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Ideas to help with sight reading for percussion
By kevin | December 6, 2008
This is in response to a question I had recently from a parent who was helping their daughter prepare for a high school band audition on percussion. This is just a few ideas to help anyone in this situation.
Firstly, what is sight reading?
Sight reading is the ability to perform a passage of music from the written notes without having a chance to practice it. It is commonly a part of auditions at all levels, wether it be for high school band or professional orchestra, and it is also commonly part of grade examinations for most instruments.
Usually what happens is that the examiner or band director will put the sheet of music in front of the applicant, and ask him or her to play it.
On percussion in Band auditions usually sight reading is required on both Tuned Percussion (commonly bells) and Untuned percussion (often snare drum).
Sight reading on Bells (or any tuned percussion instrument) is quite a bit more challenging than Untuned Percussion, because of having to read the pitches and the rhythms.
Tips to help make sight reading easier:
1) Regular Practice
You can make sight reading part of your regular practice routine by sightreading anything and everything you can get your hands on. If you’ve got old tutor books for flute, clarinet or other instruments at a basic level these make excellent sight reading practice material for bells.
2) Take your time before you start
Remember that although it is “sight reading” and you can’t practice it first, you can discipline yourself to run through a “mental checklist” before you play that will help you to get it right. This is perhaps the most important thing about getting sight reading correct, and not doing this is commonly where students fall down with sight reading.
Before you start, you need to run through the following things in your mind:
- What’s the Key signature?
- What’s the Time Signature?
- How fast does it go?
- What note does it start on?
- What’s the dynamics? (volume)
- sing through the first few bars in your head.
Although the examiners and audition panel are waiting for you to play, give yourself those few seconds that it takes to run through that list in your head – they won’t mind waiting a few seconds, and it can make the difference between a pass and a fail.
3) Notice all the elements and play musically
Remember that sight reading is still music, and you need to perform it like music to get the best result from the audition. Take notice all all the elements – the tempo (speed) and the dynamics are very important to make it sound musical.
4) Stay Calm & don’t stress about it!
Sight Reading is usually not a major part of most auditions or exams – it is just something which is done to test your level of experience playing and reading music. The band director or audition panel will be looking at your overall musicianship and not necessarily whether you can sight read a particular passage. If you make a complete mess of it, don’t worry! You probably did better than you think you did!
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!Topics: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
April 17th, 2009 at 10:28 am
Nice tips! These can be an effective resource for music teachers. Thanks for sharing this post.
October 22nd, 2009 at 2:26 am
Always love to see a resource on sight reading, it’s such an important topic. Very informative.