A vast body of written music exists in the form of score, including classical, pop, rock, and many other kinds. The purpose of learning to read score competently is, ultimately, to be able to stream new pieces of music into your brain at a high-bandwidth transfer rate, so that you can perform, analyse, or just enjoy them. The process will also likely leave you with a beautiful and crisp internal mental model of the keyboard as a physical instrument, and the notes and intervals and chords laid over that construct.
If you're reading score to perform it, then your simple-sounding role is only to translate written symbols into physical actions. That makes you the courier in just one leg of the journey a note takes from the composer's imagination to the vibration in a piano string. To support your role, composers and publishers have rendered those symbols onto the page. And turning your actions into sounds is the job of the piano. If you're reading score just to understand or enjoy it, then things are even simpler: there's neither action nor sound. But as simple as that outline might make it seem, learning to read score is in truth much more difficult and demanding than many of us imagine.
Your chances of success are greater if you focus only on learning and practicing, and have the discipline to reject any thoughts of goals and of progress. Even if you're a goal-oriented person in every other endeavor, when you're learning to read score you must resist optimizing for progress. Focus only on maximizing your practice time and intensity. Your job is only to stimulate the brain, and then allow sleep and nature to deepen neural pathways and leave you slightly better adapted to the following day's practice. Progress may seem rapid at first, but in the long run progress is actually glacially slow even if you practice a lot. But practice you must. In this lifelong training program the only mistake you can make is to become so disillusioned that you quit and go and do something else. Have faith that, as long as you're practicing, you're improving.
Technically, the term "sight-reading" means reading a score "a prima vista" ("at first sight"). A lot of people, including teachers, use the term "sight-reading" incorrectly to mean performing from a score even if it's the umpteen millionth time you've seen it. But there's a good, practical reason to avoid lumping together the notions of performing from an unfamiliar score and performing from a familiar score. And that reason is to do with learning to read versus learning to memorize.
The first time, or the first few times, that you perform from a challenging score you can be certain that you're relying on your sight and not on your memory. I'd have no hesitation in calling that an example of sight-reading. On the other hand, when you play the melody of Go Tell Aunt Rhody for the umpteen millionth time then you can be pretty certain that even though your eyes are looking at the score your brain and body are certainly performing largely from memory. So that's certainly not sight-reading, and there's no value in calling it such. Between those two arguably extreme examples is a large, and interesting, gray area where you're using some combination of reading and memory. There are techniques for learning to memorize. But if you want to learn to read then you should strive to spend your time playing pieces that put you as close to the sight-reading end of that gray area as possible.
And that's why using the term correctly matters. I would define "sight-reading" as reading a very unfamiliar score. Anything else is reading a not very unfamiliar score. And when you're doing the latter then it's anyone's guess—including yours—how much actual reading you're doing.
Before you practice reading score, you have to learn how. I believe that the best way of learning to read score is from books, and there are plenty out there. I recommend a series such as Alfred's Basic Piano Library or Alfred's Adult All-In-One Course, which show you how to read score as well as providing practice material. I also recommend Rudiments and Theory of Music, by the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, which shows you how to read score, and also teaches music theory.
Your first task is to learn what the graphics and symbols in a score mean. Those are the horizontal ruled lines and the spaces between them, and the marks such as the elliptical note-heads, the stems, the rest symbols, and so on. The symbols tell you what note to play, and when to play it. For example, the vertical position of a note-head symbol on the staff tells you what note to play. First, you should memorize the note symbols at "landmark" positions on the staff. For example, the line at the center of the treble clef is a very prominent and memorable landmark. A note symbol written on that line is B, so commit just that fact to memory. Other good landmark positions are the bottom line of a staff, the top line, the space immediately above the top line, and so on.
Knowing the note at a landmark position means that you can figure out notes at nearby positions for yourself. It only takes a moment to see that the note written in the space above B must be C; and the note written in the space below B must be A. Soon you'll have memorized the notes at those positions, too, and you'll know them as effortlessly as you know the landmark positions. Use whichever landmark positions seem good—and memorable—to you. Over time you'll fill in all the gaps between the landmark positions—at first by figuring out, and eventually by memorizing.
In your studies, you'll come across mnemonics. An example of a mnemonic is Every Good Boy Does Fine, where the capitals represent the notes on the lines of the treble staff. For music in general and score-reading in particular I believe that mnemonics hinder more than they help (they're just yet another thing to remember). Your ultimate goal is to memorize the note letters for each line and space, on both staves and on leger lines. So the effort you spend learning mnemonics, and the time you spend using them to find notes at positions, is effort and time that could be going into practicing finding and memorizing the note positions for yourself.
