper. It takes up to ten hours to digest food, and...."
"Eat several small meals a day in order to keep your metabolism constantly burning, so..."
You are constantly bombarded with contradictory messages such as these. The worst part? They all seem reasonable! So rather than diet, you become swept up in all the options and put off starting until you find the best route. In the end, that magical diet is never started and you are no better off. Does this resonate with you at all?
I call this the "overload principle." The staggering array of options available in a given situation causes a person to operate with overly cautious tendencies. The brain seemingly becomes overloaded by the sheer volume of choices and freezes up like a computer from 2001 trying to run World of War Craft.
For me, learning to sight read has been the unfortunate area to overload. The whole process seemed so impossibly tedious, and yet so many people around me are amazing at it. I asked my high school choir piano accompanist how she acquired her monstrous sight reading skills, to which she answered, "I don't know. I've just always been good at it." This made me wonder if it was just a natural tendency? After all, it seemed as though most people seemed to be either good at sight reading or playing by ear; rarely do I come across a person skilled in both. Still, I knew I could improve.
I thought, "I have a good ear, so I'll have to work a lot harder to gain sight reading skills. I need to find a good method to improving." Hours were spent on google reading one article after another. Those hours were filled with "Only $19.99!" advertisements and companies claiming that you could be a master sight read in no time flat through their software. It seemed like there was no real solid information on learning to sight read; gimmick software was all I could find.
Today, it finally struck me that I had wasted countless hours of my life searching for a shortcut when the solution was right in front of my nose:
Suck it up and practice!
The reason for a lack of articles on how to be a great sight reader was because the best way might just be to dive in and do it! Sure, there are different little tricks and approaches, just like there are various diets. But the main way to learn at least begins with just doing it, just like a good diet begins with exercising more and eating less. That's just common sense.
I've come to the conclusion that sight reading is a lot like text reading. Think of it this way:
-Individual notes are like single letters
-Chords are combinations of notes, like words are combinations of letters
-Phrases are strings are notes/chords, like sentences are strings of words/letters
-Sections in a piece (A section, B section, etc.) are made of multiple phrases, as paragraphs are made of multiple sentences
-Complete pieces are made of of sections, as essays are made up of paragraphs or books are made of chapters
When I first started learning to read, it was tedious. I had to memorize 26 symbols (52 if you include capitals and lower case) with corresponding sounds. When I saw the character "a," I had to spend several moments trying to recall what sound that made. This is akin to looking at a note on a staff and figuring out, "That's the third line up...That's a B." It took hours to learn this, but in time, I could identify letters without thinking.
Then, I had to string letters together to form words. When I saw the three symbols C, A, and T next to one another, I had to sound them out individually before being able to figure out the word. In music, this is like looking at the note Bb, D, F and thinking, "Okay...that's a Bb major triad."After a while, I got pretty quick at picking apart those three letter words.
Next was stringing those words into sentences such as, "The cat ran to the hat by the bat." I certainly was not able to do it in regular, smooth rhythm. It was broken up; "The cat....ra..n....to the....hat...by..." That's like starting to sight read short phrases rather than individual chords. At first, you have to do it slow, and the rhythm might not quite be there as your developing early sight reading skills.
By now though, I don't even think when I read. Do you have to think, "Okay, that word has T, H, E...sound it out..." NO! You just see the pattern and the sound of the word automatically comes to mind. I don't even look at individual words- my eyes skim across entire lines and process all of the information without thinking about any of the individual components. I can even read ahead of what I am speaking aloud.
This is what great sight readers tell me about their abilities! They don't look at notes are even chords; their eyes just glance across pages and their hands produce music based on patterns on the page- patterns that, after years of sight reading, their brains have learned to automatically identify.
So why does reading sheet music seem more difficult than reading a book? Well, because we spend much more time reading books and text than music. Just think; you live in a world bombarded with text! Commercials, billboards, magazines, books, t-shirts, closed-captions, newspapers, school assignments, work reports, labels, recipes, nutrition facts, social networking websites- the list goes on! The average person spends hours every single day reading text of some kind. It's almost to the point of being unavoidable!
The thing is, some people have treated music this way, and that is the "secret." At a young age, they learned notes on flashcards. Then came easy, one line melodies that they struggled through. As those become easy, chordal accompaniments came into the picture. Easy pieces were learned. Piece after piece, they expanded their abilities and skills until sight reading became a natural reaction rather than a highly conscious effort, similar to how we can read entire pages of books only to realize we didn't pay attention to any of it. One doesn't begin reading War and Peace right off the bat. That would be ludicrous! Rather, they start with Green Eggs and Ham, move on to Captain Underpants, graduate to Junie B Jones, and years later enjoy the works of Shakespeare on leisure evenings by the fireplace.
When it comes to brain overload, the best thing to do might just be to jump right in and do something. Take what little bit you know you can do to lose weight, for example, and go for it. Cross each bridge as it comes. This certainly applies to my sight reading; I need to just suck it up and practice!
Can you think of a time that you have suffered from brain overload, and did you do anything to address it? I'd love to hear your thoughts!
