In the spirit of making this forum the best (since the best people, aka you, decided to move here), I am forcing myself to post at least one non-meta non-OT (that is pianistic) post each day. Some days I may repost thing that you might have already heard from me somewhere else but not today. I suggest each one of you do the same, otherwise I predict that the forum will fizzle 🔥 after we get tired of the "otherwise you will be banned" jokes.
Small background (more on that in a future post): I am an adult learner, with a (remote) teacher and I am making progresses on all fronts but reading. I tried a plethora of sight reading systems and exercises and I've found only two "good enough" to mention:
which covers only rhythm and really well
and
which covers everything with progressive difficulty, some things better than others (poor on rhythm but there's the other one)
Actually I should also mention https://playpianofluently.com/ which I am also doing, but that is a completely different approach and I am not sure I am utilizing it correctly. Phil is Best (pardon the pun). I should get a private lesson with him, but he is really a maverick and I'm sure the first thing he'll say is to not do anything else but his stuff or forget any progress. Has anybody else done (as he asks or on your way) any part of his course?
Back to the books. Both of them are extremely poor on exercises (in that, there are only a few and you need very many). Moreover, with an exercise, you never know if you played it correctly. Think learning to read and misread most words in a way that still makes some sense and not realizing it. Are you still learning?
So, I started writing an Android app which used the ideas from both (and a few others from myself) to automatically generate exercises and use MIDI to check that you are playing it correctly. It's in a very preliminary stage, but it seems promising (more on it in a future post).
For now, the question is: how have all of you learned to read, how are you doing (or not doing) it now, and what else do you care to share about it?
As of myself, I am extremely poor: I can read one hand or the other separately (never together), at a very slow tempo, and only if the rhythm is simple. This is really stifling my progress: I spend 90% of my time learning a piece between reading and memorizing (another topic for another day) it. My teacher simply says, try to do it, memorize for now and it'll come to you. He's a great teacher and I fully trust him, so perhaps it will, but I am asking you about your current situation and (especially) your past. I'm particularly interested in people who learned to read music as adults, since the adult brain learns different than the child's.