Knowing how to decipher the symbols on the page is just the first step, but it includes knowing how to decipher both the notes (taking the key signature and accidentals into account) and the rhythm. The commonest reason to read score is to perform it (although I encourage you to read score just to understand the music, too). So the next step is practice, and lots of it. You practice so that you develop fluency and speed in your reading. For the purposes of performance, reading score comes down to the process of translating symbols on the page into keys pressed on the piano. Practice and repetition are essential to developing that process into an automatic and mechanical habit.
My favorite practice books include Progressive Sight-Reading Exercises For Piano by Hannah Smith, and 300 Progressive Sight-Reading Exercises For Piano Volumes I, II & III by Robert Anthony. There's also Bartók's Mikrokosmos. After practicing with resources such as those, you can graduate to regular commercial sheet music, or sight-reading software.
There are three distinct skills to learn, and therefore three distinct forms, or modes, that your practice can take. These are: note-reading; rhythm-reading; and real-time. You should focus on practicing in one mode at a time.
The practice mode of note-reading takes the form of holding down and then releasing the correct piano keys in the correct sequence. You're ignoring rhythm and tempo, so you can take as long as you like to figure out each note. Note-reading is the practice mode closest to what I call the core competency of performing from score. That core competency is the ability to automatically translate a written symbol into a physical action. In this case, the physical action is pressing (and later releasing) a piano key. For the beginner student, it can take some brief time and effort to figure out each note symbol and then find the right key, and so performance is slow, irregular, and plodding. But the translation becomes automatic when your neural machinery has formed an identity between a note's written rendering on the page and its physical rendering on the piano (and consequently your proprioceptive certainty that your finger is on the correct key). The intersection between the written rendering and the physical rendering is the abstract concept of the note itself, and so three concepts become one in a triad. For example, a C4 note (middle C) exists abstractly, and this one concept of this one note casts shadows into the material world, both as a written C4 symbol (the thing you read) and as a played C4 (the thing you do). The written symbol is the unique identifier that you use to look up the correct triad in your mental database. The symbol takes you to the abstract note, which takes you to the piano key, and the triad is complete once your body has obeyed. This process can occur very quickly, although not instantaneously, and so you'll find yourself reading slightly ahead and building up a buffer of triads in your mind for your fingers to process in sequence. This buffer also helps you remember what you played last with each hand and consequently where your fingers are right now.
When note-reading, don't worry if you get mixed-up between symbols on lines or spaces that are a third apart. In time you'll form an intuitive internal model of the meaning of a mark on each line and space. It'll be a model that's impossible to explain to someone else, except just that you know that the symbol you're looking at right there represents a B flat note, for example. Your internal model of the keyboard, and your proprioception relative to it, is equally intuitive and, when you have it, is just as hard to explain to someone who doesn't.
Use the rhythm-reading practice mode to develop competency in rhythm and tight tempo. If you don't have software that supports this mode, then you can get some value from counting-and-clapping, especially as a beginner student. The Mastery for beginners section below explains how to count-and-clap.
Put the note-reading and rhythm-reading practice modes together and you get the real-time practice mode. This mode places your core translation competency under the additional stress of performing the translation to a rhythm and to a consistent tempo. You'll inevitably use pieces for note-reading mode that you're unable to play competently in real-time mode. So you'll regularly be forging ahead for note-reading and then returning to earlier and easier pieces for real-time. But switching things up like that keeps the brain challenged, satisfied, and always making slow-but-sure progress.
For practicing, software can be an improvement over print. Software's mechanical appraisal of your performance is much more accurate than a human can manage, and it will certainly catch mistakes you won't even know you're making. For example, it's common to play the note a third away from the note written, or not to release a key during a rest. You might not notice mistakes like that, but good software will catch them all. On the other hand, if the software has a note-reading mode then you should guard against getting complacent and just mashing keys until you hit the right one. Once you've gotten into that habit, then moving to print can be quite a shock.
It's also important to have a large library of pieces of score to choose from—especially beginner and intermediate pieces—and each piece of software you use contributes to that library.
Ideally, software that trains you to perform from score should support all three practice modes. And if it only has one mode then that should be note-reading, since that's the mode that focuses on the core competency of translating symbol to action.
