The Four Core Performance Skills part 2 - Sight Reading

The Musician Toolkit with David Lane

The 4 Core Performance Skills are the big skills that every musician should strive to master to be the most balanced and well-rounded musician possible, and to have success as a performer in EVERY situation. The first of these core skills is sight reading. Sight reading not only gives you essentially a head start on learning new music, it is ESSENTIAL for many jobs such as accompanists, studio session players, and theatre musicians. Orchestral musicians get such little time with their music before a concert that without good sight reading skills, they will be way behind. However, much like other core skills, learning it is often over-simplified into advice like "Just play new music" or "Keep your eyes moving ahead." These are all fine approaches, but without addressing other aspects of your practice, it will be hard to become the best sightreader you can be. This episode offers actionable practice tips to improve your sightreading.

This is the 2nd of a 5-part series. If you missed it, check out the previous episode in this series: The Four Core Skills Part 1: An Overview of the Skills

Past sight-reading episodes on this podcast:

Sight Reading Maverick (with Erica Sipes)

Improving Sight Reading By Touch (with David Holter)

Also check out

Deciphering Written Rhythms (with David Krosner)

For improving your speed and confidence in recognizing written notes, you can watch this tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3a0tgr-X-0

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