I hope you'll be able to find a software product that works for you. Here are my thoughts on some of them.
Of the software titles available in late 2021, a popular option is Piano Marvel, which is browser-based. Piano Marvel has its virtues (including a large library), but it also has several issues that you should be aware of when considering buying a subscription. It has a lot of bugs. For example, it sometimes draws bar lines in the wrong place, and makes a single bar look like two. It observes only note-on events, and not note-off events, and consequently you're given the same appraisal whether or not you play notes for the correct duration. The browser stops responding to the computer keyboard during the animations at the end of an exercise, so you have to wait for those before getting back to practice. And there are a host of other bugs and usability issues. If you feel it's worth it, then Piano Marvel might fit into a program that includes other practicing resources such as print, or additional software. It's really debatable as to whether it's worth paying for in its current state.
Another reasonable option (although not without its bugs and usability problems) is Adventus' Piano Suite Premier. It's a client app, so it's installed on your computer (rather than being browser-based). Piano Suite Premier has all three practice modes. At a pinch you could use it as your only practicing resource and it would be capable of challenging you for a long time. This only applies to real-time practice mode but, on the metronome settings page, the app is configured by default to turn the page 1 beat before the page-end. That doesn't encourage you to read ahead very far, plus you'll probably find you don't have enough time to react to the new page. Try setting this to 2 beats, and getting into the habit of reading 2 beats ahead in every bar, not just the last bar of a page.
Flowkey appears to be nicely presented, with a large library, and you might like it. For me, it has too many usability issues (and missing features) to be worth paying for at this stage in its development.
And Etude Sight Reader is a title worth taking a look at.
I wish that I could still recommend The Miracle Piano Teaching System to you. It's by far the best software I've ever used for practicing score-reading, even though I always wished it had a bigger library. Unfortunately it's now discontinued. But if you can ever get your hands on a copy of it, then I'd say it's worth setting aside an old Windows 95 PC to run it on (as I've done).
How many times should you play a piece before moving on to the next? The answer is that it depends, and I'll give three different circumstances as examples.
If it's the first time you've seen the piece (or the first time in a long while, and you haven't memorized it) and you can play it without significant mistakes and at good tempo, then don't move on to the next piece right away. Spend some time reveling in your ability to read this one, and thoroughly exercise that ability. Play the piece again, two to six times, before moving on to something different.
If, on the other hand, you play the piece poorly the first time, but after a dozen or so attempts you can play it reasonably well, then you can be sure that memorization (and context) is playing the bigger part in that improvement. True reading ability doesn't improve that quickly: it advances at a snail's pace over a very long period. But memorization (including muscle-memory) can improve that quickly. What's likely is that you're remembering the chords and notes and patterns in that particular piece, and the score is serving only as a prompt for your memory. What you're reading in the symbols is more of which note-of-this-particular-piece to play, and not so much of which note-on-the-piano to play. This is a problem to the extent that mistaking memorization for reading prowess bothers you. You can tell that that's what's happened when you move to another piece that contains the same notes, but in a different order, and all of a sudden your performance is remedial once again. And so the cycle continues of appearing to become an awesome reader, and then bumping back down to Earth on the next piece. So if your performance of a piece improves dramatically after 15-20 minutes (give or take) of practice, then the piece was too difficult for you to read in real-time in the first place, and it's high time to move on to something else. That way, you can get good practice value from the piece in note-reading and/or rhythm-reading modes while avoiding being misled too much by your performance in real-time mode.
The higher the volume of reading material available to you, the less likely it is that you can become familiar with all of the pieces at the same time. Try as often as possible to read score that you haven't seen before, and go back to an earlier piece only after a long break from it, to see whether you've improved.
The issue just described is to some degree hard to avoid. And practicing in that situation is not entirely without value, in any case. Even for action that's being driven by your memory, as long as you're looking at the symbols then you're still learning (albeit passively) to associate the symbol with the action. And there'll also be notes that you're truly reading, and actively making that association yourself. So the dial can actually move quite far in the direction of memory-support and yet leave enough reading value in a piece for it still to be worth playing. But the student and teacher should acknowledge this phenomenon, and always be realistic about the stage you believe you're at. This is vital to remaining grounded and realistic and happy with your development, instead of being constantly deluded, and ultimately disappointed. Anyone, especially a teacher, who encourages a fantasy belief in your ability to read is not doing you any favors; quite the reverse.
The third of the circumstances I said I'd describe is that you don't play the piece well to begin with, and after half-a-dozen or so tries even in note-reading mode you're still getting more of it wrong than right. In that case, feel free to shelve that piece and go somewhere else. Move to the next piece, or go back a level (10 or more pieces; perhaps a lot more) and pick up from there.
For real-time mode, there'll always be pieces you can't yet play; whether it's the rhythm or the notes in it that are too complex for you. But you have options to get reading-practice value from even the most challenging piece. One option is to play one staff at a time, or even one voice of one staff. Slowing down the tempo is another option, but it's rarely a satisfactory one. There might only be a few challenging bars that you need to take extremely slowly. In which case, slowing the whole thing down enough that you can read the most difficult bar in real-time will make the rest of the piece unbearably slow. Speeding up at the easy parts and slowing down at the difficult parts is essentially what note-reading mode is. So your best option is likely to just be to use that piece for note-reading. The day will come, after you've moved on to note-reading much more advanced pieces, and perhaps via some rhythm-reading practice, that you can come back to this piece and perform it (or a piece like it) in real-time.
When it comes to reading score (and this is probably true of many other endeavors), trying to make progress the focus of your attention is more likely, paradoxically, to actually slow you down than to help. Impulsively burning through pieces and appearing to level-up as quickly as possible will more likely than not mean missing out on the full benefit of foundational pieces, hitting a wall of frustration and disappointment, making yourself dread practice, and consequently finding yourself doing less and less of it. Rather, it's my belief that progress happens fastest while your attention is elsewhere: namely, on diligent and patient practice. We've seen that memorization sooner or later becomes a factor in how well you appear to be reading, and that your true progress is actually difficult for you to assess. For that reason your focus should not be on getting a good score on the current piece in order to move on to the next, as counter-intuitive as that may seem. You can't directly control (nor measure) your progress; you can only directly control (and measure) how much you practice, how you go about practicing, and your mental attitude toward practicing. So focus on those things. Use your time and energy to really concentrate on the current piece. Block out thoughts of moving onto the next. Really experience and inhabit the current piece and get all the value you can out of your time with it. And move on when you feel that value is diminishing. Focus on the factors that you can directly control and measure, and leave progress to take care of itself.
When you're reading score, do you find your gaze bouncing back and forth between the page and the keys? Is that slowing you down? Does it cause you to keep losing your place in the score? The solution to these issues is to keep your eyes always on the score and never on your hands. Learning how to play up and down the keyboard by means of your sense of touch, and not your sight, may sound difficult; it may even sound impossible. But if you try it (it doesn't matter how slow and clumsy you are to begin with) then I'm certain you'll be surprised and amazed to find that you can do it, and that it's a really interesting experience. You're seeing the keys with your fingers. It was a book called Super Sight-Reading Secrets, by Howard Richman, that introduced me to this idea.
Before trying to play by touch, you need to have a good, clear model in your mind's eye of the layout and size of the keys, and how your hands and fingers appear and feel (proprioceptively) relative to the keys. You'll have to look at the keyboard at first, of course, in order to see and memorize how the keys are shaped and positioned relative to one another. Notice where the white-key-gaps are that stop at a black key, and where the ones are that go right to the back of the keyboard. It's those different kinds of gap that cause the black keys to cluster into groups-of-two and groups-of-three. These are the features that you'll be able to feel for once you've memorized that they exist, and where. Alternately look, and then feel without looking. Carefully examine and internalize a feature and then, looking away and visualizing in your mind's eye what you just saw, equate the visual with the tactile. Learn how wide different intervals are, from seconds up to octaves. How does your hand feel—how stretched are your thumb and pinkie—when playing an octave? Lock this feel-sense into place in your nervous system and/or muscle-memory so that your mind just knows where the keys are and your hands know where they need to go. And always sit in the same position with the D-above-middle-C lined up with your navel.
Once you've built a solid internal model of the key layout, and how your hands fit it, commit to playing by touch all the time. Getting your hands into the right position without looking often means feeling your way to the right neighborhood of the keyboard, the right group-of-two or groups-of-three black keys. You'll fumble around at first, but it'll become easier once you learn ways of sensing with multiple fingers at the same time, and using the slightest contact or lack-of-contact to tell you where you are. Remember that feeling around is just to reorient yourself; it's not to remind yourself what shapes are there. By this stage, you should already know what shapes are there.
Even after committing to playing by touch, you'll sometimes experience a strong urge to look at your hands while reading score. Perhaps you're practicing scales and your finger slips off of, or misses, a key. Don't look at your hands. Maybe you've hit the wrong key, realized that your hand isn't where you thought it was, or just gotten lost. Don't look at your hands. Stop playing, keep looking at the score, and feel your way back to the correct position even if that means returning to the D above middle C (where your navel is) and then working outward. Whenever you can figure something out in your mind's eye then do so in preference to looking at the keyboard. Looking at the keyboard just because it's more convenient than accessing your internal model is a bad habit, and it'll slow your progress. If you need to look because you haven't yet internalized the layout of the keys then you'll need to go back and focus on gaining that skill.
Knowing at all times where your hands are is arguably as important as reading the next note. Very often, while you're practicing, you'll have the experience of recognizing a symbol but you'll have trouble getting your finger to the key because you've forgotten what keys your fingers are near. If you're playing in real-time then you likely won't be able to re-orient yourself by feel and then find the note in time. The solution is to constantly maintain a mental image of what position your hands and fingers are in relative to the region of the keyboard beneath them and the keys that are within reach. This can be as simple as just remembering what note(s) you played most recently (with each hand) and with what finger(s). This will be a conscious effort at first, but eventually you'll do it without thinking.
Failing to keep track of your hands is one reason you might be tempted to look down at them. But resist the urge, and re-orient yourself by feel instead. And then slow down and make more of an effort to remember the notes you're playing. Try a less challenging piece if necessary (the books I mention in the Modes of practice section above work very well for this kind of practice).
Fingering is something that I think it's important to pay attention to from the start, because it helps you keep track of where your fingers are. It's unlikely you'll need to write finger numbers into your scores, because most sight reading books and software these days have it written in already when it's not obvious (and even sometimes when it is, which is unhelpful and distracting).
Don't worry if you're struggling to keep track. It is difficult, but you should consider it a high-priority habit to develop, and keep paying attention to it. Slow down enough, or play simple enough pieces that you can devote some of your attention to reading and some to keeping track of hand position. Also, playing the same piece many times is a good way to trade a bit of pure reading practice for a chance to focus on keeping track. From time to time it's ok to get ahead of yourself and read such advanced pieces that you're mostly making mistakes and forgetting where your hands are. That can work to stimulate growth in your core competency. But also devote time to playing manageable pieces at good tempo (even if it's a slow tempo) and good form, with the correct fingering. This journey is ultimately about developing new neural pathways. And that takes practice, time, and sleep. Eventually (possibly before you expect it), you'll find yourself remembering where your hands are and the last key or keys that you played. Not just in familiar pieces, but in new pieces, too. Just keep working and keep trying and it will happen.
There is actually (or there should be) more to reading music than mechanically translating symbols into actions. Reading is not the same as comprehension. So, consider trying to understand what the music is doing as you're reading and playing it. For example, Take Me Out To The Ball Game opens with a leap of an octave. If you've played it, were you aware of that? Or did you just play an F in the left hand followed by a higher F in the right hand without thinking about it? In the same song, did you notice that "crack-er-jacks" spells out a descending Gm triad? If you don't know what notes a Gm triad is made of then it's worth doing a bit of music theory study. These are simple examples, but look for things like them as you're playing and you'll get more value out of the pieces. One really important benefit of being able to read music is to see how music is composed.
Comprehension can help you be vigilant that you really are reading the notes that are written, and not just (for example) being prompted by the general pattern of the written symbols to play a memorized figure or to bounce between memorized chords. If you concentrate on understanding the written score, and relating it to what your hands are doing and where they are, then you'll make better use of your practice time.
For beginner students, pieces can look deceptively simple. When you see a piece for the first time that looks like it's something you should be able to play, it can take discipline not to rush right in and immediately try to play it with both hands, in real-time, and at a consistent tempo. But sometimes if you bite off even a little more than you can chew, that can completely unravel you and the result can be discouraging. You might then be tempted to just bash away at the piece over and over until you inadvertently begin to memorize it, which of course defeats the purpose of learning to read. Instead, if you really want to master a good real-time performance of the piece without risking becoming overly familiar with it, here's a series of steps that can help you to do that. Be sure that you can perform a step easily before proceeding to the next. Following this formula can shorten the total time it takes you to be able to read and perform the piece, and it will mean that at every step the task you're attempting is achievable and is one that you can perform competently and with the minimum of frustration.